Into The Fire

"In the first place, I ain't no priest. You see a collar on me, Rae? I don't do confessions. You got something troubling your conscience? Keep it to yourself, don't go grabbing me in the middle of the show and telling me how bad you are, because I don't care. I'm a healer, Rae…"

"And the best."

"Damned straight. I'm a healer, not every lunatic's confidant. I don't want to hear that shit. I should have been an evangelist, Rae. They don't have to deal with all the whining and carrying on I do. All they have to do is preach."

"Did he come up to her afterwards?"

"There you go again, all the time asking about her. I'm the one had the little jerk hanging on me like he was drowning and was going to take me down with him."

" 'Course I'm most concerned about you, honey."

"Yeah. Of course."

"I was just asking in case he hangs around and bothers you again."

"I don't know if he saw her afterwards or not. I went around the other side of the tent so I didn't have to watch her on her goddamned box.

You'll have to ask her your own self."

He turned away from her roughly, but a moment later he spoke again in the darkness.

"What was that you just done?"

"What you mean?"

"What was that thing you just done to me?"

Rae was quiet for a moment and Tommy knew she was blushing.

"It's called the butterfly," she said. She paused. "Did you like it?"

"Interesting," he said.

At first Rae didn't know how he meant it, but then he put his arms around her when he fell asleep, which was a thing he almost never did.

There was a pounding on the trailer door around three o'clock in the morning and Tommy bolted out of bed to answer it. A long, lean, evil-looking man stood there in cowboy boots and a Stetson that appeared to be as stiff as plywood. Tommy blinked once and waited, but he knew who the man was.

"You Reverend Tommy R. Walker?" the man asked.

Tommy stepped outside and pulled the door shut so that Rae would not overhear. He was wearing silk boxers at Rae had bought for him recently and he sported a sleeper's erection but he was too excited to see his visitor to worry about it.

"I am," Tommy said.

"I'm Harold Kershaw," the man said, removing his hat out of respect.

"God bless you, boy, I know you are. And not a moment too soon, neither."

Aural awoke from a troubled dream in which a man she had never seen before was showing her his life on film.

She was strapped in a chair and whenever the man experienced pain in his life, Aural was administered a shock just as painful. When she awoke, her mind still clouded by the dream, she heard voices outside the trailer that she shared with the female members of the Apostolics. The voices were speaking in the hushed tones of conspirators, the kinds of whispers that seem to carry even louder than regular speech on the night air.

One of the men was the Reverend Tommy, and she wondered what he was doing catting around outside her window in the middle of the night but when she heard the second voice, she knew. The second man didn't even speak, it was more of a prolonged grunt of assent, but she recognized it and it galvanized her into action.

Aural bolted the door, then yanked on her jeans and boots and squirmed out the window on the other side of the trailer. She didn't bother with her purse or any belongings because she knew there wasn't time. Bent over, she scuttled in the darkness towards the cars parked on the strip of asphalt adjoining the vacant lot where they would erect the tent in the morning. She was within a few yards of the cars when she heard the sound of heavy boots kicking at the trailer door.

A body took shape beside one of the cars, stepping towards her. Aural swerved aside but the shape spoke.

"Miss Aural? It's me."

Aural squinted at the man in the darkness. She didn't know him.

"From the meeting tonight?" he continued. "You said you'd talk to me afterwards?"

"Not now, hon. This ain't exactly an appropriate time." Aural tried to step around him but he moved in front of her. Behind her, the Apostolics were sending up a frightened squawk and she could hear the door crashing in. Harold Kershaw was into the chicken coop, but the hen he was after had flown.

"You-all come back when it's light," Aural said, thinking by then she'd be all the way to Maine if she could manage it. "I'll talk to you then."

"I can help you now," the man said, and he opened his car door.

'Bless your heart," she said, dipping into the car, "but we best go right away." She glanced at the trailer and saw Harold Kershaw's ugly face peering out of the window that she had used as an exit.

"That's what I had in mind," the man said. He ran around the car to the driver's side, then fussed with something instead of opening the door.:'Come on, " Aural said.

'Going as fast as I can," the man said. "I wasn't quite ready for you."

Aural kept her eye on the trailer, expecting Harold to come running at any minute, so she gave only scant attention to the man who was still fussing on the outside of the car. He came around the back to her side again..

"What's taking you so long?" she demanded, still not looking at him fully.

"Ready now. Mustn't go off half-cocked," the man said.. "Don't want any mistakes, now, do we?"

Harold came thundering around the side of the trailer, pausing for only half a second to get his bearings, then headed straight for the cars with his heavy-footed lope.

"I can't wait," Aural said, turning to get out, but the man opened her door at the same time and grabbed her hand in his. Distracted as she was, she wasn't aware that he was handcuffing her until the metal clamps were already on her wrists, and when she opened her mouth to speak he slapped a piece of tape across it.

"Fast service, no waiting," he said, giggling. He slammed the door and ran to the driver's side. Aural reached her cuffed hands to open the door but found that there was no handle on the inside. Well, damn, she thought. Who would have dreamed that Harold Kershaw was bright enough to hire an accomplice? She watched Harold pounding inexorably towards them, but then, when he was within a few yards, amazingly, the man started the car and drove away. Harold pounded the car's trunk once with his fist, but that was as close as he got. Aural squirmed to watch him recede in the back window, then turned to take a good look at the driver for the first time.

He glanced at her as he spoke, keeping most of his attention on the road.

"I was wondering how I was going to get you alone," he said. "I knew I didn't dare come into that trailer full of women. You can't be overeager, you have to restrain yourself and be careful, no matter what, otherwise… well, you just have to be careful. But you learn that. You naturally get better as you go along. Anyway, I was thinking and thinking, how am I going to do this safely when all of a sudden, there you were. Do you think Jesus sent you to me? I believe maybe he did, I believe he watches over me. Of course, I'm sure he watches over you, too, given your line of work, I mean. I'm certain that you have a good relationship with your Lord, don't you, Miss Aural? Well, that means Jesus wanted us to get together for your sake as well as mine. I think that means we're going to have a real good time together, don't you? I know I will.

Together, we're going to be fulfilling your destiny.

That's a nice thought, isn't it? You're only a part of my destiny, of course, but I am yours. I'm what Jesus has in mind for you… I'll make it real good for you, I promise you that. Ooh, but it's been a long time. I got such an awful lot to make up for."

He turned away from the road again and smiled broadly at her.

"This going to befun, hon," he said. When he giggled, Aural lmew that she was in terrible trouble.

"Good thing you're so petite," Swann said. "This is a very tight squeeze." He paused to catch his breath. The rope around his waist bit into his skin and he wriggled back towards her to ease up on the tension. Aural was zippered into a leather sack designed to encase golf bags and a full set of clubs for shipping, and the rope was tied around her feet. He had carefully selected the leather be cause it would slide better than the nylon sacks and it offered a measure of cushioning. Swann had added to the protection by slipping two pillows under her head before beginning to drag her. He didn't want her to get a bump and fall unconscious. The whole thing was that she knew what was happening to her.

'Course, if you was one of those chunky girls, I wouldn't have wanted you in the first place," he said. He knew she could hear him even if she couldn't see. "I like a slim girl, one with a shape, but not pudgy, you know?

I believe that a slim girl feels things more intensely, don't you? All that extra padding of fat can seriously decrease your sensations, don't you think?"

Aural made a noise, but the tape over her mouth made her unintelligible and Swann had long since given up trying to decipher her sounds. He knew the general sense of them anyway. He turned to face the way he was going once again. The light on his hard hat illuminated his path for only a few yards before it was swallowed up again by the darkness. Still breathing heavily, he began to crawl forward again, feeling the golf sack catch and then slide after him. The leather had cost more but it was definitely worth it.

Aural could hear him panting and tried to imagine him trudging along, dragging her. It must be uphill, judging by his difficulty, although she had no sense of being tilted.

She had no sense of where she was at all, hadn't known since he pushed her into the bag. Disoriented as well as terrified at first, she knew only that she had been dragged for a long time, then lowered with what she assumed was rope around her upper body as well as her feet, then dragged again, this time over considerably bumpier terrain.

He was working hard to get her wherever they were going. Always nice to be wanted, she thought, then realized that her sense of humor was returning. Whatever lay ahead of her, she knew that fear and confusion were not going to help her survive it. Being afraid had never done her any good in her life, but, staying calm had saved her neck more than once. The best way she knew to stay calm was to cling to her sense of humor. In this case, that might mean hanging on to it for dear life.

They were still for the longest time; and yet Aural imagined him lying down, panting and wheezing as if he'd run a few miles, but then she realized she couldn't hear him breathing. What if the asshole had died from the exertion? What if she were to be left in this bag, gagged and handcuffed, while her captor lay dead beside her?

Where in hell were they? How long before someone found them? Would someone find them?

She wanted to cry out, but a calmer part of her remained in control. She would only waste energy now; she would save her scream until she needed it.

Something fumbled with the sack over her face, then the zipper began its lovely zip. He wasn't dead after all, and Aural felt a confusing flood of relief.

"Boy, am I glad to see you," she said, sitting up as soon as the opening was large enough to allow it.

In truth, she couldn't see much of anything at first; the light was too bright after so long in the total darkness of the bag; but she could make out his shape, kneeling next to her. She squinted while trying to look around to see where she was. There was an odd hissing sound coming from behind him. It sounded like a concert of snakes.

"You like it?" he asked.

"Well, I'm not sure how I feel about it yet," she said.

"But whatever it is, it beats the bag."

He giggled, surprised and pleased.

"You a talker, ain't you?"

"There are very few things in life that aren't improved by a little conversation," Aural said, her eyes still scanning the area, trying to figure things out. Shapes were beginning to take form, but they were all odd and unfamiliar.

"You're not afraid?"

"No, I'm not afraid," Aural lied. "Mostly I feel a little cramped from the bag. Say, listen, you're not afraid, are you? Because if you are, I say let's call this whole thing off."

"You're funny," he said. "I like that. You're lying to me, too, but that's all right. I understand that. Before we're through, you'll say anything you can think of."

"Now there's a prospect," said Aural. "The man wants me to lie to him.

All men do, 'course, but you're the first one who ever admitted it.

Don't tell me you're an honest man.' "I'll be very honest with you," he said. "I don't have any reason to lie to you."

Aural looked upwards. She could see no ceiling, only darkness that extended beyond the light.

"So how about I stand and stretch? That be all right with you?"

"Sure," he said. "Why not? You're not going anywhere."

She came to her feet awkwardly because of her handcuffed wrists. She arched her back, rolling her head on her shoulders to loosen the muscles and taking the opportunity to examine even more of her situation.

"Cold in here, isn't it?" She had just noticed the chill.

The air felt as if it were above freezing, but not much.

"How about turning up the heat?"

"I'll warm you up before long," he said.

"I look forward to that."

"I know you're scared," he said. Aural thought he sounded disappointed, as if being scared were part of the deal. Whatever it was, she wasn't going to give it to him.

If she admitted to the fear, she knew it could quickly overwhelm her.

"Why would I be scared?" she asked. "You didn't bring me all this way to hurt me.".He gave that giggle that was colder than the air.

"Yes, I did," he said.

"Uh-oh," she said, grinning at him, right into his face, showing him he didn't bother her. "Sounds like another Danny Leeps."

"Who's that?"

"An old boyfriend. Danny liked to hurt me, too. He wasn't near as cute as you, but otherwise you're just like him."

"I'm not like anybody else!" He was so enraged at the suggestion that Aural thought he might hit her. She readied to duck under the blow and then to push against him and knock him off balance. She could try to run if she had any idea which way to run.

He didn't hit her, though. Instead he bent down to the leather sack and rummaged around, allowing Aural to see the light source for the first time. It was a camper's Coleman lantern, and the hissing sound emanated directly from it. She thought of kicking him while he was bent over, then smashing the lantern and taking her chances in the dark, but she realized that she had no chances until she at least figured out where she was and how to get out of there.

He stood up from the sack, holding what looked like a larger, oddly shaped pair of handcuffs.

"I like your hat, by the way," she said.

Swann reached up to touch the hard plastic shell on his head as if just noticing, and at the same time Aural realized with horror what it was, and why. She was underground.

Swann noticed the change in her expression immediately and a slow smile of satisfaction suffused his countenance.

"You just figure it out, honey?"

"Guess you wanted us to be alone," Aural said.

"That's right."

"A motel room would have been easier," she said. She tried to grin but her face felt stiff with fear.

"You remember when Jesus wanted to be alone, where he went? He didn't go to a motel. He went to the wilderness."

"When was this?"

"To the mountains and the desert. And he wrestled with Satan and all?

The devil tempted him, remember?

Well, you and me have to wrestle with Satan, too. We have our own temptation. 'Course I tend to give in to mine, but Jesus understands and forgives. But there just isn't that much wilderness around anymore, is there? It's not like we have a desert place where we could be alone as long as we want."

"How long you figure that is? Just ballpark."

"That depends on you, doesn't it? I can take it as long as you can.

Turn around."

Swann slapped the odd-looking handcuffs on her ankles. As she felt the iron tighten on her boot, Aural remembered the knife for the first time.

There was nothing to do with it now, not trussed hand and foot, but the time would come. She suddenly felt much better.

"I got other supplies to fetch," he said. "You just stay here and pray.

And think about your Danny Leeps. Think about if he ever went to this much trouble for you."

He snapped on the light on his hat and extinguished the lantern and put it in the golf sack. The headlight beam struck her right in the face.

"You're not going to just leave me here, are you?"

"When I get back we can pray together," he said.

"How long you going to be?"

"Time is relative," he said. "It's going to seem like a very long time to you."

"Well, you hurry on back, then, sugar, 'cause I'm going to miss you."

"I know that," he said. He turned from her and walked away. The beam from his hat had a peculiar yellow color to it and when it struck the wall it reflected back as if from gold. Aural could make out the rock of her prison for the first time.

The light dipped down until it was almost to the floor of the room. She could no longer see Swann himself, only a vague shape interfering with the reflected glow.

"Y'all have a safe trip now," Aural called.

"You better hope," he said and the light disappeared as if it had gone straight into the wall of rock.

His voice continued to echo for a moment or two, and Aural realized that wherever she was, room, or dungeon or cavern, it was vast. For a minute she could hear the scrape of his boots against stone, and then even that sound was gone and she was alone in the darkness.

Not yet-don't scream yet, she told herself Save it.

Swann was startled to see how light it had become. It was nearly noon by the time he saw the sun again and it shone with a brightness that he had forgotten while maneuvering with only the feeble light of the headlamp.

In fact, he realized he had never really gotten used to the sun, the wind, the scent of fresh air since getting out of Springville. Prison was like living in a tomb, and no amount of time spent in the exercise yard could dispel the sense of permanent gloom that pervaded the mind of a prisoner.

That gloom was not just a matter of light, of course-at times it was entirely too brightly lighted inside. It was a matter of internal vision. If one's eyes could see no farther than the nearest wall, it was not long before the mind could not think past it either. The romantic notion that confinement would release the imagination to soar was nonsense, Swann thought. It cramped and stifled the mind just as it did the body. Most of the men in prison could not hold a sustained thought about anything outside the walls; their minds were mired in the quotidian concerns of survival, cellblock politics, manipulation, fear.

Television and radio were not links with the outside world, they were artifacts from a civilization light-years away, one that died when the prisoner entered the walls. Books, with their visions of alternate universes, were as alien as Runic tablets. Decipherable, but irrelevant to the life of those who read them. Life in prison was the prison and the role that a man had to play to survive became the man, the man became the role. After a time there was no difference.

Now, however, Swann could shed his role at last. As he walked to the car he realized that he felt truly himself for the first time since getting out. He was no longer anybody's punk, whore, and wife. He was no longer servant, slave, craven. He was in control, he was in control. There was no limit to what he could do now, provided he exercised reasonable caution. His only limit was his imagination, and in the real world his imagination flourished.

He knew that he was unique in the thoughts that possessed him, he always had been, since childhood, and he had learned early to keep them to himself. They were his treasures that no one else could understand, even though they coveted them. That was the ironic part: they did not approve of his thoughts, he knew that, they thought they were ugly, nasty, shameful, yet they all wanted to take his treasures away. Swann would not let them have his treasures. He clung to them, nurtured them, and kept them carefully hidden from view.

It was at times a burden never to be able to speak of his most prized possessions. There were occasions when he was tempted to share them, when a fantasy had been so real, so enticing, so filled with excitement and pleasure that he wanted to grab a stranger, anyone, and tell them what a joy he had in his own mind. He could not, of course. That is, he could not unless he had a confidant whom he could really trust. The only such people were his girls. He told them all about his thoughts, told them even as he demonstrated to them. He knew they would never betray him. They would never tell another living soul.

Swann drove to town, feeling at last fully and completely himself again.

He felt the beast that lived within him stir and stretch its tentacles to clutch his heart and stomach and groin. It tugged, voracious, yearning to be fed, and Swann felt the old excitement build, the old irresistible joy.

He drove with the window down, smelling the air, loving the scents of the countryside where he had grown up.

Everything seemed new again, yet comfortingly familiar.

He could not recall ever feeling better. He was in charge, everything was under control and perfectly planned, and there was at least a week's worth of great pleasure ahead of him, perhaps more if she could take it.

This one seemed strong and she had a great mental outlook. He liked her spirit, it would help her to stay alive longer.

Swann could not remember when he had ever felt better. After a time he began to sing.

The Reverend Tommy R. Walker met Harold Kershaw in Elmore at a coffee shop named Chat 'n Nibble, where the other customers downed noonday meals of chickenfried steaks with biscuits and brown gravy. Tommy drank coffee and kept a nervous eye on the front door. He didn't expect anyone from the show to come this far afieldthere were several fast-food restaurants between here and the campsite-but it wouldn't hurt to be careful. He sat beside Kershaw at the counter rather than in a booth so that he could disassociate himself from the other man in the unlikely event that Rae or a member of the Apostolics should wander in.

"She didn't have no friends outside the show, not that I was aware of,"

Tommy said.

"Some sumbitch was driving the car," Harold said.

"Well, I can't figure out who it could have been."

"Girl like Aural's got no problem finding friends. Just walk past a bar and get about a dozen sniffing after her."

"I realize that… still, I would have heard if it was anybody local.

Rae would have told me. Besides, how could she know you were coming? I didn't tell anybody."

"Uh-huh."

"I didn't. You think I'm crazy? I want to get everybody back on my side, not turn them against me by doing anything against their little darling."

"Your little darling is a dangerous woman."

Tommy glanced at the door, then took in Harold Kershaw's hands and face.

He saw no trace of skinning.

"Bitch tried to kill me more than once," Kershaw continued. "Tried to bounce me out the back of my pickup one time. Took a knife to me once."

"I thought she burned you," Tommy said.

"Burned me?"

"That's what she told everybody."

"Oh, yeah. It wasn't me she burned, it was the damned trailer. I was in the pot and she jammed the door shut and packed a bunch of stuff down at the bottom and set them on fire. Mostly my clothes. Bitch burned my favorite boots."

"She didn't burn you, though?"

"I got out the window. Hell, the door was metal, metal don't burn that well."

"Goddamn," said Tommy, feeling strangely disappointed that Aural hadn't actually set the man aflame.

"Watch your language there, preacher," said Kershaw, grinning. "You got to set a good example for the young'uns. Can't go round saying shit and damn. Next thing you know, everybody be talking like that."

"I'm a healer," Tommy said, not knowing exactly what distinction he was trying to draw. He wanted to tell Kershaw to keep his opinions to himself, but the man looked so rawboned and mean that he decided not to.

He looked like the kind of man who would hurt you just for practice. It was hard to see how a tiny thing like Aural could have managed to handle a man like that. Or why.

For just a moment, Tommy had a flash of understanding that led to an even briefer feeling of sympathy for the plight of women, but it all faded immediately.

Kershaw stripped the cellophane from a toothpick and pushed the tip through a gap between his two lower incisors. He wiggled it up and down with his tongue so that it looked to Tommy like the jerky, exploratory motion of the antenna of an insect. As if Kershaw had just popped a giant bug into his mouth and not yet swallowed it all.

Feeling disgusted, Tommy turned to look through the plate-glass window at the street. A man was passing by with a large bag of groceries on one arm, a pair of nylon blankets still in their plastic wrappings on the other.

"So what's your bright idea, preach?" Kershaw asked but then he stopped so abruptly that Tommy turned back to look at him.

Kershaw was staring at the window, his mouth open, the toothpick drooping. "Fuck me," he said and ran for the door.

Swann heard the runnin footsteps behind him and was half turned backwards to look when he saw the first blow coming at his head. He ducked enough to take it on the shoulder, but it was still hard enough to knock him off balance and Swann stumbled as the second blow hit him in the chest. The third blow caught him grazingly on the top of his head as he was falling. He landed so hard the wind was knocked out of him and he lay on the ground, gasping for air that he could not seem to capture in his lungs.

A man loomed over him, fists clenched, face in a snarl, but Swann couldn't concentrate on anything else until he finally caught a breath.

When he realized he would live, he made no effort to get up. He lay where he had fallen on the sidewalk, canned goods and candles spewed out around his head, the blankets covering his feet as if someone had taken the trouble to tuck him in.

"You don't have to get up," Kershaw said. "I can stomp you even easier laying there."

By now Tommy had joined Kershaw, but he stood apart from him, making just one of the spectators who had gathered around as quickly as if warned in advance of some coming excitement. This was not urban America, where people gave violence involving someone else a wide berth and a studied indifference. In towns like Elmore, men still gathered to see a fight, not worried that it would reach out and kill others at random.

They also gave it a chance to play itself out before intervening. There were always the peacemakers, but never in the beginning. Even the peacemakers wanted to see a little action.

"Where is she?" Kershaw asked.

Swann looked puzzled, shaking his head.

Kershaw kicked him on the hip. The crowd gasped, neither approvingly nor disapprovingly. They were withholding judgment until they better understood the conflict.

Too much punishment of a downed opponent would have to be stopped eventually, but an exploratory kick seemed tolerable.

"Ain't going to help you to act stupid," Kershaw said.

"I'll pound on you till you tell me where she is."

"Who?" Swann asked.

"You know who."

Kershaw drew his foot back again and Swann covered his face with his hands even though his attacker clearly was not aiming there. The boot caught Swann in the side and he cried out.

The crowd murmured again, this time as much in disapproval as sympathy.

"I don't know who you mean," Swann said as soon as he could talk. He rolled his eyes to the crowd, looking for help.

"Aural," Kershaw said. "Where is she, you little peckerwood?"

Kershaw stepped on Swann's shin, holding his foot down until Swann jerked into a sitting position, holding out his arm.

"Least let him get up," said a voice from the back of the crowd of men.

"I ain't keeping him from getting up," Kershaw said, looking angrily around him to locate the protester. "Peckerwood stole my woman."

A collective "ah" escaped from the men as understanding came to them all. Woman stealing, a vague but threatening concept, shifted the sympathy back towards Kershaw.

"I don't know her," Swann said. "I didn't steal her, I didn't steal anybody."

"Shit," said Kershaw in contempt for Swann's story.

"You better tell me, 'cause I ain't afraid to kick you to death if I have to."

"You've got the wrong man," Swann said, sounding as pathetic as he could manage. He rolled his eyes towards the crowd again. He knew that eventually some of them would intervene, and he was grateful that Kershaw had not encountered him someplace secluded. Swann knew he would have to wait out the torture-he had done it before more than once-and the only question was whether he would be able to walk when it was over.

"I got no use for your woman," Swann said, playing the only card he had.

The crowd sucked in their collective breath at the seeming insult.

Without warning Kershaw stooped and smashed his fist into Swann's face.

Stern murmurings rose from the men. Hitting a man when he was down had its limits and Kershaw was fast approaching them.

"That's about enough," another voice offered, but no one moved forward yet. Moral persuasion would be tried first.

Swann spit out some of the blood that dripped into his mouth, then ran his hand under his nose, which was bleeding profusely. He thumbed a tooth as if it were loose although the blow had not hit his mouth. He made no attempt to rise. He would lie there and take it like a punching bag if he had to, but offering resistance or even giving the appearance of being a fair opponent would be disaster.

"I meant I got no use for women at all," Swann said, trying to finish the ploy that Kershaw had thwarted by hitting him so fast. "I'm queer."

That split the crowd about evenly between those who thought he had proven his case and those who thought he deserved the beating on general principles, but the real victory was over Kershaw. It was one thing to stand over a fallen man and kick shit out of him because he stole a woman, quite another to administer punishment to a victim who was so fundamentally weak that he even admitted to the ultimate perversion.

Kershaw hit Swann in the eye, then again for good measure, but the second blow had the halfhearted enthusiasm of a man who knows he has already lost.

The crowd helped Swann to his feet as Harold Kershaw walked away. Tommy Walker deliberately walked in the other direction. After a few minutes Swann managed to convince everyone that he didn't want a doctor, and he was in his car, heading out of Elmore. He watched in his rearview mirror for several miles to be sure he wasn't followed.

When he was sure he was safe at last, Swann pulled over to the side of the road. Now that the adrenaline was leaving his system, he began to feel dizzy from the last two blows to the eye. Vision out of that eye was poor, and when he looked at his reflection in the mirror he saw that it was nearly swollen shut. He had been beaten worse in his time, Cooper had nearly killed him in the first few weeks of breaking him in to his role as compliant concubine. This time no bones were broken; he could move; he could travel. He didn't look very good, but no one was going to see him for a while other than Aural McKesson, and it didn't really matter if he was presentable to her or not, did it?

The only thing that worried him was the dizziness that wouldn't go away.

He laid his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. The car seemed to swim about him and he snapped his eyes open again, looking for something to focus on to stop the spinning. The tree he looked at moved and then he was moving, swinging wildly back and forth and the light flickered and went out.

Swann awoke, aware that he had passed out, and. panic swept over him. It was not his health that concerned him most, but his security. He had managed to survive all this time, both in prison and before, by being constantly on the alert. He sometimes thought of himself as a mammal in the age of dinosaurs, a small and poorly armed animal that evaded its enemies by its cunning and superior intelligence. Living in the cracks of a world dominated by the huge and stupid, the mammal had persisted, laughing silently at the giants all around as it slipped stealthily between their legs. In time it came into its own destiny, outlasting the monsters, lifted to the top of the heap by its natural superiority.

Swann liked the analogy; it pleased and comforted him to think of himself as surviving on guile and craft while the slow-witted ones stumbled about, hunting for him in vain.

The price for such elusiveness was constant awareness, and if he lost that, he was lost. He needed a place to hide now, he needed someone to care for him. A doctor, a hospital, was out of the question. He could not afford to be restrained; his safety depended on a mobility — that equated to anonymity. If he was never in the same place twice, he left no impression, there was no one to remember him, no way to connect him to anything, or anyone.

He could not understand how that cracker halfwit had recognized him in the first place. What kind of incalculably bad luck was it to have been shopping in the same place at the same time? The town was twenty miles from the campsite where he had found the girl. What was the man doing there, and how could he have identified Swann? The man could not have gotten more than a glimpse of a shape in the car. It was night, Swann hadn't even been facing the man. Had he? Could he have had that good a look at him? Or was it even bad luck? Had Swann been careless, was his vigilance slipping?

Frightened in a way he had not been since his first few days in prison, frightened for his life, Swann knew he had to find someone to help him until he recovered. There was only one person who could do it and be trusted implicitly.

He forced himself to drive on, struggling for his equilibrium.

Aural had never known a darkness like this, not on the blackest night of her life, not with her eyes closed, never.

Even the blind see more light than this, she thought. This was the darkness of the grave, total and unchanging. It was not a question of her eyes getting used to a lower level of light; there was no light at all, nothing to get used to, no gearing down or gearing up, no widening of the lens would make any difference.

It was not entirely silent as she had thought at first, however. For one thing, there were her own noises, her breath, the rasp of her clothing against rock, the sound of swallowing. Every sound was magnified and the louder ones echoed back and lived on for seconds longer. But beyond herself there was the noise of water. Somewhere in the distance a creek ran over rocks, the familiar splash could be heard as if filtered through hundreds of yards of darkness. And closer at hand, if she remained still herself, Aural could hear water dripping, very softly, with long intervals between drips, but steadily, with the regularity of a clock. She tried to count the interval between drips and determined it to be 180 seconds long, assuming that saying one-thousand-one in your mind actually took a second. Three minutes. She had a drip she could cook an egg by.

How many drips had he been gone? How many before he returned? How many before her real ordeal began? she wondered. She didn't know what this guy had in mind for her, but it seemed a pretty good guess that it wasn't to just leave her alone. Beyond that, she didn't allow her mind to speculate. There was no point in getting scared ahead of time. No point in doing his work for him.

What she had to do was prepare herself as best she could for his return.

Since her hands were cuffed in front of her body, getting the knife from her. boot was no problem, but she didn't know what to do with it after that.

Hobbled as she was, she would not be able to maneuver.

She would get one chance at best and even then she didn't know what to do. Say she cut him, so what? She couldn't then run away while he contemplated his wound. All he had to do was step away from her, bind himself up, then attack at his leisure. Or just leave her alone again while he went away to get a weapon. Wounding him, scaring him, would do nothing for her because she couldn't get away. Which meant she had to kill him.

First of all, she told herself, she didn't know if she was up to killing anyone. It was one thing to threaten with a knife, which she had done several times, and the threat had always been sufficient to buy her enough time and space to get away, but to kill with one was something else again. And suppose she did manage to summon the courage to kill him, what then? Unless she knew where she was, or how to get away, she'd not only still be lost, but she'd have a corpse for company. This place seemed enough like a grave already without adding that touch of realism.

One thing she did know was that she couldn't keep the knife in her boot.

Whatever else he had in mind for her, if this guy was like every other man she'd ever known, eventually he was going to want to have her clothes off of her. Which probably included her boots, which meant he'd find the knife unless she already had it in her hand.

On her knees, Aural felt around for a hiding place in the rocks. The rock was moist wherever she touched. And smooth-everywhere she put her fingers it was smoothas if water had been running over these rocks forever.

With her hands stretched out in front of her, Aural stood and inched slowly to one side. At first she counted her steps so she could return to her starting point, but then she realized that there was nothing to distinguish that point from any other. The only place she needed to mark was the spot where she put the knife.

Walking was awkward on the uneven floor and it was difficult to maintain her balance with her legs so closely constrained. She fell once on the slippery floor and landed hard, unable to break her fall. She started to cry from the shock of the fall, but then wept out of self-pity. She wept a long time, giving full vent to her fright and unhappiness, and her cries filled the vaulted room and reverberated back and forth until she seemed to be in the center of a crowd of moaning, wailing women.

At the end, Aural laughed at herself, pouring some of the same hysteric energy into the laughter so that the stones resounded again. This time it sounded as if she were in a crazy house at the fair, one of a nest of cackling lunatics.

That was okay, she said to herself Do it once, get it over with, nobody around to hear you make a baby of yourself, except yourself, and you knew that much already. Just do it when you're alone, if you have to, but don't give it to him. That's a reward you must never give him.

She proceeded, half-crouched, feeling the uneven surface first with her hands before inching forward with her feet. When she paused to listen, the running water sounded closer, though still far away, and the drip of her clock was getting harder to detect.

She found a spot at last, her fingers slipping into a recess in the rock that was large enough to hold the knife.

Feeling it with both hands, she tried to picture the geometry of the rock. Would it be visible when he brought the light back? She checked each angle of vision in turn, straining to imagine how it would look if someone could see. Even a speck of visibility would be too much-the knife might reflect the light more than the,rocks, glint and flash and call out its presence. The hiding place seemed to curl in on itself like the edge of a snail's shell. He would see the opening only if he put his eyes where she had her fingers, which she didn't think was possible, and even then he would see only the hole. The recess itself was behind a curve, the knife completely out of sight.

Aural put the knife in the hiding place, took it out again, worried about it, put it back. It was the best she had found.

It would have to do, at least until she came up with something better.

She practiced getting her hand into the hiding place while standing up, while sitting down, even while lying on her back. The surfaces of the stone became familiar; she memorized the contours until it was no more difficult than finding a water glass in the bathroom in the middle of the night.

The difference was, she could always find the bathroom. She now had to be sure she could find this spot.

Aural removed her boots and placed them so that if she sat with her feet where the boots were, her back would rest in the perfect place to give her immediate access to the knife.

She moved slowly to her right, counting steps, feet and hands feeling ahead of her into the darkness, searching for a different kind of niche in the rock, something big enough to hide herself. After fifty restricted steps she decided to return to her boots and try another direction, but when she came to what should have been the proper spot, her bare feet did not encounter the boots.

An icy panic gripped her. She had lost her way, mis placed her only weapon in a vast cavern of empty darkness. She had given herself over, defenseless, out of her own stupidity. With an involuntary cry of anguish Aural dropped to her knees and groped along the slippery rock with her hands.

Was she too far or too short? Had she already passed the boots in the darkness, slipping past them on her way back? Or had she not yet gone far enough? How far would she have had to be in the pitch black to miss them? An inch? Half an inch? She needed only to have misstepped by the narrowest of margins to have missed them completely, because if she didn't touch them, they were as far away as the moon. How could she have been so stupid?

This wasn't like fumbling around in her room with the lights off; there were no landmarks here, no familiar furniture to bump into, no walls to rebound from.

At first she flailed wildly with her bound hands, patting and pawing in all directions, praying for a touch of leather against her fingertips, but when she started to crawl forward, she stopped abruptly. Think, she adjured herself Think. You can't be that far away now, a few steps in any direction at best, but you must be basically on-line.

But if you start to crawl around, you could end up anywhere, pointed in the wrong direction and lost forever with no hope at all. Anchor yourself here in some way.

You're not really lost right now, you're just not where you want to be quite yet, but you're not lost if you stay anchored. You need the best way to search the most territory without leaving this spot. Don't be a baby, don't be any more of an idiot than you already have. Think. The farthest you can go in any direction and still stay in place is the length of your body. She lay down on the rock, stretched her hands as far as they would go. There was a particular depression at her fingertips, a hollowed dip that felt like a saucer. She ran her fingers around the saucer, then around the rock immediately surrounding it, trying to establish a context. Her toes were pressed against a slight ridge. Like all the other surfaces, it was smooth and rounded, but it rose up from the floor by several inches.

When your toes are there and your fingers are in the saucer, you're back where you started, she said to herself Now slowly, carefully. Keep your feet against the ridge and roll. Moving one careful revolution at a time, Aural began to roll in a circle with her toes at the center. Face down, face up, she counted the turns, praying all the while for contact with a boot. Toes against the ridge, heels against the ridge. A slight shift of the body to keep the feet in contact, then roll again. After each half-revolution she probed with her fingers, seeking the saucer.

After sixteen rolls her fingers found the familiar depression. She had done a complete circle. But no boots.

She sat up, trying to remember her high school geometry.

Something about pi, but what did that tell her? Nothing, which was what she already knew. She remembered protractors and compasses and drawing circles, which she had just done with her body. All right, she had the time, let's continue the geometry lesson. Draw another circle, this time using her hands as the center. With her body as the diameter of the circle-or was it the radius? — she would still come back to this same point with her feet on the ridge and the saucer at her hands. She would not get lost and she would cover more ground. She tried to envision how much more, knowing that some of it would be overlap. Half a circle?

Less, more? She couldn't see it clearly in her mind, but she didn't know what difference it made. She had no other plan.

Aural began to roll again, this time keeping her hands always in touch with the saucer-like depression. She counted her revolutions, knowing that sixteen should put her feet back in contact with the ridge, and became so concentrated on finding the ridge again that she almost forgot what her real purpose was. She nearly rolled over the boots with her hips without realizing what they were.

"Oh, you sweet things," she said, hugging the boots to her. "Don't you ever run away from me like that again."

She reached for the niche in the rock and located the knife quickly and easily. She replaced the knife in its secret crevasse, then tried to put her boots on again. It was very difficult to slip the leather uppers beneath the ankle irons and finally she gave it up. She had better use for the boots off than on, anyway, and if he realized she had taken them off, so what? What did it tell him?

Feeling proud of herself for having accomplished something rather than just allowing herself to descend into self-pity, Aural seated herself back against a cushion of rock and began to think of how she was going to deal with her captor. After a moment of silence, she could detect the steady tick of her water clock counting the minutes. Coming from the other direction, the liquid sound of water washing against the rock was soothing.

For the first time, she realized that she had not slept in a long time, not since being rousted out of bed by Harold Kershaw's arrival.

Blessedly, she fell asleep.

Aural awoke from a dream of bright sunlight to find herself still in utter darkness. The "brook" still burbled gently in the distance, the water clock ticked on and on, and nothing had changed. And then she heard an alien noise and immediately realized that it was probably what had awakened her. It was a sound of something muted striking stone, a dull thud followed by a scrape, and it came on slowly, very slowly. At first her mind conjured up an image of a large serpent hauling itself dreadfully towards her, its giant tail banging against the rock. It took a while for her to realize it was something being dragged over the rock as she herself had been dragged in the leather golf sack. This time there was something more resonant in the sack than her head and bones, and it sounded clearly if dully from a distance. Whatever he had with him now, he was a long time coming with it. From the moment when she first detected the scrapes that preceded the thuds, Aural noticed long pauses between movements, as if he were resting every few feet. Whatever he was dragging must be very heavy, she thought, or else he's very tired. it took five ticks of her water clock, fifteen minutes, before she saw the first faint light. It wobbled as if the headlight were planted atop a shaky stalk. Was his head moving that much? She thought he must have palsy to be shaking so badly.

With a slowness that became more frustratingly painful to her the closer it came, the beam of light advanced.

Aural realized that as much as she didn't want him to come, she also needed him, and now that he was here, she wanted him to get on with it.

She could do nothing by herself, she required his presence, his light, if she were ever to get out of here.

The light was coming from a hole in the wall and very low to the floor.

It was a narrowly focused beam, as if shining in a tunnel, and as it made its tedious way towards her, Aural could finally see the outlines of the exit he had used. It must have been the same way she was brought in. There was an opening in the vertical rock no bigger than a man's body-and a small man at that. She wondered if he was crawling through the tunnel-it didn't look big enough to negotiate in any other way.

As the beam moved closer she could hear the man himself. He was panting and moaning. He would advance a short ways-she could hear his boots on the stone now, the tumble of something muted against a hard surface then the scraping sound of his progress would stop and she would hear his breath, hard and labored. Just before he'd start again he would groan, as if the effort cost him in pain.

Finally the light, wavering, slumping downwards as he rested, wavering again as he crawled forward, reached the opening of the tunnel, and he came into the chamber, moving on his belly with infinite slowness but determination, like a giant garden snail. Trailing behind him, his own sluglike path of mucus, was the leather golf sack, connected by a rope tied around his waist.

When he and the sack were completely clear of the tunnel, he collapsed, his face falling onto the rock.

"Well, numbnuts," Aural said, "you took your own sweet time about it.

You think I got nothing better to do than hang around waiting for you?"

He didn't stir. His body was stretched to its full length on the rock, the light on his helmet pointing down at an angle onto the floor. In the diffused beam that shone off the floor, Aural took her first, oriented look at her surroundings. As she had already determined, she was in a cave, a huge chamber hollowed from the rock by the water flow of millennia. The ceiling was so high above her that she could barely make it out in the gloom. The wall from which the man had just crawled was at least thirty yards away from her and appeared to be solid except for the hole which he had just cleared before collapsing. She had thought she was leaning against a wall herself, but now she saw that it was only an outcropping of rock little more than waist high, and the true wall was at least another thirty yards beyond it. To her left, still farther away than the other walls, a narrow trench split the floor and then vanished completely as it hit the rock face behind her. It was probably the source of the running water she had heard, she thought. Whatever underwater river had formed the lake that had once filled this chamber had continued to flow until it worked its way still deeper into the rock and then through the wall, draining the lake with it on its way still farther underground.

To her right Aural could see a series of darker shapes along the wall that looked like waves at their crest, just bending over before crashing back upon themselves, the kind of waves under which photographers loved to capture surfers, surging just below the crest as the top of the wave curled over them-but these waves were rock, and they ran vertically from the floor, some all the way to the ceiling, frozen in time and space when the lake vanished beneath them. The rock appeared to have bent back on itself, as if shaped when molten, and formed scalloped edges reminiscent of the niche where she had stored the knife, only greatly larger, extending towards the roof.

Interspersed oddly along walls were those pointed mounds that Aural knew were stalagtites or stalagmites, she was never certain which was which.

As she studied the huge room that encased her, the light began to move, bouncing crazily off the walls. She looked and saw the man stirring on the floor, trying to lift his head, then falling back to the rock again as if his neck could not support the weight. Again he was still and Aural could hear his hoarse breath gasping from his throat as if even the effort of lifting his head were a great labor.

He rolled over onto his back and the light and shadows went crazy again, leaping about until they settled in a new configuration. The beam now pointed straight up and Aural could see the ceiling of her cage, a huge dome of rock at least three stories above her. If the space stretched that far up and still didn't break through the earth over their heads, how far underground must they be? She was not only buried, she thought with renewed alarm, she was entombed, tucked away as neatly and as far from the living as a pharaoh in his pyramid vault.

"Come here," the man said, and the light wobbled when he spoke, drawing forth new shadows on the ceiling and walls.

Aural watched him without moving, trying to judge the degree of his weariness. She could take the knife with her now, use it on him as he lay there-assuming he obliged her by staying exactly where he was. But if he turned to look at her, there was no way she could hide the knife with her hands cuffed together, Thirty yards was a long distance to cover with the baby steps her leg irons required, and she could betray the existence of her only weapon every step of the way.

"Come here," he repeated. His voice was hoarse and weak. "I need you," he said. And then, bizarrely, he added, "Please."

Aural walked to him slowly, trying to learn as much as she could about the cave as she did so. It was hard to make out anything in detail because each slight move of his head sent shadows winging and lurching about, swallowing each other up as new ones were born to replace them.

Nothing ever looked exactly the same way twice because each breath he took caused the cave itself to move in and out of the light as if it had a pulse to match his own.

As she got close to him she realized that she could have brought the knife after all. He had not turned to look at her yet, and she was now within lunging distance, and now closer, now she stood next to him, looking down.

She could have cut his throat while he lay there, his eyes closed. For a moment she wondered if he was asleep. She was close to the hole now but the light was pointing up and away from it and she could make out nothing beyond a greater darkness in the rock.

She had seen no other exit. If she were to get out, she would have to go into that hole of blackness. Had she not seen him emerge from it, she wouldn't have thought there was room enough for her shoulders to fit in.

The very idea of crawling into such a place filled her with dread.

She would sooner have forced herself into a hole in the ground, knowing there was a snake at the other end, but she also knew she had no choice.

She would do what she had to, when she had to do it. And if that included slicing his throat open, she would do it. She thought. She hoped.

Gazing down at him now as he lay still, breathing shallowly like a dreamer in a troubled sleep, it was hard to hate him enough to kill him.

And then she realized the condition of his face. He looked as if someone had been kicking his head around with cowboy boots. Aural had seen more than one of her boyfriends return from a night in the bar looking that way.

One eye was swollen nearly shut; his nose and both cheekbones were puffed and as dark with broken blood vessels as if he had been painting his face with charcoal.

Traces of dried blood still clung to his nose and upper lip, and overall he had the look of a man tenuously clinging to health.

He opened his eyes and looked up at her and she realized he had not been asleep, but quietly waiting. Conserving his strength and perhaps waiting to see what she would do.

"Hey, slick, you're looking good," Aural said.

"Where are your boots?"

"I took them off. You go partying with friends?"

"I met a friend of yours," Swann said.

"You should have brought him home."

"Get the lantern," he said. His voice was little more than a whisper, even in the resonating chamber of the cave. Moaning slightly, he rolled to his side, resting his head on his arm so that the light on his hat shone in the direction of the golf sack. Every movement seemed to cost him a great effort. Aural was amazed that he had managed to crawl back through the tunnel. When men administered a beating like the one he had taken, they didn't limit them selves to the face. Not the men she knew.

She did not know how long a trip it was, but she knew that it had taken a long time for her to be brought to the cave once she was forced into the sack in the first place. He must have wanted to get back to me very badly, Aural thought, and the thought frightened her.

She unzipped the sack and found that it was crammed with groceries and supplies. What bothered her most was the quantity of canned food. It must have been the cans that caused the thudding noise, she realized, and there were dozens of them, beans and peaches and spinach and baby peas, and dried apricots, too, and dried sausage and a plastic bag full of hard rolls. Four plastic quart bottles of water, two containers of paraffin oil for the lamp. And three cartons of cigarettes. He was planning a long stay, Aural realized with a sinking feeling. There was enough food for weeks.

The lantern was wedged between pillows and wrapped inside a sleeping bag. There was a pack of dinner candles, red and white and blue, and extra bulbs and batteries for the headlamp. Lighter fluid and flints and even extra wicks. He was taking no chances about running short. But there were no matches. Later, when she had time to think about it, that detail frightened Aural most of all. There were no matches despite all the other flammables, she realized, because in the high humidity of the cave, matches would soon become sodden and useless. He knew this from experience. He had been in this situation before.

The terrifying deduction from that was that he had not only done this with another girl, but he had gotten away with it or he wouldn't be free now. He had done it@ he had learned, he had perfected his method, eliminated his mistakes.

He ignited the lantern with a cigarette lighter which he returned to his front pocket, then placed the lantern in her hand. She thought of swinging it into his face, but his eyes were on her the whole time and she decided to wait.

She had to have either her feet or her hands free before she tried to get away; she had no chance without the use of one or the other, even with him as injured as he was.

If he could drag the sack all the way, he still had a great deal of strength left in him.

"Take it to a flat spot," he said. "Then come back and get the bag."

When she had the lantern in her hands he turned off his headlamp.

Aural carried the lantern back towards her hiding place, studying the details that now sprang up in the increased light. The vertical waves on the wall remained dark, but the rest of the rock took life in a fantastical way. The whole cavern seemed to be tinted a dull yellow, as if it were carved from pure gold. Everywhere she looked, wars, ceiling, or floor, the light reflected back to her with an aureate hue, so that the very light itself seemed composed of the finest translucent golden dust. Under different circumstances it would have seemed a fairy cave rather than a dragon's lair.

"Pretty, isn't it?" he asked, as if reading her mind.

"If you like this kind of thing " she said.

"It's sulfur oxide," he said. "And pyrite, too. Fool's gold."

"Figures. I finally land in a gold mine and it's a fake," she said.

"That's far enough," he said. "Put the lantern down."

Aural continued until she was close to her boots before setting the lantern on the rock floor.

"Now come back."

She hesitated.

With an effort, he rose to one knee.

"Oh, you don't want to make me come after you," he said. "That wouldn't be smart at all."

Leaving the lantern by her boots, Aural returned to the man.

"What friend of mine did you run into?" she asked.

"He didn't tell me his name," he said. "I didn't ask.

People like that don't need names, anyway. They're all just the same."

"I wonder if you couldn't say the same for men in general," she said.

"Oh, not me," he said. "I'm not like other men at all.

I'm what they would want to be if they had the courage, but they don't.

You'll find that I'm quite special." He sounded convinced and proud.

"Not that I've noticed so far."

"But we haven't really gotten to know each other very well yet. You'll think I'm special, I promise you."

"You guys all think you're different."

"I like your courage," he said. "I like that you think you can talk back to me and get away with it. You'll change your mind, but it's nice for now."

He rose to his feet as she approached him. He was unsteady on his legs, as if his balance were off, but Aural realized that she had already waited too long. His strength was returning rapidly. She should have hit him with the lantern when she had the chance; she should have followed her first instinct and gone after him with the knife when he was still supine and had his eyes closed.

"Pull the bag over there," he said, pointing towards the lantern.

When she bent over to grab the rope, he hit her from behind, hammering both hands together into her kidney.

Aural fell onto her knees, gasping.

He waited until she could hear him clearly before speaking.

"I apologize for being so crude about it," he said. "I detest that kind of brute violence, but you really must learn to do what I say, exactly when I say to do it. Next time I tell you to put the lantern down and return to me, you do it right then, right that instant, not when it pleases you. Do you understand?"

Aural nodded her head.

"Well, good. Everyone's entitled to a first mistake.

Let's not discuss it any further. Pull the bag over to the lantern."

Aural was surprised at how easily she could drag the sack. It seemed to slide across the floor as if it were lubricated. When she got to the lantern she could see that the bottom of the sack was coated with a sort of gray slime.

"What is it?" she asked. He had kept pace with her as she dragged the bag, seemingly unable himself to walk any faster than her six-inch stride would take her.

"Guano," he said.

"What's that?"

"Bat shit, honey."

She noticed now that he had the same slime on his boots, his pant cuffs, some almost as high as his waist.

He must have waded through it at some point, dragging the sack.

"It doesn't smell bad," he said. "Isn't that interesting?

It's because of their diet."

"I'm glad you told me."

"You don't have to worry. The bats never come in here."

"Might have made a nice change."

"Nothing ever comes in here," he said, giggling.

"Except you. On your belly."

He started to say something, then put up a hand to cover his swollen eye and held his other hand out for balance. He swayed, then stepped back, away from Aural.

Now, she thought, take him now, leap on him and pound his head against the rocks. But she did nothing but watch him.

"Kneel," he said when he had recovered himself somewhat. Aural knelt, facing him. Here we go, she thought. Now he unzips his fly and reveals his ambition.

She thought of the woman she had spoken about to Rae who had cut off her husband's penis and thrown it out of the car window. I'll bite it off, she thought. That ought to distract him for a while. But he made no gesture towards his fly.

"Now onto your stomach," he said. Aural moved forward as she slid onto her stomach, getting as close as she could to her boots and the knife's hiding place without moving the boots. When she was still he knelt on her back, freezing her into position with his weight. His hands fumbled at her waist, undoing her jeans, then struggling to pull them down her legs. She tried to raise up to assist him but he pushed her back down.

"I'll do it," he said brusquely. When her jeans were as far down her legs as the ankle irons would permit, he sat with his full weight on the small of her back and undid her handcuffs. Aural thought of going for the knife then, was about to try to roll him off and lunge forward to the hiding place, but he moved much too quickly for her.

With a motion that had the sharp precision of practice, he yanked her onto her side and refastened the cuffs on either side of the ankle-iron chain so that she was now bound with her hands at her feet, forced by her constraints into the fetal position.

"There," he said, obviously pleased with himself.

"Oh, neat," she said.

"Comfortable?"

"Personally, I love this. Wouldn't you like to join me, sugar? We could share these cuffs."

"I have already joined you," he said. "I'll never leave you again."

He knelt in front of her so that he could see her face.

"Will you lead us in prayer?" he asked.

"I tell you what," she said. "Why don't you have the first go at it?

I'll catch up with you the second time around.

"I'd think you'd want to pray," he said.

"Sugar, there are lots of things I'd like to do right now, but you know, you just can't do everything all at once.

I'm so excited about what you and me are going to be doing together here with me trussed up like a turkey that I can't think of anything else."

"Everyone always wants to pray now," he said, baffled.

"Everyone?"

"The others."

"You mean you've had other girls? Well, now, that does it. You just cut me loose and take me home right this second."

"You'll pray later," Swann decided.

"I'm a professional prayer. Get me an audience and I'll be happy to say a few-"

"Sweet Jesus," he intoned, cutting her off, "give us both the strength to get through the terrible ordeal that is about to come. Give this girl the courage and fortitude to survive for as long as she possibly can.

And give me the patience not to rush things, let me proceed with the care and attention that she deserves. In Jesus' name, Amen."

"Nice sentiment," said Aural. She felt a cold chill run down her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature in the cave.

"You're a little frightened now, aren't you? I can tell."

Aural refused to give it to him, but didn't trust herself to speak.

"It's all right to be afraid," he said. "I'm always nervous myself before I begin. It's good, though, it helps to heighten the sensations."

Not a word, Aural vowed to herself From here on, no matter what he did, she wouldn't cry out, she wouldn't speak, she wouldn't so much as grunt for him. Whatever he had in mind, he would have to do it by himself, she would not help him.

He was rummaging through the leather sack, taking out the candles and a carton of cigarettes. Suddenly he clamped his hand to his swollen eye and bared his teeth as he groaned in pain and confusion. Aural watched him squeeze his good eye shut and sway back and forth on his knees.

He dropped one hand to the ground and continued to moan, hanging his head like a sick dog. When he straightened up at last, Aural could see tears on his face and he looked frightened, but whatever it was, it had passed. He sat back on his heels for a moment, gathering himself, then ripped open the carton of cigarettes.

Swann put a candle at Aural's head and another at her feet and a third behind her, then lit them. Like some kind of altar, she thought. And she was the sacrifice.

He turned off the lantern, and the shadows in the cave went crazy, dancing wildly in the flickering of the candles.

The darkness closed in around them and Aural could no longer make out the ceiling or the walls. There was only her, only Swann, only the gyrating shadows to bear witness. Aural's world had shrunk to a little fold of light in the universal blackness and she was at the center of the earth.

Swann lit a cigarette and coughed. "Filthy things," he said. "I don't understand why anybody smokes them.

Don't they know cigarettes can kill you?" He giggled as if he had suddenly realized what he had said. He looked her in the face and grinned. "They do kill, you know.

Eventually."

Aural tried to study him, to keep her eyes on his eyes and to ignore whatever else he was doing. She wanted to kill her imagination, to keep it from killing her. Whatever would happen would happen anyway, and anticipation would only make it worse. She stared at the asshole, whose eyes were dancing gleefully. He's insane, she thought. He knows exactly what he's doing, but he's as mad as he can be.

Swann puffed on the cigarette several times until he was contented with the glowing ember.

"Shall we begin?" he asked.

"Shit, yes, let's get on with it," Aural said, forgetting her vow of silence already.

"I usually like to start with the legs," he said, stroking her shin.

Aural jerked away but he held her tightly, giving her a stern look of reprimand. When she stopped resisting, he ran his fingers over her calf like an acupuncturist seeking just the right spot.

He found the spot, then held the cigarette over her skin, just close enough so that she could feel the heat.

Fuck you, Aural thought wildly. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. You want me to beg, you want me to cry, you want me to piss myself out of fear.

Well, fuck you, you get none of it, none of it.

He pressed the cigarette into her flesh and she screamed. She realized very soon that she would give him everything he wanted.

Hatcher came announced this time, without pretense. He called and asked Becker for an appointment, and when he arrived he was accompanied by Karen and Gold and an agent from the Behavioral Sciences group whose purview included serial killers. Becker vaguely recognized the man.

Becker met them in his front yard, golf club in hand.

He'd been hitting plastic golf balls over the roof of the house and into the backyard with a pitching wedge.

As Hatcher and the others stepped out of the car, Becker lofted a perfect shot over the house, then he turned and thrust the golf club into Hatcher's hands before allowing him to speak.

"Try one," Becker said. "Aim just left of the chimney."

Hatcher did not demur. He knew Becker wanted to make him look foolish and he was willing to oblige if that was the price to get what he wanted. He knew he would probably have to debase himself further before he was finished.

Becker teed a ball into position and Hatcher dutifully il@ swiped at it, swinging stiffly in his suit. He missed the ball completely the first time, and tried again immediately as if the first attempt had been just for practice, hoping that his flub was not as obvious to the others as it was to him.

On his second swing, Hatcher buried the head of the club in turf, disconnecting a sizable chunk of sod "So sorry," Hatcher said, staring at the clod of dirt and grass that he had just unearthed. It looked like a bad toupee unaccountably dyed green.

He looked at Karen. "So very sorry."

"It's not your game," Becker said in a tone that implied that he was intent on continuing to humiliate Hatcher until he discovered the game that was his.

"I seem to have-" Hatcher bent over, thinking to retrieve and replace the severed turf, then stopped, wondering if calling further attention to it only made matters worse. Gold and the Behavioral Sciences man moved away from the lawn towards the porch, trying to disassociate themselves from the incident entirely.

"Jack does things like that all the time," Becker said.

Gold thought he sounded enormously pleased. He removed the club from Hatcher's hands as if taking a dangerous toy from a child. It was not lost on Hatcher that Jack was only ten years old.

They proceeded into the house and arranged themselves in a living room that could comfortably seat only four. As if seeking the supplicant's chair, Hatcher sat on a leathercovered footstool that was a reproduction of a cobbler's seat, a piece of furniture used more for decoration than utility. The footstool forced Hatcher's knees higher than his waist, so that he looked like an adult at parents' night at grade school, sitting uncomfortably at the desk of his child.

"Comfy?" Becker crooned, smiling with a benevolence that fooled no one.

"Fine, yes, fine," Hatcher said.

Gold and the other agent continued to avoid each other's eyes. The psychiatrist glanced at Karen and intercepted a look of cold fury directed at Becker, who seemed oblivious. Gold wondered about the long-term health of their relationship. Certainly the stress of the Cooper case was doing nothing to holster it.

"So good of you to make time for us like this," Hatcher was saying. "I realize you must be very busy… uh… with your interests."

"Yes. Today I was trying to learn to cut the ball,"

Becker said, smiling. "My normal shot is a slight draw, very good for most purposes-better distance, for instance-but there are times when you want to have that high fade available. The kind Nicklaus hils. Faldo and Norman have it when they need it, too."

"Ah, yes." Hatcher nodded. He thought he recognized the name Nicklaus.

The others meant nothing to him.

"It's hard, though. Especially with a wedge," Becker said.

"Yes, difficult, I should imagine so," Hatcher said.

"Well, now, John, we have come to see you-you do know Special Agent Withers of Behavioral Sciences, don't you?"

Becker nodded. "Withers."

"Of course," said Withers, who knew Becker only by reputation. He returned the nod of greeting.

"We have come on a matter of some urgency which I believe you already know about."

"What's that?" asked Becker.

Hatcher looked at Karen. He hoped not to let Becker drag every bit of the story out of him, inch by painful inch.

"The Cooper business," Karen said briskly. She was in no mood for Becker's antics. Being front man for Hatcher was bad enough for her without jumping through hoops held up by the man she lived with.

"You know about the Cooper business, with the two girls in the coal mine." Her tone allowed no room for disagreement.

"Special Agent Withers raised a few questions about the overall credibility of Cooper's story," Hatcher said.

"Nothing crippling to the case, certainly, but an odd question here and there. When these-ah-doubts were brought to my attention, naturally I asked for more opinions. It was then that Assistant Director Crist and Dr. Gold came forward with what they tell me was originally your… idea."

Becker smiled confusedly as if he had not yet fully grasped the meaning of the conversation.

"You know what he means," Karen said sharply.

Becker turned his countenance towards her, still looking bemused. She glowered back darkly.

Hatcher continued. "I refer to your-suggestion-that Cooper was somehow coached into confessing the murder of the Beggs girl. While not granting that that is the case at all, — not at all, it still raises an interesting line of speculation that one must conscientiously pursue.

Dr. Gold has been good enough to do a bit of research into the subject."

Becker turned his attention to Gold. He imagined that Hatcher had given the assignment to Gold for two reasons.

The first would be to keep the possibility that Hatcher might be wrong about Cooper's guilt-and that Becker might be right-within as small a group as possible. Since Gold was one of the group that had originated the doubt, Hatcher would be containing the spread of doubts if he had Gold do the work. The second reason, a happy offshoot of the first from Hatcher's point of view, was to punish Gold for having been a party to the doubts in the first place. Becker also imagined that Hatcher's greatest punishment would be reserved for Becker himself It was Hatcher's way.

Gold cleared his throat. "Well, not to get overly technical, we have done a number of studies on eyewitnesses, as you all know, and the results are not only that they are notoriously unreliable but that they actually 'see' and 'remember' those things which they are preconditioned to see. If they are shown videos of a traffic accident, for instance, and are personally inclined to believe that women are worse drivers than men, given the least bit of ambiguity in what they see, they will identify the driver who has caused the accident as a woman. That's a very simple example, of course. Any skillful questioner can plant suggestions in their minds as to specific details of the scene and they will soon parrot what they were told, convinced that it was what they saw. A rather extensive study of this phenomenon was done at Princeton, where Johnson was able to make her subjects swear they saw and heard things that never happened. They can be shown pictures of people embracing and interpret them as acts of violence, if they have been lead to believe that's what they will see. Most common, of course, is the identification of a perpetrator as being a member of whatever race the spectator identifies with criminal acts. Whites are notorious for believing all black men are dangerous, and consequently 'seeing' all dangerous men as black.

"Of most interest to us in this case, of course, are those examples in which the questioner can make the witness remember' things that did not happen. It is not difficult to do, and the witnesses are by no means stupid or pliable people. It is simply a matter of playing into their preconceptions as to how things are apt to happen, or supplying details that they missed but that their minds tell them should be there. It is easier still if the ideas are planted before the witnesses see the event. If the scene is dark, if details are obscure and the witnesses have been told to watch for a man with a knife, they will 'see' a man with a knife, no matter the facts of the event.

"Now these are ordinary people with no ax to grind beyond ordinary prejudices and preconceptions. Cooper is a very stupid man with a strong desire to believe that he is a killer. Such a notion enhances his self-esteem-and indeed actually gets him the esteem of others within the prison system, where he has spent a good deal of his life.

Again, without getting technical, the more people he thinks he killed, the better Cooper feels about himself. To be simplistic about it, we all know high school athletes whose exploits become more and more heroic in the telling the further they get from the event until by the time they're in middle age or beyond they themselves actually believe their stories of past glory. They have convinced themselves through repeated telling.

"With Cooper, we have a man who could have been convinced through repeated telling that he did something which in fact he never did. I stress the could because right now we really don't know what happened.

But given Cooper's need to believe the worst about himself, given his prolonged isolation with Swann, given an apparent cleverness on Swann's part — ." Gold trailed off, not wanting to reach the dangerous conclusion aloud.

"Well, hardly the sort of thing to convince a jury", Hatcher said, "but helpful in a speculative way." His fear, of course, was that it was precisely the kind of thing to convince a jury, just exactly the sort of vagary that in the hands of a skillful attorney could turn into a weapon of doubt with which to pry the case wide open. Juries were acquitting people right and left with not much more to justify their verdict than what Gold had just said. There was a predisposition to innocence abroad in the legal system that Hatcher found alarming. He did not dare to risk such an outcome while Beggs stood to lose face.

"What do you think, Withers? This is your line of work," Becker asked.

Withers had been hoping that no one would address him at all. It seemed the sort of conference in which no participant was going to win.

"I'm sure Dr. Gold has done his research well," Withers said noncommittally. "There are always some inconsistencies in anyone's confession. That's just human nature. All I did was point out a few in Cooper's case.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything."

"Oh, good, then there's nothing to worry about," Becker said.

Hatcher improved the crease in his pant leg.

"Actually, John, I must agree with you. There really is nothing to worry about-we have the killer in custody, no question in my mind about that.

But there are always naysayers. There are always those who would ruthlessly manipulate the legal system to their own ends. Naturally, in the interest of justice, we would like to squelch those voices before they begin. We must have the appearance of justice as well as justice itself. In order to assure that appearance in this case, we feel that it is best to have this man Swann in custody as well."

"Don't you have him in custody now?"

"Actually, he has been released from prison."

"What asshole did that?"

"It was considered the best way to assure his cooperation."

"What stupid son of a bitch gave the order to release Swann?"

"There's really no point in fixing blame in such cases, John. An error seems to have been made; we need to correct it."

"Sure, but what kind of a head-up-his-ass dufuss would let that little shit go in the first place?"

Hatcher adjusted the crease in the other pant leg. The others in the room watched, transfixed, to see if he would avoid the knife poised to take its pound of flesh.

"Decisions of this kind are complicated, but ultimately I must take responsibility for all the actions of my people.

It would be cowardly to do otherwise."

Becker was not yet satisfied.

"You're the asshole, then?"

Hatcher lifted his head and forced a smile as wintry as a February night.

"Yes, John, if you want to think of it that way. I am the asshole."

Hatcher looked at no one but Becker and his voice had the regulated tone of a metronome.

"I suspected you were," Becker said. He heard Karen's angry exhalation of breath. "But it's nice to hear you confirm it.

He smiled broadly. Withers thought it was the first genuine expression of any kind that he had seen since his arrival. Becker looked, briefly, like a happy man.

"I'm glad you are pleased," said Hatcher. "Now, John, the Bureau needs you to do something. Swann has disappeared completely. We have been unable to get any trace at all on his movements since he left prison.

Inasmuch as you have had a rather lengthy interview with the man, and given your great expertise in these matters, and since although you failed to detect the nature of his deception during that interview you did most likely gain some insight into his character, the Bureau hopes-most ardently hopes-that you will assist us in finding him."

Becker had known it was coming from the moment that he heard that Swann had escaped. There seemed no way to avoid the final confrontation that Swann had provoked in the first place by sending his letters to Becker.

Having fooled Becker during the interview had only pushed the ultimate outcome to the point of inevitability.

"I will need a few things," Becker said.

Hatcher was surprised at the ease of victory. He had expected much more resistance.

"Of course we will give you whatever you need."

"I want this to be the end of it," Becker said. "I never want to work for you again. I don't want you to forward mail to me, I don't want you to call me, or speak of me, or think of me. I want to be taken off indefinite medical extension and dropped from the Bureau roster as if I were dead. This is the end of it-forever."

Hatcher did not hesitate. He knew he could always renege later. Becker was far too valuable an asset to relinquish forever. Hatcher had built his career in part on Becker's triumphs and had no intention of stopping now, although another triumph in the Beggs case might well put him beyond the need of Becker's heroics. In any event, it was a contingency to deal with in the future. For now, the only thing that mattered was Becker's cooperation.

"As you say, John. It will be as you say."

"You mustn't think I trust you," Becker said.

Hatcher raised his eyebrows and tried to look as if his feelings were hurt. The form had to be observed in these matters.

"I want the tape you made of my interview with Swann," Becker continued.

Hatcher raised a finger towards Withers, who made a note.

"When I narrow him to an area, I want to be able to pick and choose from the local agents myself."

Hatcher nodded, again motioning with a finger towards Withers.

"And full cooperation from the national information net, of course."

"Certainly."

"And if I smell you anywhere near me, if I so much as sense your interference, no, hell, even so much as your observation of the case, I'll quit."

Hatcher sat stock-still.

"I have my responsibilities, John."

"My conditions, yes or no. You've fucked up every operation of mine you've ever gotten close to… Yes or no?"

Hatcher waited as long as dignity required before finally lifting his finger a fraction. Withers began to write.

Aural spent the night as if in her coffin. He had put her in the leather golf sack for warmth and zipped it up so that only her face was uncovered. She was still shackled hands to ankles, and he had taken the additional precaution of securing the sack with the length of rope, tying the other end around his leg so that if she moved too far in the night, he would know it. Later, when she was weaker, he could relax his vigilance, but he knew that she still had some resistance left.

Eventually she would welcome the end as much as he did, but he wanted to postpone that time as long as possible. When they gave up and lost the will to remain, they slipped away from him much too quickly. Life was a curious thing, Swann thought, capable of withstanding injuries and insults of the worst sort as long as the fiber of the will was intact to hold it together. But if the heat of despair got too high, the will would melt irreversibly, like gelatin oozing between his fingers. He tried to make his girls last longer; he urged them to withstand him and to hold on; but when they decided to go, he could not restrain them.

Sometimes they went so quickly that he almost missed the passing, which would have been a terrible waste. He wanted to celebrate the moment, to exult in it, to sanctify it with his great joy and release. It would be an awful thing for them to have suffered so much and then to have slipped away unnoticed, uncelebrated. If he knew that their time had come, he would try to speed them along by intensifying his pleasure, because it was important that he should send them, that he should be the cause. He would work on them all night, if necessary, never leaving their side when the time had come, ignoring his own need for sleep or food, denying himself comfort for the greater cause. He thought of it as a sacrifice he made for his girls, just as they had made their own for him. It was the least he could do for them; he owed them that much when they had given so much to him.

When their time came he forgave them their spitefulness, he overlooked the horror of their appearance, their mutilated, untouchable bodies, the tears and mucus and excrement with which they soiled themselves. At the end they were all his angels and he in turn was the ministering angel for them, the last sight they saw on this earth, the last human touch they would ever feel. They took him with them into Jesus' embrace and Swann knew that Jesus thanked him for sending them to him. And they thanked him too, or they surely would once they reached the other side.

He could detect the light of love in their fading eyes as they eased away. At the end, they understood, he was certain of that. They knew that no hospital emergency team could have tried harder to prolong their life, and that no minister in the world could have given them a more joyful, jubilant valedictory when the inevitable arrived at last.

When he grew weary, when he could take no more pleasure for that day, he had trussed up Aural in her sack and then crept into his sleeping bag with the contentment that came from exhaustion. He turned off the lantern and the insistent hiss died with the light, leaving them in silence except for the sounds of the girl. She moaned when she moved, but he knew that after a few days that would stop. Something happened to them after a few days, and they slept peacefully at night. They still screamed for him when he made them, but they stopped moaning. And this one wasn't a crier, he was glad of that. Sometimes they cried all night long and destroyed his rest, which only made him angry. He regretted that because this was not a business to be done in anger. It had to be done carefully, slowly, with love. If he was angry, he went too fast and hurt them for the wrong reasons. He hadn't gone to all this trouble and taken such risks just to hurt them to punish them. He was ashamed of himself when he allowed his anger to get the better of him and always regretted it later. This girl was not going to anger him, however. She was going to fight him, she was going to hang on as long as she possibly could-and she was not going to cry. She was wonderful and Swann drifted into sleep thinking that he truly loved her already.

Aural was astounded to realize that she had slept. She awoke with a start, not from a nightmare, but to it as the realization of what had happened, was happening, flooded back to her consciousness. She heard a noise beside her and realized that he had awakened her with a shout. She could sense him in the dark, twisting about in his sleeping bag, groaning.

"Sweet Jesus," he cried, his voice filled with pain.

"Oh, Christ, Jesus."

"What the fuck are you doing?" she asked.

He continued to groan, and although she couldn't see him, Aural could imagine him clasping his head with his hand as he had earlier when he seemed to faint.

"Jesus," he muttered again, then, "Goddamn it."

"I'm trying to sleep over here," she said.

He stopped shouting then, but she could hear him whimpering and rocking back and forth. The noises came rhythmically after a time, as if he were receiving the pain in pulses. She hoped it came like machine gun fire; she hoped it ripped his head off.

"What's the matter?" she asked after several minutes, trying to sound sympathetic.

He did not respond.

"Do you need anything?"

He was silent and she realized that he had stopped rocking. If he continued to whimper, it was so quietly that she couldn't hear it over her own breathing.

Because of the rope tied around the sack, she could not roll over and her back was aching fiercely. Amazingly, the cramped muscles hurt more than the burns, which, at the time they were administered, seared so painfully that she thought they might kill her. She knew now that they wouldn't kill her-at least the pain wouldn't kill her.

What effect it would have if he kept at it, if he burned all of her… she tried not to think about it.

She had been freed once from the contorted fetal position. She had told him she had to go to the bathroom, and to her amazement he had unhooked her hands from her ankles and allowed her to stand. He tied the rope to her handcuffs and secured her wrists in front of her body.

He had been strangely courtly throughout the proceedings.

"You will want privacy," he said. He gave her a lighted candle and pointed the direction she should go.

"Keep on until the rope is taut," he said. "You'll find the appropriate spot there." He even handed her a roll of toilet tissue and made a display of turning his back although she felt his eyes on her every step of the way.

Aural hoped to get closer to the wave formations on the wall; she thought there might be potential hiding places there if she could ever get to them; but as she veered in that direction, he called out sharply.

"Not that way," he said. "Straight ahead."

"Well, how'm I supposed to know where I'm going?" she demanded.

"Oh, you'll know it when you get there," he said, his voice suddenly amused. "It's well marked."

He was full of these little jokes to himself, giggling at things only he thought were funny. Aural not only — hated the bastard in a general, all-encompassing way, but she couldn't find much to like about him, either. He'd be a creep even if his hobby was collecting stamps instead of torturing women.

She walked forward into the wavering candlelight, then stopped and gasped.

He giggled, "Find it?"

A human skeleton lay a few feet from her. The flesh was gone, but long dark hair still curled in a mat under the bony skull. The hands had been crossed over the chest in a mockery of subterranean burial, and the lower torso was covered in patches of cloth that had once been a skirt.

The victim's shoes were placed neatly at her feet and her ankles had been crossed, but the bones of the feet had dropped away from each other and lay where they had fallen on the rocky floor.

Aural could not guess how long the girl had been dead, but the shoes looked like new.

She turned away from the skeleton and stepped in the opposite direction.

The rope pulled snugly at her waist.

"Anywhere in there will do," Swann called to her. His voice beat back on itself, overlapping the giggle that followed.

Aural moved several steps to the side and squatted. The bones of another skeleton shone dully in the flickering light. This one had been "buried" like the first, her arms crossed over her chest. The ligaments of the hands had disintegrated and the finger bones had fallen in among the ribs.

When she was in control of herself, Aural called, "You been busy, ain't you? You been a real little beaver."

"Oh, you haven't seen them all, " he said proudly.

"These are very early works. I did them years ago."

"Well, they say that idle hands are the devil's tool," Aural said, walking back towards him. If there were other bones, she did not want to see them. "It's good to know you've been active so you can't get up to any mischief"

As she approached him she realized she could have grabbed one of the bones, a leg bone, a thighbone, and used it to club him to death. If she had had the presence of mind. If she could have brought herself to pick up the bone in the first place. She cursed herself for another opportunity missed. How many more would she have before she joined the boneyard? Girl, you've got to get in control of yourself, she thought.

You've got to take your chance when you get it.

Now, as she lay wide awake, she could hear his steady breathing. The bastard was beginning to snore. He was resting while she was consuming her precious energy in useless rage and anxiety. Damn it, girl, she thought, don't let him sleep. Keep him as bad off as you can, keep him sleepless, get him punchy and careless, force him into making a mistake.

"Hey, shitstick!" she called. "Wake up. Time to be up and doing, we got some business to take care of."

He came awake noisily, spluttering, alarmed.

"What? What is it?"

"Come on, stick, get your ass up. You got things to do. And in the meantime, how about some breakfast? You wasn't planning to starve me to death, too, was you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"It's morning. Get your ugly ass up. Feed me, then we'll think of something fun to do."

"It's morning?" he asked, puzzled. "How do you know?"

"Let's get at it, slick. Start opening some of them cans.

What have we got for breakfast, beans or peaches?"

She heard him fumbling about, then his lighter flared into flame. Aural saw him looking at his wristwatch, trying to figure out what was going on. Baffled by what his timepiece told him, Swann turned to look at her, holding the lighter in front of him like a lantern.

"What are you up to?" he asked.

Swann studied her for a moment in the insufficient glow of the cigarette lighter. He cocked his head to one side, trying to interpret what he saw. Aural's head peeked out from the golf sack, and she was grinning at him.

"Up and at 'em, chief," she said. "Time's awasting."

Swann clicked the lighter shut and the cavern returned to darkness.

Aural saw red ghosts dance on her retina while Swann moved out of his sleeping bag. She heard him fumble about for a moment, then the lighter snapped on again and he lit a candle. He walked the few feet to her side and peered down at her for a moment before bending and tugging at the rope that bound the sack to his leg. Satisfied that the rope was still secure around her body, he unzipped the sack far enough to see that her wrists and ankles were still manacled.

He zipped the sack up to her chin once more.

"What are you playing at?" He leaned close to her, peering into her eyes. Aural could smell his breath and feel the heat of the candle.

"Just a little s and m. I'm pretending you've got me tied up and are trying to torture me."

"You'd better be careful," he said. "You'd better be very, very careful.

So far I like you."

"I thought you did. I don't know… a girl can tell."

"But I know how to be mean," he said, ignoring her.

He moved the candle until it was directly in front of her face, six inches away from her skin. His own face was behind the flame, the features dancing in the flickering light like a jack-o-lantern. So slowly that it took Aural a moment to realize what was happening, he moved the flame towards her eyes. She watched with fascinated horror as the flame inched closer and closer.

"Tell me when you're sorry that you woke me up at two in the morning," he said softly. Aural did not look at him; she could see only the bright orange flame creeping ever nearer. The fire filled her field of vision, blocking out anything else, and she fought a scream that wanted to tear loose from her chest. Not my eyes, she thought, terrified.

When the warmth of the candle turned to heat, she blew it out.

Swann emitted a grunt of anger, then the cigarette lighter snapped into flame again. He relit the candle and set it on the ground, too far away for her to blow it out again.

He sat with his arms on his knees, studying her as if she were an enigma that he had just stumbled across.

"What am I going to do with you?" he asked at last.

"You mean you don't know? I was counting on you to have it all figured out."

"Shut up," — he said softly.

"If it's up to me, I say let's play another game entirely.

How about the one where I stick you in the sack and set you on fire?

You'll like that one, I promise. I'm good at it."

"I said be quiet. I'm trying to think."

"While you're thinking, open a can. I'll have the beans."

To Aural's amazement, he smiled at her.

"All right," he said. "Since you're so eager to get at it, I'm up now anyway. Beans do sound good, don't they?"

He released Aural from the sack, undid her handcuffs from the ankle irons so that she could stretch and feed herself, and fed her beans and peaches.

"Eat up," he said. "You're going to need your strength. This will be a longer session than before since we've got more time."

"More time to kill, you mean," Aural said.

"That's good. I like that. More time to kill. That's good."

"I've got hundreds of them," Aural said.

"I like women with a sense of humor," Swann said.

"I spent three years living with a gorilla who had the sense of humor of a rock."

"I think I used to date him," Aural said. "Did he have a tattoo on his butt?"

Swann giggled. "You're funny," he said.

"You're a little strange yourself. In a very interesting way. I can see why the girls like you."

"They do, you know," he said soberly. "You're yjoking, but they do. My girls love me-at the end. You will, too, you'll see."

"Do you get those headaches a lot?" Aural asked abruptly. "I heard you crying last night."

"I wasn't crying."

"You ought to have that looked at."

"Your boyfriend did it to me," he said. "The one who beat me up in town."

"Harold Kershaw? He always was a favorite of mine.

He let me set him on fire, he liked it so much he can't let me go. You sure you wouldn't let me try it with you?"

Swann pushed his can of beans from him and took Aural's from her hands.

"How about if I visit the little girls' room before we start again?" she asked.

"All right."

He tied the rope around her waist and gave her a candle.

As she walked towards the graveyard, Aural thought of how she might slip a shinbone in her shirt when she squatted. If she kept it hidden long enough, she could pull it out when she got within range and hit him on the head.

Halfway there, the rope grew taut.

"I'm going in the right direction," she complained.

"I know it," Swann said. He was crossing quickly to her, holding the lantern. As she started to turn to face him, he kicked her legs out from under her and rolled her onto her stomach before refastening the handcuffs so that her hands were secured behind her back, making any attempt to get a bone impossible.

Swann grinned at her. "You mustn't ever think I'm stupid," he said.

"That would be a serious mistake."

"I sure don't want to get on your bad side," Aural said.

"You're just a little too eager," he said, hauling her to her feet.

When she returned, he shackled her hands to her ankles once more.

"Let us pray," he said.

"Praise be to Jesus," said Aural.

He looked at her, pleased.

"Would you like to lead the prayer, sister Aural?"

"Not just yet," Aural said.

"Or sing? Would you sing a hymn for us?"

"I'd rather get burned by cigarettes," she said.

"Very well."

He lit a cigarette and coughed at the smoke.

"I think this relationship is coming along nicely, don't you?" Aural asked. The last words were lost in her involuntary gasp as he touched her.

Becker lived with the tape of his meeting with Swann, turning it on in the morning after Jack was off to school and turning it off only when the boy had returned home.

During the late afternoon and the preparation for the evening meal, Becker acted as if nothing were different, joking and playing with Jack, helping him with his homework, trying to make the mysteries of beginning science and mathematics less arcane. When Karen came home he was still buoyant, almost jolly, but when Jack had gone at last to bed, Becker retired to the office and turned on the tape once more, playing it with the volume low. It was no longer the words he was listening to but the rhythms, the pauses, the stops and starts, the sudden, fleeting fermatas that bespoke lies.

You have a rep," Swann's voice said on the tape.

"I'll bet," came his own reply.

"I hear you climb, you climb mountains. You're a rock climber, right?" A pause, no response from Becker, then Swann's voice again, a trace of triumph. "You'd be surprised how much they know about you."

"You a climber, Swann?" Becker could hear the strain in his voice as though it were filtered through the discomfort he felt in the little cell, the unease he experienced in the presence of Swann. I was off balance already, Becker thought, pausing the tape. One minute into the interview and already so skewed by my problems that I wasn't listening right. Swann was telling him what he wanted to know. They always told him; they could not help themselves; they were always so pleased, so proud of their ghastly accomplishments that they could not help but reveal it in some way. The hardest thing for such psychopaths was keeping the secret to themselves; the great trick was to listen. In this interview Becker had listened only to himself But he could hear it clearly now.

"Well… not really. I worked with ropes a little bit, I know what's involved. That's scary work."

He's'playing on your ego there, Becker thought. And why? To cover himself "Not so scary if you know the safe way," Becker said on the tape. In his own home, Becker squirmed with irritation at his own stupidity. "You ever try it?"

"I believe in gravity," Swann was saying. "If it tells me to go down, I go down."

Becker turned off the tape and glanced at the clock. It was close to four in the morning. He had run through the entire tape dozens of times, trying to filter his own ego out of it. He rewound it and played the same section over.

Karen was asleep, or pretending to be. Becker watched her for a moment from the doorway, then walked through the darkened house to Jack's room.

Becker looked lovingly at the boy asleep; innocence, all innocence. He turned away from the door and went outdoors to stand alone in the yard.

He felt like howling. He was giving it up, giving it all up as surely as if he were leaving the earth. When he returned, he would be too vile to live with them again, he thought. His hands would be too bloody, his soul too restless. Innocence deserved to be protected; it could not be entrusted to the ravening beast. Listening to the tapes, Becker had found Swann, but he had lost what he loved.

He was like a junkie with the needle in his arm, Becker thought. He had put it there himself when he had deciphered the first cryptic note from Swann; he had prepared himself for the fix as surely as if he had gone out and bought the narcotic and the syringe that same day. When he performed the actual injection no longer mattered because he was already gone, and he knew it, and anticipation was as much a part of the experience as the act itself He knew that he had taken the first step down the long, slippery slope and any subsequent flailing of arms or attempts at equilibrium were just posturing for the benefit of others, futile attempts to convince them, and himself, that he was an unwilling victim. In fact he could see ahead of time the terrible fall that awaited him as he gathered speed, and he knew he wouldn't stop until he hit the gutter. He shuddered, looking forward to the trip, his chest fluttering with excitement.

That was what Hatcher knew about him, understood better than Becker would admit to himself, and the real reason he hated Hatcher. In the long run, Becker could not resist the hunt, the chase. He could not ultimately deny himself the kill, which was just the plunging of the syringe.

He was like Swann in that, Becker knew. No, worse, he wasn't like Swann.

He was the same.

This time Pegeen Haddad was in acceptable Bureau costume. She met Becker at the airport dressed in a navy blue business suit with a white blouse closed at the collar by a red and blue foulard. Becker thought she looked like an airline stewardess.

"Well, Haddad, there you are," he greeted her.

Pegeen tried to remember any of the witty remarks she had prepared for the meeting.

"Here I am," she said.

Becker nodded several times as if he wanted to say something further and she waited before realizing that he had nothing clever to say, either.

"Okay, then," he said finally. "Let's get at it."

As she led him to the car in the parking lot, Pegeen wondered if it was at all possible that Becker felt as nervous as she did. He was a hard man to read at the best of times, and seeing him again after several weeks was not the best of times. She had not expected to see him again at all, ever. His request to have her assigned to him as an assistant had come as a complete surprise and had raised more than a few eyebrows in the Nashville home office. The story of her presence in the motel room during Becker's unexplained shower had made the rounds of the rumor mill with great celerity, and her continual and increasingly weary explanations of innocence had finally begun to taper off when his sudden request came through, reviving and inflating the previous spate of salacious humor in the office.

He did not speak to her again until they reached the car.

"Got any other clothes with you?" he asked.

"No," she answered, surprised. "Why?"

"Things are going to get kind of grubby," he said.

"You'd be better off in a pair of jeans."

"Agents don't wear jeans on duty. This outfit conforms to Bureau dress code."

"It doesn't suit me, though. I'm your boss now, Haddad. They told you that, didn't they?"

"They said I was to assist you."

"That means doing what I tell you to do, all right?"

Pegeen did not understand the harshness in his tone. He sounded angry with her. Her first reaction was to get angry herself.

"They didn't tell me why you wanted me to assist you," she said.

"I didn't tell them."

"Want to tell me?" she inquired sharply.

Becker studied her for a moment as she maneuvered the car into traffic.

"What do you want to hear-I asked for you because you're the best agent I've ever met?"

"That would be a nice opening, then you could tell me the truth," she said.

"You're not going to like the truth," he said.

Pegeen felt herself blushing. He wanted to be with me, she thought. He wanted to spend time with me, to be with me, he's been thinking about me just as I have been thinking of him. Her ears were on fire, her damned ears were giving her away again.

"What's the truth?" she asked softly.

"Let's go to your place and change your clothes," he said.

She glanced at him for as long as she dared before turning back to the traffic.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," she said. In fact, she thought it was a splendid idea, if not a very safe one.

"Well, let's try it anyway," Becker said. "Sometimes my ideas are better than they look at first glance."

Pegeen paused for several moments before saying, "I've given it several glances now. I still don't think it's a good idea."

"Do what you're told, Haddad," he said gruffly. "I'm not in a mood to argue with you about everything I say."

He laid his head back against the seat. "Wake me when we get there," he said. "I haven't slept for several days."

"I'm glad I have that soothing effect on you," she said, trying to figure out just what was going on.

"It's not you, kid. It's the car." He closed his eyes and by the time Pegeen had swallowed the "kid" and fought back her urge to retaliate with a cutting remark about his age, Becker was asleep.

When she stopped the car in her driveway, Pegeen had still not decided quite how to handle the situation. Becker made it easy for her. He rolled his head towards her, opened one eye, and said, "Jeans and something old on top, and boots." He then closed his eye and rolled his head away from her.

Racked with confusion and conflicting desires, Pegeen dressed in front of the mirror over her bureau. The jeans were easy enough, but the selection of the blouse took some consideration. She contemplated her reflection as she held a number of possible selections under her chin and against her bra. The brassiere was demure and proper and perfectly appropriate for her business outfit, but not right for the more casual tops she was contemplating. She decided on a purple underwire push-up bra and paused to look at her naked torso. Her breasts were full, almost too large for her body size, she thought, but beautifully formed. She was very proud of the way they looked and regretted at times that her best features were necessarily hidden under her clothes while her face, which she could only tolerate, and her ears, which she loathed, represented her before the world.

As she admired her nakedness, she half wished that Becker would suddenly walk in on her. She imagined him pausing for a moment to admire her beauty, then taking her into his arms and kissing her softly before trailing his tongue down to her breasts.

Christ, she thought, putting on the bra and tugging on a top, you're going to be up on a charge of sexual harassment in the workplace if you don't stop this. The man is asleep in the car, not in here, that ought to tell you something.

As she approached the car, Becker rolled his head towards her once more.

"Cover yourself," he said.

Pegeen thought her face would burst into flame. She knew she should not have chosen the tank top.

"I am covered," she said angrily.

"Warmer," he said. He rolled- away from her and closed his eyes again.

Fuck you, too, she thought, storming back into the house. She reemerged with a flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists.

"Good," he said. "It's going to be cold. We're going underground."

"The tank top was less conspicuous for going undercover than this is. I look like a lumberjack."

"Not undercover, Haddad. Underground."

Becker handed her a slip of paper with an address in downtown Nashville written on it.

"Wake me when we get there," he said.

"Is this how it's going to work? You give me orders, then go to sleep?

If you'd let me in on what the plan is, I could do a little thinking on my own. My brain does work, you know."

"I thought we got past all this defensive shit the last time around," he said.

"There seems to be some difference of opinion as to what exactly happened last time."

He opened both eyes and studied her.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I'll wake you when we get there," she said, throwing the car into gear too abruptly.

"Something wrong, Haddad?"

"What could be wrong?"

"The address is for the headquarters of the speleological society. The guys who crawl around in caves."

"I know what speleology is. They're spelunkers."

"They call themselves cavers these days," he said.

"You ever done any caving?"

"No. Have you?"

"Hell no," he said. "I'm scared of places like that."

Once more he turned away from her and seemed to sleep.

Erskine Browne was built along the lines of a stiff rope.

When he stood behind his desk to greet his visitors, it was easy for Becker to see why he had been nicknamed Weasel by his colleagues. Before arthritis had debilitated his flexibility, Browne had been legendary within caving circles for his ability to squeeze himself into any hole and wriggle through it like a ferret after its dinner. Even now, with his bent and frozen joints, his hands shaped into claws by the arthritis, he looked to Becker as if he could slip through an s-curve if he had to, and his lively eyes seemed to indicate that he wouldn't mind it at all.

"Becker, isn't it?" Browne asked.

"John Becker, that's right. And this is Special Agent Haddad."

Browne offered his gnarled hand to Pegeen.

'Agent Haddad. A pleasure. I didn't realize they made agents so pretty."

He winked at Becker.

Pegeen decided that Browne's age allowed him a certain dispensation in the sexism category. Any man over sixty was to be excused for the occasional inappropriate remark because of a deficient early education.

"Only the good ones," Becker said soberly.

Browne winked again and offered such a knowing grin to Pegeen that she changed her mind about dispensation.

"I did the research you were asking for on the phone," Browne was saying. "You wanted me to look for a name in the enrollment roster of the SOA… " He turned again to Pegeen. "That's Speleologists of America."

Pegeen did not return the smile.

"I have that," she said.

"Name of Swann, right? The national search was easy, that's all computerized, has been for seven years."

"Any luck?"

"Nope. Of course that doesn't mean too much. There are a lot of amateur cavers-some of them pretty good, too-who aren't members. We only have maybe ten percent of the active cavers in the country, which is a shame because we have a good deal to offer them. The newsletter alone is worth the price of membership."

"I didn't really expect to find him on your list," Becker said. "It was a long shot. People like Swann are not great joiners."

"Well, now, let's not get ahead of ourselves," said Browne. "That wasn't all I did. The FBI calls me, I'm going to put myself out a little bit, right? What did he do, exactly?"

"Exactly, it's hard to say," said Becker. "He may not have done anything at all. He may just be a figment of my imagination."

"Yeah, sure, which is why you go to the trouble of trying to find him in our lists. I figured, it wasn't important, you wouldn't ask. Like I said, the national is all computerized, but it doesn't go back very far.

Now regionally, we're about halfway through getting all the names into the machine. It takes time, and with these fingers I'm practically worthless myself. But they Work when I really need them." He waggled his fingers suggestively in front of Pegeen. She had an urge to take one of the swollen knuckles and bend it backwards.

Browne returned his attention to Becker. "So I looked in the regional records. Now those go back to before wereally even organized, just names and telephone numbers on the backs of envelopes in the beginning, people you might call if you were going to be in their area and wanted to go down. You'd call it a network these days, but you go back far enough, and hell it was just a friend giving a name of somebody a friend told him about who might know somebody else who was interested. You know what I'm saying. All of that is in that file cabinet over there."

"A lot of work," Becker said.

Browne shrugged. "What else have I got to do these days? Anyway, you were right, your friend Swann isn't a joiner. He never did belong to the society."

"Well, I knew it was a long shot…"

"I said he didn't join-that don't mean he wasn't in the file. I got his name on a paper napkin, along with the name of Herm Jennings, who suggested I call him."

Browne pulled a pale-green paper napkin from his desk drawer. "The check mark after his name means I called the man to see if he was interested in joining. He wasn't, or I would have put a circle around the check.

That's my system. I don't remember ever talking to him; it must have been twenty years ago or more, so I called Henn Jennings this morning.

Herm can just barely recall him as somebody who went down with him and a couple of others one time. That's how he knew he was interested in caving. But that's all he remembers; it's not like he ever really knew the man."

"Twenty years ago? That would make him about fifteen at the time."

"That's right-that's usually when you get started, when you're in your teens and don't know any better."

"Did Jennings remember where they went, by any chance?"

"No, I asked him that. But you can be sure of one thing, if he went with Herm, he went someplace good, someplace tough. That's the only kind of hole Herm visits. And if Herm passed his name along, the kid could carry his own weight, fifteen or not."

"Bingo," said Becker.

"That's a bingo? Don't sound like much to me."

"It shows he knows caves in this region," Becker said.

"It shows he's been at it a long time. And that he's good.

That tells me all I need to know."

"Well, then, good, glad I can help."

"You've just started helping, Mr. Browne. What I really need are your maps."

Browne turned to Pegeen. "I've got the most thorough maps of all the known caves in my region. They're better than the government maps, better than the geologists' maps, better than anybody's."

"I'm sure they are," said Pegeen.

"No question. I can tell you every hole in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky that's wide enough to squeeze your shoulders through-and I been in most of them myself I drew more than half the maps personally. You didn't think there was any goddamn surveyors crawling down there, did you?"

"I would think not."

Browne nodded emphatically.

"You got that right. Some of them ain't much bigger than a rabbit run; some of them got more room than a hotel. This whole region is honeycombed with tunnels and caves and caverns and mines-hell, it's a wonder it don't all collapse. It's the limestone substrata, you know.

Water just carves that rock like butter. You get any kind of trickle going and pretty soon-a million years or so-the water's cut its way through that limestone like a jigsaw.

You ever go caving?":'Not really," she said.

'Not really or not at all?"

"Not at all."

"You ever want to try, you let me know. I'll take. you down personally."

The day I go down in a dark hole with you, old man, she thought. "I'll remember the offer if I ever get the urge," she said, straining for politeness.,"That's right, you get the urge, you think of me," Browne said, winking at Becker.

The old son of a bitch thinks I'm blind as well as stupid, Pegeen thought. She watched Becker absorb Browne's attempts at male conspiracy with just the faintest hint of a smile He wasn't going along with the joke-not that it was really a joke; men always had some faint dream of success, she knew, no matter how pathetically delusional it was; they stoked themselves on fantasies of women overwhelmed by their magnetism and leaping over all bounds of decency, age, decorum, and common revulsion just to get at them-but Becker wasn't telling him to mind his manners, either.

Browne had a sheaf of charts on the side of his desk and he tapped it proudly, as if it were a codex of the classics.

"You tell me what you're looking for, and if it exists, 'I've got it here."

Becker thought a moment. "It should be somewhere remote, somewhere you could enter and exit unseen. It has to have a sizable chamber in it somewhere, big enough for a man to stand and move around."

"Easy access or difficult?"

"Access to the cave?"

"That's one. Some of these entrances are halfway up a mountain. You got to climb up before you climb down."

"Not too difficult. He's carrying, or dragging, a hundred-pound weight in addition to his gear."

"Okay, that lets out some. How about access to the chamber, you want that easy or hard?"

"He doesn't expect to be found in there," Becker said, "so I guess it's got to be hard. He won't be anyplace where some random caver is going to walk in on him."

"But he's still hauling the hundred-pound weight?"

"Oh, yeah. He'll have that with him-going in."

"Going in?"

"He won't have to bring it back out."

"Well, okay, I won't ask what he's dumping in there, but if I found out he's left his shit in any cave I'll kick his ass for him." Browne turned to Pegeen. "Sorry about that.

"What?" Pegeen asked.

"Language," he said.

"Oh, shit. You can't say anything I haven't heard before. Look, if he's got this-weight-with him, that means he can go down easier than he can go up-on the way there. Coming back, I suppose he could go up all right."

Browne lifted his eyebrows at Becker before continuing. "Okay, so we eliminate anything that goes up after entry."

He shuffled through the charts with practiced ease.

"We have them graded according to difficulty," Browne said, "but we don't have any code for taking something down that you don't bring back up. That's just not done, at all, period." He muttered to himself for a moment, riffling and shuffling the charts.

"Here's one," he said, marking the plastic coating of the map with a grease pen. "And here, and here. You could probably do it here, but it's a pisser. On the other hand, no one's going to be wandering in by accident. This one's very tough, very difficult. Is this guy an expert?"

"We don't really know," said Becker. "He might be.

We have to assume he's good."

"He'd have to be-at least he'd have to know what he was doing to get into any of these. You do want them tough, right? I mean, no tourists being led in there by a guide.

Unless there's some chamber that no one's going to go to, but no, not with guides, I don't think so. Too much of a chance of being seen coming or going."

"Well, here's ten, twelve, fourteen of them. They're all remote. They all have a big chamber, and the chamber is down or at least level when you're going to it. No one's going to be trying these things on the weekend, or if they do, you could hear them coming a long way away once you're in the chamber. Of course, we don't know if your man even knows they exist-half of these are pretty obscure. Some of them don't show any more on the surface than a breathing hole.":'A breathing hole?" 'Sure. A cave breathes, you know. If you go down very far you get a constant temperature, year 'round; it's colder than the air above ground in summer, warmer in the winter. When it's hot, you get this shaft of air sucking down through the hole like a vacuum cleaner. When it's cold aboveground, you get just the opposite, a steady breeze of warmer air.

It's damned mysterious if you don't know what you're seeing, but if you find a breathing hole, you've got yourself a major cave at the other end of it."

"Are they marked in any way or can someone just fall in?" Pegeen asked.

"Most of them are marked, or boarded over, the ones on public land, anyway. On private land there's usually a damned billboard out by the nearest road so the owner can charge you a few bucks if they're what you call user friendly. But if they aren't big enough to walk into, you're not going to get any tourists, so some of them on private property are pretty much the way God made 'em. They may have had signs or markers once, but if they're out in the woods somewhere, the owner doesn't go there himself, the sign falls over, you know. Out of sight, out of mind. If your man doesn't know where they are, he's not going to find some of these."

"We have to assume he knows about them," Becker said.

"How come?"

"He has an affinity for them. He likes them dark and tight.

Browne laughed. "Lots of us like them that way. Sorry, Miss."

"Some of us like them long and hard and pointing up" said Pegeen.

'Hub?"

"Caves, Mr. Browne. We all have our preferences."

Browne looked to Becker uncertainly.

"I'll need copies of these maps," Becker said.

"You're a born diplomat, Haddad," Becker said when they were once more in the car. "You should have gone for the foreign service."

"He's an asshole."

"Probably only because you're around," Becker said.

"Thanks a lot."

"It's not your fault, it's his, but people are going to have a reaction to you, you might as well get used to it."

"Do you find that it works the other way? Do women have a reaction to you?"

Becker grinned. "That would be for you to say."

She turned to him.

"I'll speak for the male point of view," he continued.

"You deal with the female."

You know, you bastard, she thought. You know exactly how women react to you. Her ears were blazing.

"There are no mines on that list," she said.

"I don't think he'll try a mine again," Becker said.

"Why not?"

"He got caught. Five years late, but he still got caught.

Those were early attempts. He's smart, he'll learn from his mistakes, he'll refine his methods. They always do, they keep adjusting until they- find what works best for them."

"Then what?"

"Then they speed up," he said. "When they think they're safe they just keep taking victim after victim."

"What makes you think he's going into caves? Why not anyplace private?

An old warehouse, a house in the country…"

"For one thing, he told me where he was going."

"He told you?"

"in a manner of speaking. He goes where gravity takes him. Down. And he knows the use of ropes. He told me that, too. In some ways going into a cave is just like going down a mountain-plus you need rope work to get back up, if it's steep enough. He'll go for a cave, it's what he needs.

Emotionally."

"He's got an emotional need for caves?"

"They have fantasies, that's their problem. They have fantasies so strong that they are compelled to enact them.

And fantasies.have a context, an ambience, if I can say that-they don't take place on Main Street at noon, they exist in a specific environment which is nearly as important as what he does. Your fantasies take place somewhere, don't they?"

"Mine?"

"You do have fantasies, don't you, Haddad?"

"No."

"I see."

"I don't." Unless you count thinking about older FBI agents walking in on me when I'm naked, things like that, she thought.

"Okay. But a lot of us do. And where they happen matters."

"Do you mean restraints, blindfolds, that kind of thing?" Pegeen asked after a pause, knowing she ought to let the subject drop but unable to let it go.

"What?"

"I don't have that kind of fantasy."

"Okay," Becker said.

"Do you?"

"What?"

"Never mind." Pegeen was blushing again.

"No."

"Oh."

Becker watched her drive, Pegeen kept her eyes studiously on the road.

"My fantasies are about people," he said finally. "Not equipment."

"I see," she said. "That's normal. Probably."

"I don't know about normal. It's common. I think most of us fantasize about different partners."

Pegeen nodded and thrust her lower lip forward as if pondering the subject.

"Movie stars, people like that?" she asked.

'No, just people. Women I meet, women I know."

Pegeen nodded again in a way that she hoped appeared noncommittal.

"Uh-huh."

"Not you, though," he said.

"Not me?"

"You don't fantasize like that?" he said.

Pegeen felt herself in such a turmoil she didn't trust herself to speak.

She had thought at first that he meant he didn't fantasize about her, and her stomach had seemed to fall away, and then she realized her mistake and was crushed by a sense of her own foolishness. He hadn't meant her, he wasn't thinking about her, the intensity of her awareness of him wasn't even communicating itself across the width of the front seat.

When she trusted herself to breathe again, she steered the conversation back to business and vowed to herself to keep it there.

"What makes you think Swann is even around here?"

"They always come home, in a general sense. If an escaped come from New York ever had sense enough to hide out in New Mexico, we'd have a hell of a time finding him, but they seldom do. First place to look is their mother's house. He grew up around here, lived less than thirty miles from here when he committed the assault on his landlady."

"What if he did? What if he took off for Portland?"

"Then we'll have a hell of a time finding him. But they usually don't.

People stick with what they know. He's comfortable here. He knows how people think, how they talk, the way they do things. Swann's in the region somewhere or he's a rarer breed than I think."

"So what do we do now, go check out all these caves?"

"No, we wait for Swann to tell us which ones to check.

"How does he do that?"

"By his choice of victim. When he takes her, he's going to go to ground pretty close by. He did that with both the girls in the coal mine; he'll do it again. You don't want to have to travel very far with a victim in any event, it's much too dangerous."

"How will we know when he's got a victim, or if he does?"

"Oh, there's no 'if' He'll take someone soon if he hasn't already, and I'm willing to bet he already has. He was in prison for three years, thinking of little else. He'll take someone fast. He'll need to before he bursts. When he does, we'll get a missing persons report. That's Swann's flaw, you know. He's not like most of them, who specialize in drifters, street urchins, migrant workers, prostitutes, people nobody would miss for a long time.

He's so confident of where he takes them, so sure that he won't — be found there, that he doesn't care if there's a search for the victim.

The two girls in the coal mine were connected to solid citizens. A hunt began for them almost immediately. Swann didn't care-he was already underground, doing whatever he does to them and apparently equipped to stay there for a long time. Judging by the amount of melted candle wax and old food tins they found in the mine, I'd say he was down there at least a week."

Pegeen shuddered at the thought of that week for the girls. "The bastard." 'Bastard' hardly does it justice. Our problem is that there's a delay in reporting missing persons. In the case of adults, cops won't even register the report until the person is gone for three days. That means Swann has got that much of a head start whenever he strikes, and my guess is he doesn't need more than an hour or two at the most to cover his tracks."

"So we wait for the missing persons report to come in that meets our profile? There must be something more we can do while we're waiting."

"Sure. We go to a sporting goods store and get what we're going to need."

"Beyond that," Pegeen said.

"I'm open to suggestions," Becker said.

Pegeen carefully assessed his tone to determine if there was anything suggestive in it. Reluctantly, she decided that there was not.

"I'll let you know if I think of anything," she said.

Missing persons reports trickled in with the sluggishness that reflects the degree of importance attached to the matter by most police departments. The simple fact is that most missing persons are not miissing-they have simply chosen to depart without telling anyone.

Husbands and fathers debunk to avoid responsibility; teens and young adults flee school or their parents; employees quit or go on five-day benders; friends prove not to be friendly enough to say goodbye. For every person reported missing who is actually the victim of foul play, there is a full year's worth of reports on people who simply wandered off in this most transient of countries. Police know this, even though the concerned or distraught friends and relatives cannot imagine the missing departing of his or her own steam. The person has, after all, abandoned them, and who could be so fed-up or stressed-out or done-in to want to go to that extreme?

Even though the reports dribbled into the Nashville office slowly, they did so in great quantity. They didn't come quickly, but they kept coming, for this is a nation on the move and Becker had pinpointed a sizable portion of it for his search. The reports were fed into a computer which sorted them according to their conformity to Becker's victim profile.

Becker and Pegeen reviewed the most likely cases themselves, adding human perception and intuition to the process.

"Here's a likely one," she said, lifting one of the printout sheets. She and Becker sat at adjoining desks in the Nashville office, isolated and largely ignored by everyone else in the room.

"Mandy Roesch, eighteen years old, Hazard, Kentucky.

No problems at home, no boyfriend-probably not pregnant then-sang in the church choir, scheduled to start classes at Memphis State in the fall.

Doesn't seem the type to have just taken a hike."

Becker stood at a large map of the Southeastern States that were covered by the Nashville office, atop of which had been placed a clear plastic overlay showing Browne's selection of probable caves.

"She was last seen in Hazard?" he asked.

"Yes. She was supposedly going to choir practice, never showed up."

"Hazard is just a bit too far from either of the closest possible caves.

Mark her as marginal."

Pegeen stared at the map.

"What is it?" he asked when she hesitated.

"It — seems so… hit and miss. This girl sounds exactly like the kind of person he takes. So she's a few miles too far away from one of the caves which we don't know he's going to in the first place. We don't even know that he is going to a cave, much less one of those. We don't know how far away from the cave he's willing to drive with someone. We don't even know he's anywhere on that map. It's not even a needle in a haystack. That assumes you've got all your hay in one place. This is like a needle in a whole field of alfalfa-and we're not sure there is a needle in the first place. We don't know Swann is doing anything."

"Some fun, eh?"

"Do you always work this way?"

"I've had harder cases."

"Harder? How?"

"You're wrong about one thing. We do know there's a needle that we're looking for. At least I know it. Swann is at work, believe me."

"But how do you know that?"

"How do you know a thirsty man will drink?"

"It can't be as simple as that."

Becker looked at her for a moment. She felt herself squirming under his gaze.

"It's not simple," he said at last. "It's very complicated, but it comes out the same way in the end. The thingss he goes through before he acts is actually very prolonged and tortured. I'll explain it to you someday if you really want to know."

"We studied it at the academy," Pegeen said. "I know some thing about it."

Becker smiled ruefully.

Be grateful that you don't. Not the first thing. You're fortunate that you haven't got a clue."

"What a lucky girl," she said.

"Sometime, when you've got about six hours to kill, I'll tell you about it."

How about tonight, she thought, trying to keep her smile from spreading from the back of her throat to her lips.

"Whenever you feel like talking, I'm happy to listen,' she said. She nodded slightly, attempting to convey serious empathy while keeping it all in the framework of business. She wondered how'good she was at it; she certainly felt clumsy and obvious, but maybe not obvious for Becker.

He had seemed mildly annoyed with her since she met him at the airport a few days ago, sometimes downright angry.

"Thanks," he said, turning back to the map, placing no weight of any kind on his thank-you.

"Do you know what really surprises me?" Pegeen asked, trying to keep the conversation going.

He raised his eyebrows slightly, waiting.

"That it works this way," she said. "I mean the whole process. Look at this: we're after a serial killer, one man in the whole country who has the potential to kill dozens of people. We're a part of a huge, professional, highly organized organization, and what does this manhunt consist of? You and me and a computer and a map. Before I entered the Bureau, even during the academy, for that matter, I had this image of the FBI, this massive organization hurling itself into battle all at once. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"I've been in a while," Becker said. "I'm used to it, but go on."

"Well, I don't know, I just always had this notion that if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was after you, you were in trouble, you were in really deep shit."

"We've got good public relations people," Becker said.

"I don't mean that we're not good," she said.

"Sometimes."

"This is not a disloyal statement, you understand. It's just-it's us, isn't it? I mean, I know we can call on agents all over the country if we have to. We can have a lot of people knocking on a lot of doors and we've got all that great scientific stuff, it does amazing things-but really, when you get down to it, this case is just you and me going over a list of names."

"Not quite what you envisioned, is it?"

"No."

"In fact, most of the time it's boring as hell, right?" Becker asked.

"I didn't say that; it's not really boring, it's morepainstaking.". "Tedious, I'd say. But that's the way it works. It's all the nuts and bolts; you've got to sort them by hand. The only intuition comes in knowing what kind of nut you're looking for in the first place."

"At least we know our nut," Pegeen said. "We're lucky in that."

"We know him," Becker said, his attitude suddenly dark. "Know him well.

I don't call that lucky."

By the second day of sifting reports, they had a list of manageable size. Pegeen drove the backroads from one small town to the next while Becker lapsed into darker and darker moods. Now that they were actually in the field, interviewing acquaintances of the missing women, Pegeen thought that Becker was sinking somehow, as if the presence of Swann underground with a victim was creating a special gravity that drew him down deeper and deeper into himself, into some black pit of his inner being.

He was still crisp and alert when interviewing people, using that curious blend of detached efficiency and sudden knowing intimacy that worked so effectively for him, but afterwards, when he was alone in the car again with Pegeen, Becker would slump into the seat and seem to slump in his spirit as well.

On the second day of driving, she asked him if it was her fault.

"What?"

"Are you mad at me about something? Have I done something to annoy you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You haven't realy spoken to me except to grunt in two days. In fact, you've seem pissed off at me ever since you showed up."

"I'm not mad at you, Haddad. Why would I be?"

"I don't know. That's why I'm asking."

"I'm not. You're doing a fine job."

"I haven't done anything yet."

"You're doing it well, though."

"I thought there was something about me that rubbed you the wrong way."

"I'd rather be doing this with you than anyone else I know," Becker said. "Any other agent would be trying to get me to cheer up."

"Fuck you, sorry I asked."

"Would it help if I told you that I'm quiet because I'm thinking?"

"Shouldn't we think together? I might be able to help My brain works sometimes, too."

"I guess it wouldn't help to tell you that, then. The fact is, I'm not thinking. I'm just depressed."

"What about?"

"What's going to happen," he said.

"What's going to happen? What is going to happen?"

Becker scrunched into the passenger seat so far that his knees rested on the dashboard. "We're going to find him," he said.

"How do you know?"

Becker did not answer. He rolled his head to one side and looked at the pine trees moving past the window.

"Are you sure we're going to find him?" Pegeen insisted.

"Yeah."

"Well, that's great, isn't it? That's what we want, isn't it?"

Becker grunted, but she was not certain it was in assent.

"Why does that depress you?"

"Because of what comes after that."

"What?. What comes after that?… What do you mean?"

"Pegeen, I like you," he said, startling her with the use of her first name. "I like you a lot. One of the things I like most about you is your innocence. You'll lose that eventually, but I'll be sorry to see it go."

"Could you be a little more patronizing, do you think?

I've been around a little bit, you know. I just look innocent. It's my goddamned complexion."

"I like your complexion."

"Yeah, I'll bet."

"I do. It makes you look innocent."

"Very funny. Look, Becker, I'm an agent, I'm trained, I have a badge, I have a gun, I'm legally authorized to shoot people. I'm not innocent, I'm not a child. You chose me to come along with you on this assignment; you could have had anyone but you chose me. You didn't do it because of my innocence."

"You haven't figured out why I chose you yet?"

"I have suspicions."

"What do you think?"

"So you can make fun of me, is what it looks like. Tell me what you're talking about."

"Let it go."

"You know what passive-aggressive is, don't you?" she demanded. "It's not very becoming."

"You checked me out, right?" Becker asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I said you were innocent, not dumb. You asked around to find out about me. If not last time, sure as hell this time."

"Okay. I just thought…

"Don't apologize. I would have done the same thing."

"Did you?" she asked.

Becker laughed. "Yeah. I checked you out."

"What did you find out?"

"Not much. You broke up with your boyfriend."

"Somebody told you that? How the hell does anybody know? I didn't tell anybody. Are they spying on me?"

Becker laughed.

"Welcome to the club, kiddo."

"It's hardly the same, and don't call me kiddo, either."

"What's hardly the same?"

"Never mind. I'm just shocked that… who was it, who told you?

Kinnock? He's been trying to get his hand up my skirt since I joined up."

"'You mean there's good reason for people to keep tabs on me but not on you? Because of my history it's all right? But it's not all right for you?"

I didn't mean anything in particular."

"So what did they tell you about me, Haddad? What gory stories did they tell you?"

"Just, you know, it's mostly very complimentary.

Everyone says you're fantastically good at it."

"But what?"

"But nothing. Everyone respects you enormously."

"But I'm what, a bit unstable? A bit crazy? A bit dangerous? Or do, they go further?"

"No."

"Do they tell you why they think I'm so good? Do they say why I seem to have such a knack for finding these psychopaths?" 4 'No. I I "Yes, they do, sure they do. Why wouldn't they, they don't-know nothing about it, what better time to speculate?"

"No, honest..

"Christ, let's not be honest with each other, Haddad.

Let's keep things just the way they are; we're getting along fine… listen, kid, fair warning. Everything they told you is true as far as it goes. If not in specifics, then in spirit. As far as it goes. It's all true… It just doesn't go far enough."

Pegeen did not know what to make of his statement, and she got no further help from him. Becker fell into a silence that remained unbroken until she pulled their car into an empty field where a large tent was being erected.

The Reverend Tommy R. Walker was uncomfortable in the presence of any police authorities, and FBI.agents made him doubly ill-at-ease.

Authorities had plagued Tommy's life. Cops and sheriffs treated him like he was running a damned carnival instead of a respectable healing and revival meeting, and even after he had paid their bribes and followed their laws Tommy felt guilty whenever they were around. The fact that one of the agents was a girl, probably no older than Aural, didn't help matters, either. She was a kind of goofy-looking creature with her funny ears and all that red hair, but kind of attractive, too, in an unusual way. Still, she had flashed a badge at him, and that meant she had authority. Ceding some sort of power to the man was bad enough, but granting it to a woman was something else, something he didn't like at all. Rae had taken enough control over him since Aural left, haranguin him with questions and accusations and using her body like it was some special treat that she would dole out only if he gave her the proper information.

He had become quite dependent on her sexual favors in the past few weeks, he found. The more eager, the more inventive she became, the deeper he fell into her thrall.

He didn't know how, exactly, but he seemed to have slipped into a form of vassalage to her body which had given her emotional and intellectual primacy as well. In ways he could not pin down, and by methods he could not adequately name, Rae had become the boss.

She even took charge now, talking freely with the agents while Tommy hung back warily.

"I reported her missing, yes, I did," Rae said.

Tommy noticed that she spoke primarily to the male agent, addressing him with a level of flirtatiousness he had not seen in her before.

"She was a dear friend," Rae continued. "A very dear friend and I was worried about her."

"Did you have any particular reason to worry?"

Becker asked. "Couldn't she have run off with a boyfriend, for instance?",

"Aural was off men; she didn't want a boyfriend."

"Why was that?" Pegeen asked.

"Bad experiences," Rae said. "You know how they are.

Pegeen nodded, feeling momentarily sisterly. She did indeed know how they were. Awful at the worst of times, and at the best, still difficult.

"Believe me, if she had wanted any boyfriends, she wouldn't have had to look very far," Rae said. Becker and Pegeen both noticed her glance at the Reverend Tommy that didn't quite take place. The Reverend stirred uneasily. "She set her last boyfriend on fire, that's how fed up she was."

"Set him on fire?"

Rae nodded proudly. "Yes, sir, right on fire."

"Wasn't on fire," Tommy said.

"Certainly was," Rae returned sharply.

"Nope. She tried to burn up the bathroom of the trailer and Kershaw was inside it. He never got burned. at all.

She's just telling you cow flop."

"No such a thing." Rae was indignant. "She set that man ablaze, and he deserved it, too."

"First off, no man deserves that," Tommy said, appealing to Becker as a fellow male.

"I've seen a few," Becker said.

Tommy acted as if he didn't hear the contradiction.

"And second, it ain't true."

"Aural told me so her own self," Rae said.

"But Kershaw told me, " Tommy said triumphantly, then quickly realized he had said too much.

Becker and Pegeen noticed the change in the relationship between the other two; it happened as palpably as a fifty-degree drop in temperature. The Bureau always wanted agents to interview subjects separately, but Becker had realized long ago that the guideline was often wrong.

People who knew each other could send signals to keep the other from saying too much, it was true, but just as often they would react to the presence of an agent as if he were an intermediary in a long-running power struggle.

Both would appeal to him to take their side and in the process reveal far more than they might alone. Like a couple before a marriage counselor, each would plead his or her own case in ways never done with the partner.

"So that was Harold Kershaw I heard you talking to outside our trailer,"

Rae said icily.

"What?" Tommy said. Becker thought his guilt was so obvious he might as well have worn a signboard. Pegeen wondered if all men pretended not to hear whenever a woman asked them the question they didn't want to answer, or if it was just every man she had ever known.

"You gave her over to Harold Kershaw?" Rae protested. "Do you know what that shikepoke'll do to her?

How could you do that to that sweet thing?"

"Kershaw ain't got her."

"He might kill her, I can't believe you.

"It ain't Kershaw," Tommy said. "I told you, he ain't got her.

"You know where she is then, don't you? You know how worried I was, why didn't you tell me? You made me go to the police and everything and all the time you knew-"

"Hey, I don't know. I don't know nothing."

"He knows where Aural is," Rae said to Becker.

"Hey!"

"You might's well arrest him," Rae said. She looked at Pegeen, nodding vigorously. "He's as bad as the man who's got her."

"Rae, Rae, calm down here…"

"Take him to the station and beat him with your nightsticks@r I'll do it myself"

"Hey! Rae. Honey. Sugar, what are you talking about?" He turned to the agents, appealing for sympathy.

"I don't know where the girl is. I didn't snatch her. Kershaw didn't snatch her. It was this little weasel. Kershaw found him and kicked the shit out of him, but Kershaw didn't take Aural, he never got close enough to her, she ran right into this weasel's car, like he was waiting for her. I think she was planning on slipping out on us anyway, Rae, honest to God, she was going away with this little guy, I'm sure of it."

Pegeen pulled a photograph from her purse.

"Was it this man?"

Tommy tried to square the grim-looking still-life of the mug shot with the face of the little man lying on the sidewalk, bleeding, cowering behind his upraised arm.

"Could be, maybe. Sure."

Becker slid an arm around Tommy's shoulders and turned him away from the women. Tommy felt a heat, a sudden urgency in the agent that frightened him. It had not been there before, but seemed to burst into combustion with the showing of the photograph. Tommy knew he was no longer being politely questioned-things had changed with the sudden bewildering fright of a nightmare. Becker smiled at him, but a fire was flashing in his eyes. For a second Tommy remembered the desperate need of the man who had grabbed him in the healing meeting, trying to confess his sins, the desire so strong that it read like a barely sheathed fury. Like something huge and hungry spotting its prey, immediately transformed into a carnivorous concentration so strong that it must act like a form of gravitational attraction, pulling the victim towards it.

Tommy realized he would tell this FBI agent everything he wanted to know; he would be afraid not to. He knew that the agent was not after him personally, but he sensed a hunger so great that he might make a mouthful of anything close. Kershaw had frightened him with his potential for violence, but this man, with a single move, terrified him.

"Let's you and me talk, Reverend," Becker said.

"You bet," said the Reverend, turning his head to look back longingly at Rae. He realized with a sinking feeling that he would get no help from her.

Pegeen had never seen Becker excited and she realized he had become a different person. Although he always gave the impression of contained strength, he now seemed as if the strength were breaking its bonds and were within seconds of bursting forth. Through no physical change that she could detect, he now seemed to be coiled and ready to strike.

He spread the charts on the hood of the car at the edge of the field where the revival tent now stood, erected and ready for miracles. He cast a nervous eye at the sky, where the sun was slipping quickly below the trees, then jabbed his finger at a mark on Browne's chart.

"Here, it's got to be here," he said. His finger pointed to a cave called Devil's Den that looked on the map like an old-fashioned handweight, two ball-shaped caverns connected by a long tunnel.

"Why?"

"It's the closest. He could have had her there in twenty minutes. The others are at least forty-five-minute drives from where he took her.

That one is almost an hour away." His finger danced over the map. Becker was as familiar with its surface as if the marks were dots of Braille and he was blind.

He swept the map off the hood and replaced it with a sheaf of smaller charts, thumbing quickly through them until he found the one he wanted.

"He was waiting for her, right? Maybe he'd even made an arrangement to meet her. The Reverend said she ran right into his car. Maybe that's how he gets them; maybe they go willing at first. I don't know. The point is, he didn't just swoop down and grab her on impulse. He didn't snatch her and run for cover as an afterthought.

He had time to plan it, so he would be heading here."

The new chart was much smaller in scale and showed the entrance to the cave in relation to the surrounding area. Browne had gone to considerable pains to locate the entrance accurately, which meant that it must be difficult to reach and hard to locate without the map. Becker glanced at the sky once more, angrily, as if the sun were to blame for setting. Pegeen felt as if he were trying to will the sun back up into the sky.

"Son of a bitch," he said. "It will be dark by the time we get there.

We'll have to wait till morning."

"We have flashlights," Pegeen said.

"Look at the terrain. We'd have to be lucky to find it in the dark, and if we go tromping around flashing lights, and he's in any position to see us, he can slip out undetected. If we go now we're inviting him to get away."

"I was thinking about the woman," Pegeen said. "Can she make it through another night?"

Becker looked at her blankly for a moment. "She'll have to make it for another eight hours."

"If we get there tonight, it might save her life."

"If we fuck it up and he gets away, he's going to take a lot more lives, and he'll be a lot more careful next time.

"This woman, this Aural McKesson, is the only life I'm thinking about now. She's the one in danger. God knows what he's doing to her."

Becker swept up his maps and returned to the car.

"We'll find out soon enough what he's doing to her," he said.

"Soon enough for who? How do we know it's going to be soon enough for her?"

Becker tossed the maps into the backseat and grabbed Pegeen's elbow, yanking her around to face him. The muscles in his jaw clenched and unclenched and his eyes were raging.

"Do you think I don't want him right now?"

He gripped her arm until she nodded agreement.

"Yes," she said. "I know you do."

"We'll wait," he said, releasing her.

Pegeen put her hands on the steering wheel, borrowin time against her agitation. It was the first time she had been afraid of him. Not that she thought he would harm her. But she realized that he was going to harm someone.

"All the stories about me are true," he had said. they just don't go far enough." Having looked into his blazing eyes, she began to believe him.

"Where to?" she asked, starting the car.

"Find us a motel," he said.

"Shall I call Nashville for more agents?"

"What for?"

"For help."

"You need help, Haddad? What do you need help with, me?"

"No, with Swann, of course."

"How many men do you plan to send down into that cave? We don't know if there's room for us, yet."

"In case."

"In case of what?"

"In case he's not there, in case he went to one of the other caves, in case he didn't go there at all."

"He's in there," Becker said.

"How do you know that?"

Becker did not bother to respond.

"He's not just yours," she said.

Becker glared at her.

"He isn't?"

"I'm thinking about the woman," she said. She could feel his eyes on her, but she kept her own gaze fixed on the road. Looking directly at him made her more uncomfortable than ever. She was glad it was getting dark so she could avoid his eyes more easily; it seemed to her they had taken on a feral character, as if something wild were hidden within the man and had decided to come out of hiding at last.

"Good. Do that. I'm thinking about him."

"He's not our only concern," she said. They had reached the edge of one of the little towns that dotted the Tennessee-Virginia region.

"He's mine," Becker said. "She's yours. That about covers it, doesn't it? We've got them both taken care of"

"I think I should call Nashville," she insisted.

"No," he said flatly.

After a pause she asked, "Is that an order?"

"Pull in there," he said, pointing at a motel sign that had just come on in the gathering gloom.

When they got out of the car and he put his hand on her arm, it was all Pegeen could do to manage not to push it angrily away.

"Haddad," he said, his voice now soft and calming, "I know what you want. In most cases you'd be right.

But we don't need help. And they don't want to send it.

Not now, not when we've found him."

She looked at him, puzzled.

"Come on, you get it," he said. "That's why they sent me. II He walked into the motel office, leaving Pegeen to interpret his remark.

The only translation she could come up with made her shiver.

She was aware of a presence in the darkness outside her door as she stood in front of the mirror. Pegeen had showered as soon as they checked into the motel, trying to let the hot water wash off the feeling of apprehension that clung to her. Things were not right, the whole inexorable flow of events had shifted in its course and was now heading in a direction she knew was wrong, but she felt powerless to deflect it.

Becker was suddenly a different man and she realized that he was guiding the flow, he was sitting astride the events now, like a man riding an avalanche, looking to all appearances as if he were controlling it.

Perhaps he had been all along and she had been so busy looking at him that she had not noticed the ground moving underneath her feet. At one point she had thought this was a Bureau investigation, a search for a felony suspect being assisted somewhat eccentrically by Becker, true, but by her as well, plus the power of the FBI, the speed of computers, the cooperation of countless police, and as with all searches, it took its own course according to leads and clues and circumstance. Now she thought it had been a one-man activity all along, and not a search but a stalk. She had not been assisting, she had been manipulated, just as the whole massive grid of Bureau procedures had been used to provide Becker with what he wanted. Had she been wrong about everything else, too? she wondered. Those qualities of his that had so fascinated her, his strange moodiness, the sense of great vulnerability that hid beneath the facade of strength like a little boy in a suit of armor, the languid, restrained sexuality that seemed to course from his eyes, his hands. Was she mistaken about all of it? One of the things that had so appealed to her was the impression that everything about Becker was under a tight but temporary control like a coiled spring held in check by a hair trigger that would release explosively if she could just find the right spot to touch. She could unleash all that power and passion, she had thought. Stupidly. Stupidly. Now she feared that he was about to blow up in her face.

She looked at herself in the mirror, a towel wrapped around her head.

She wore the boxer shorts and tank top she normally slept in, and spots of moisture from the shower had darkened areas of the tank top. Her skin seemed even pinker than usual because of the heat of the water and Pegeen cursed her luck for having inherited none of the olive tone of the original Haddad.

She glanced again at the door with the sense that something was outside.

She had heard nothing that she was aware of, but still there was the feeling of something waiting there, something large and dangerous. It frightened her first, and then it angered her. Fuck this, she thought, I'm a special agent of the FBI, I'm not supposed to be afraid of unknown creatures in the dark. She pulled her pistol from its holster atop the dresser and opened the door.

Becker stood several feet away on the concrete porch, leaning against a wooden column, his arms folded across his chest. He was staring at her door, now at her.

"Don't shoot," he said laconically, not moving.

Pegeen moved the gun behind her back, feeling foolish.

"What are you doing?" she demanded.

"Waiting."

"What for?"

Becker said nothing, moved nothing. Even slouching against the column, even in the languid pose of a drugstore cowboy, he looked coiled and ready to strike. Pegeen could make out his features only dimly in the light shining from her window, but she thought he was smiling.

It's creepy, she thought. What the hell is he up to now?

What is he doing, what am I supposed to make of it?

"How long have you been standing there?" she asked.

He still didn't answer and she could feel his eyes boring into her. She was aware suddenly of what she was wearing, of how her heavy breasts would be showing dark against the tank top, of how her legs would look, too pink and speckled by the heat. The anger of a moment before returned, only now it was directed at him. To hell with how I look, she thought. I'm tired of caring, I'm tired of trying to guess what he's thinking and how I should react to it, I'm tired of the whole damned game, the elaborate tease, for that is what she now realized it had been, his holding back, never saying quite enough to be clear but just enough to keep her guessing, or hoping; that was the problem, the meaner he got to her, the more he withheld from her, the more she trailed hopelessly after him. Classic, she thought. Classic dim-witted behavior, chasing someone inaccessible, it was no, better than that, however she had tried to dress it up with imagination. Well,lfuck it, fuck the game, fuck him.

"What?" he said.

"What what?"

"You should see your face. You look all worked up about something."

Damn his eyes, too, she thought. He never missed anything.

"I'm fine," she said.

"You usually come to the door with a gun in your hand?"

"When I feel like it. Did you want something? Or are you just hanging around outside my door for fun?"

She knew for certain that he was smiling now. He turned his head slightly to indicate the door of the adjoining room.

"I thought I was outside my door."

Wrong again, Pegeen thought, but now she was too angry to care. Let him have another victory, let her make a fool of herself, it didn't matter anyway.

Pegeen closed the door and rammed the gun back into its holster. She whipped the towel off her head and glared at her reflection. Sure enough, her ears were fiery red.

Well, fuck them, too, she thought.

She flounced onto the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying with all her might to think of something other than Becker. He was an asshole, anyway, and not worthy of her time. He was probably a psycho of some kind-she should have paid attention to the warnings given to her by the agents in the office. Tomorrow she would have to go with him and do God-knew-what under the guise of law enforcement. Think about the woman, Aural McKesson, she told herself.

Pegeen glanced at the clock on the radio-alarm beside her bed. Think about the woman for the next five minutes, she demanded of herself.

Think about how you can help her, it's what you're here for, it's why you joined the Bureau. If Becker is right about the way all of this is falling down, you should get to her by tomorrow. If Becker is right, and he seems so confident that he is… shit, she was thinking of Becker.

She glanced at the clock again, didn't notice what time it said, and crossed to the door. If he's still slouching against that column, I'll fuck him, she thought, but if he's not there, if he's gone into his room, I'll go to bed and never think of him again.

He was not leaning against the column, he was standing right outside her door, looking as if he were prepared to eat his way through it if necessary.

Those eyes, Christ those eyes, she thought. They were blazing at her, into her, burning through her.

She placed her hand on his face and he jerked back slightly as if surprised by the contact. As she ran her fingers from his cheek to the side of his head he shivered like an animal but made no move towards her. It was like stroking the flank of a tiger or a wolf, something wild and dangerous and unaccustomed to human touch, something that tolerated her, uncertain whether to flee, bite, or give itself over to the pleasure.

She kept her gaze on her hand, watching the fingers as they moved across his flesh, afraid to look directly at him.

Afraid to look into those eyes again for fear they might devour her.

When she touched the rim of his ear he jerked again, and gasped. He was quivering all over, his whole body trembling with the effort to hold still.

"Shhh," she said, not realizing what she was saying.

It was a sound she would have made to calm an animal.

She ran her hand along his shoulder, feeling the muscles tense under her touch, then slowly trailed her fingers down his arm. She watched her fingers work, saw his bare skin tighten and spring into gooseflesh. When she reached his hand, she caressed the back of his fingers first, seeing him shiver once more, then gently intertwined her fingers with his. Only then, with their joined hands forming a fist, did she look at his face again.

God, the intensity of his eyes. So deep and dark, a tumultuous brown sea of emotion with his whole soul riding on it, begging her, beseeching her, but unable to speak, or unheard over the tumultuous roar of his passions.

If he didn't touch her now, if he didn't respond, she thought he would surely burst, and so would she. Rising up on her toes, she reached for his mouth with hers, letting her eyelids slide down, searching for him blindly. His lips grazed hers and she heard him make a sound, a whimper, then he pulled his head back.

She looked at him again and saw something change as surely as if something had clicked behind his eyes. Where before he had been all yearning, frightened, vulnerable desire, he was now power. He had taken control of himself. A tiny smile tugged at his lips, knowing, almost mocking.

He touched her neck first and she could feel the sensation ripple through her entire body, tugging at her loins.

I'm lost, I may be lost, she thought.

Becker lifted her, carried her into the room, and pressed her against the door. She felt his whole body tremble as he kissed her.

It was all so frantic, so kaleidoscopic in its variety that at times Pegeen was not sure where she was as they moved from the door towards the bed with the haphazard logic of a pinball threatening to burst from the confines of the machine. At one point he sat her on the dresser, her legs locked around him, and at another he was behind her, touching her everywhere with hands of fire. He turned her, twisted her, lifted her, held her against the wall, all the while seeking her mouth, his hands seeming to fly over her and torment her with touches that were never long enough. They stumbled once as she was undressing him, Becker tumbling to the floor, pulling her down with him. Pegeen started to laugh at their desperate need, but then he was atop her, pinning her down at first, then rolling so she was atop him, then rolling again.

He seemed beyond himself, so out-of-control that he did not even know what he wanted from her beyond endless contact, as if he could not get enough of touching her, of kissing her, of holding her, and yet as if each touch and each position deprived him of another and so he went on and on, clutching and shifting with ceaseless abandon, and everything he did felt right and wonderful to Pegeen, so right and exciting that she was close to losing herself along with him.

She panted and moaned and found herself shaking her head from side to side as if she were being tortured, but it was a torture that she embraced and demanded and she cried out, uncertain what she was saying, and he responded, growling something low in his throat as his mouth attacked her face, her lips, her neck, her breasts.

They were nude at last and on the bed and her face was wet with his kisses and her own saliva and her breasts wailed with the pleasure of his mouth and hands and tongue and everything he did and every move he made seemed to gather in her loins and pull at her as if all the nerves in her body were gathered there and screaming and screaming for more, for release.

Still he didn't enter her but attacked her in a frenzy of hands and mouth, as if he would devour her before he took her. His passion was like a rage and Pegeen was frightened of it as much as she was excited by it. She didn't know what he wanted, what she could give him, and when she tried with her own mouth and hands to give him release he would move away from her, reposition himself and tear at her with pleasure again, too distracted, too delirious to seek relief.

At first Pegeen was too overwhelmed to let herself go completely; she held her innermost self in reserve while joining in his frenzy with;her senses, taking all the pleasure he had to give her while protecting her emotions.

She wasn't sure that all of this was for her, that she could have inspired so much heat and sexual fury, that he even knew who he had in his arms and under his tongue, it seemed beyond sex somehow, as if Becker were tormented by a devil who might express himself in sex but could never be fully found there. She did not want to give herself completely to a man who might not even know who he was with and she withheld as long as she could, but finally it was all too much for her, much, much too much and she came to his hand and she came to his mouth and it seemed that she came to his breath alone, screaming oW crying out his name and finally cursing and flailing as if her nerves and senses had taken control of her completely and would never stop and never let her go. And even at the height of her pleasure she was frightened because she had let herself go and had given herself over to him completely and she knew she was lost, lost and hopelessly gone from safety, in his grip and under his power.

Finally there was nothing for her but to have him and she demanded it, whispering at first that she wanted him, then calling out and pulling him onto her and into her and wrapping her legs to lock him in place.

Every thrust made her cry out and seemed to reverberate from her loins to her heart and she heard herself bellowing at him to continue, to do more and more and more and she said he was driving her crazy and she swore at him and cursed him with language of the gutter that astounded her as she heard it, but it was as if someone else were yelling, someone else were writhing on the bed and tearing at his back, someone who had lost her mind completely.

He seemed never to stop, never to tire, and Pegeen thought her body was on fire with sensation and wave after thrilling wave struck her and lifted her and bucketed her and she thought she would surely die and didn't care and finally, finally, with a growl growing low in his throat then building to a final burst that was a gasp as if his heart had ruptured, he shuddered to an end and at that very moment Pegeen was certain she felt everything he was feeling, doubling her own incredible sensation until it was simply too much to bear and she died.

Pegeen came to her senses astounded at herself, but far, far past embarrassment. She had never fainted in her life, but then she had never experienced anything like that in her life either. She did not know how long she had been passed out, or if he had noticed. In fact, she was still not convinced that he knew who she was; his need had seemed so great it was elemental rather than personal, but she had known who he was and even as she lay there, hoping he wouldn't speak for fear he might say the wrong thing, she knew she was in love with him.

His body was heavy upon her, his head still facedown next to her neck, where he had collapsed. Pegeen lay quietly, trying to distinguish his heartbeat from her own, his breathing from hers. She realized that all the lights were, on in the room and it surprised her because it had seemed that their lovemaking had taken place in the dark, all sensation and with nothing visual at all.

What happens now? she wondered, but before she could think any further she forced herself to stop. Whatever would happen, it would be no good, she knew that much without examining the problem, and there was no point in tormenting herself with it yet. There would be plenty and plenty of time for recrimination and sorrow.

When she touched him he moved, startled, as if she had awakened him, although she knew from his breath that he wasn't asleep. He jumped when touched without warning, she had noticed, even in the most casual of circumstances.

It seemed a puzzling trait in a man who was so aware of his surroundings and circumstances. Could a human touch be such a surprise to a man who seemed surprised by nothing?

When she ran her palm down his back she felt the enormous welts she had put there with her fingernails. She had never done that before, either, never been so heedless of her partner that she inflicted pain or damage.

All of her previous sexual encounters had been polite, she realized.

Which was one of the ways in which they had been inadequate. One of many. After three years with her last boyfriend, it had become so polite as to be downright formal.

Taking her touch for a signal, Becker withdrew and Pegeen realized with amazement that he was still hard.

"Are you all right?" she asked, finding it impossible to think that he wasn't satisfied.

Becker was amused. "It stays that way sometimes," he said, holding himself over her on his hands and knees.

"How long?"

He laughed. "I've never timed it."

He fell back onto the bed on his back, close to Pegeen but no longer touching her. To maintain contact, she put her arm across him, placed her cheek on his chest.

They lay in silence while all the things she might say raced through Pegeen's mind and she edited them and rejected them one after the other.

What she wanted to say was simple enough, she wanted to tell him that she loved him and she knew he didn't love her but that was all right, at least for the moment, because she was swamped with what she was feeling and didn't need to know how he felt, not for this second, at least, maybe longer, maybe for hours, maybe a day. She doubted it could be a day. But for just right now she loved him completely and that was more than enough and she yearned to tell him, just that, she was bursting with the need to tell him that. I don't want to frighten you, she rehearsed silently, and you don't need to respond, but I just want to say that I love you.

You don't have to answer, just know it and accept it, it's a gift I want to give you with no strings attached. And that wasn't entirely true, either, she realized, so she rejected that version because there were strings, there were hundreds of strings attached. Besides, she already realized that if he didn't say he loved her, too, it would break her heart. So much for the selfless part, she thought. It hadn't lasted very long. She amended what she wanted to say: I love you and want desperately for you to love me, too, but if you don't, I still love you anyway. But that sounded hopelessly wimpy, as if she were just asking to be taken advantage of, so she rejected that, too. Just say I love you, she thought, and the hell with the qualifiers, and let him respond how he will. But she didn't want to lose control over his response completely, so she didn't say anything even though her tongue was on fire with the need to say it.

Becker spoke first, finally breaking the silence.

"Did you know that chimpanzees eat flesh?" Becker said.

Pegeen couldn't believe the question.

"When they get the chance, chimpanzees in the wild will catch monkeys and tear them apart and eat them," he said. "We think of them as peaceful vegetarians, living off fruit, but they're carnivores if they have the opportunity."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I was just thinking about it," he said.

"Oh."

Bite your tongue, she said to herself. Bite it off and swallow it before you say anything stupid. She stiffened and rolled away from him, but to her surprise he rolled with her so that he was on top of her again.

She wanted to push him off but he held her arms pinned against the bed with his weight pushing down.

"I had to stop thinking about you," he said. "It was driving me crazy."

He kissed her and this time where he had been rough and frantic before he was now gentle and tender. His lips seemed to melt against hers, and then to softly meld into them. When his fingers touched her body they were as soft as his lips, but no longer rudely exploring, now they moved with practiced care, bringing her to him this time with infinite patience.

Pegeen was amazed that she could respond so fully again; she had thought she had given everything she had to give before; but he found new reserves within her and new recesses where she had not known that so much of her lived. She knew'from the softness of his touch, the tender patience with which he wooed her that he loved her, too. When he wanted her to, she exploded, and then again and again until she made him stop because it was all too exquisite to bear anymore.

When she had rested he brought her to a soaring peak again. He has but to think of me, she said to herself. He doesn't even need to touch me an more, just will it to be y so and I am helpless.

He held her the whole night through, never letting her out of his arms-not that she ever wanted to leave them clinging to her even when she was out of control and heaving insensibly. In the middle of the night she realized that he could not be sated. The fault did not lie with her, because she exhausted him as thoroughly he did her; he could not be satisfied by sex, because sex was not what he craved. He had an appetite for something else and sex was just an available substitute.

An hour before sunrise he released her at last and they rose and dressed and walked to the car in the crepuscular light of the foredawn. Pegeen felt so weak and tired she was surprised that she could even walk, but Becker was as tense as he had been the night before, every muscle seeming to quiver in anticipation. When they reached the spot on the map, he fairly leaped from the car and started off cross-country. Pegeen knew at last what his real appetite was for.

Aural had begun to believe she was going to die. She had fought him every moment since her abduction, battling him with her will, refusing to give in to her fear or to submit to his power, but she had not slept for two days now, the pain was constant, and worse than the pain was her loss of spirit. It was not total, it came in bouts of despair that would leave her wrung-out and hopeless, making it all the more difficult to rouse herself to withstand Swann's next ordeal. She could still rise up to defy him with her wit and courage, but the episodes of despondency were growing more frequent, lasting longer, and when she rose out of them, she did not rise as high.

She was losing her battle; it was no comfort that Swann' seemed to be losing his as well. He seldom went more than an hour or two before succumbing to the torment in his head and eye, clasping his hands over his face and keening. Aural knew it was ironic that the damage had been done to her torturer by the unlamented Harold Kershaw, but she was beyond being buoyed by irony. She hoped that Swann would drop dead, that his head would burst and his brains spill out on the cavern floor, but until he did, his bouts of suffering did nothing for her save offer her a brief respite from his tortures. The rests were never long enough for her to recover, and after each session more of her legs were covered with burns. He would soon start on her trunk, and Aural did not see how she could survive it when he got to her breasts.

She lay awake now, unable to find a position that offered her any relief from the pain. The bravura that had prompted her to rouse him from his sleep and rush back to the torture was gone now. When he moaned in his slumber, she wished him nightmares that would torment him as much as he tormented her, but she let him sleep.

Her resistance would be the strongest when he woke up. She could still taunt and defy him through breakfast, still make him believe that he had not broken her-but the mask would slip now when the day's activities began.

Only seldom could she rouse herself to defiance when he worked on her now; it took all of her concentration just to keep from pleading with him. She sensed that would be the end of her, when her spirit broke so completely that she begged him to stop would be the moment when he would triumph. She was still strong enough to deny him that, but she didn't know for how much longer. And in the end, would it make any difference if she went out cursing him or thanking him as he had predicted? It still made a difference to her now, but would it by the end?

She was beginning to doubt it.

She felt his eyes on her before he stirred and lit the candle. He would do that, lie there for a time, listening to her breathe, trying to gauge something about her, she did not know what. Or maybe he was just working himself up, savoring the pleasures of the day before they began.

This morning he was bright and cheerful. It ' was the fifth day. The fuel for the lantern was gone; they burned only candles now.

"I slept really well," he said. He was opening.a can of beans.

"Me, too," said Aural. "Slept like a log."

"Did you really? They usually have trouble sleeping."

It always troubled her when he talked about the others.

There was no comfort in thinking that she was one of many. He had told her that they usually lasted six or seven days; she was on her fifth.

Judging by his cigarette supply, which Aural kept close track of, he didn't expect to be down here much beyond that. One way or another, he'll be gone before long, she thought. He certainly wasn't rationing the food or water; he planned to be out of here.

Swann was feeling chatty. "I'm glad you're well rested," he said. "Today is normally a Very tough day, they usually start running out of strength about now, but if you're feeling good, that's wonderful news. We'll be able to work even harder that way."

"You know what would make it even more fun?" Aural asked. He unsnapped her cuffs, repositioning her hands in front of her so that she could eat. "How about if we switch places for a while? This is getting kind of boring this way. I think I'll set you on fire today, and then when it's your turn again, you'll be even better at it because you'll know more about it."

He looked at her for a moment as if considering her proposal.

"You're not as pretty as you were," he said at last.

"How unkind." Some beans dribbled off her chin. She had no appetite and no taste for the food, but she forced herself to eat. It would keep her strength up and she knew it would delight him to see her falling. "This is not my best light. You, on the other hand, get more handsome every day."

"Thank you. My eye didn't bother me at all last night."

"There's good news."

"I think it's healed. Praise be to Jesus."

"Jesus loves a sinner," she said.

"Amen."

More beans dribbled off her chin and fell onto her legs, which made her wince in pain. She did not seem to be able to control the plastic fork enough to make it all the way from plate to mouth.

"I don't want to see that," he said, annoyed. "Why do you think I leave your face to last? I want you to look good "

He leaned towards her to wipe at her chin, and Aural stabbed at him with her fork, aiming for his eye. The fork missed and struck him harmlessly in the cheek, but the steel of the handcuffs hit the target. It was a reflex action, totally unpremeditated, and she was unable to follow up her advantage because she was as shocked as he was.

Swann recoiled, clutching his eye, holding up his other hand to fend off further blows. By the time Aural thought to strike again he had already scrambled out of her reach and was on his feet.

"You dirty bitch," he moaned.

Aural looked at the remnant of the plastic fork, which had snapped off in her hand. A tiny trail of blood was seeping down his cheek from where the fork had penetrated the skin, and Aural thought that was the wound which had hurt him. She thought of hitting him again while he was disoriented, but she realized there was no chance as long as he was on his feet and she was shackled.

She would have had to hop after him; he could knock her over with the slightest shove.

"You son of a bitch, you dirty fucker," Swann was saying. "You hurt me."

"Oh, I hope so."

"You really hurt me," he said. He kept backing away from her as if he expected her to leap up and renew the attack.

"It was only a fork," she said. "Don't be such a whiner."

"Oh, Jesus," he said, and he rocked back and forth, holding his head.

"JESUS." He screamed in pain, lashing his head from side to side, then collapsed abruptly onto the cavern floor.

Aural started to drag herself towards him, moving backwards with her weight on her heels and hands to keep her blistered legs off the ground.

If she could only get to him while he was passed out, if she could get the key to her chains, she didn't need much of a head start, just give her a minute and he'd never catch her…

Swann groaned and rose to his knees. Aural froze, hoping he would be too distracted by his pain to notice how close she was but he looked at her, snarling.

"Stay away. Stay away."

He lurched to his feet, swaying, and backed away from her again. To her astonishment he held a large chef's knife in his hand. He must have had it concealed on him all the time, she realized, or else it was tucked away in the golf sack and she had not seen it. Whatever the source, he had it now. The long blade glinted brightly in the light.

Aural moved slowly back the way she came, heading toward her boots.

Swann positioned himself with his back against the fat cone base of a stalagmite and sat down, facing Aural across twenty yards of space. He had already shifted his focus away from her, thinking now only of his own pain. elp me, Jesus," he said, clasping both hands to his head and rocking slightly. "Help me, sweet Jesus." The knife lay in his lap.

Aural reached her boots and settled back so that her feet were just touching them. She knew her own knife was still in its crevice but had to resist the urge to touch it to reassure herself. It was vital not to do anything too soon. She had to do it absolutely right this time, she told herself She would not get another chance. The existence of his weapon changed it all.

As Swann moaned and cried out in his pain, Aural leaned her back against the stone and rested. And thought.

Sunrise was still minutes away when Becker led them by flashlight to a ridge that folded back on itself, forming a crease in the landscape.

They were on a steep hillside among the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains, less than twenty miles from where the Cumberland gap pierced the Appalachian massif, tucked into the corner where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee met. Two hundred and fifty miles to the east the underground skein of holes and tubes and tunnels that leached its way under the mountains erupted into one of its more spectacular orifices, the Great Mammoth Cave. Less than fifty yards from where they stood was another opening to the subteranean honeycomb, but Becker knew he had no real hope of finding it in the dark. He was as close as Browne's map could take him.

The land surrounding them was scruffy second-growth forest that had reasserted itself among the rocks-without great enthusiasm-after the original stand had been cut and carted and dragged down the mountain to form the fledgling 19th century settlements in the valley below.

The hillside was too steep and stony to farm, the area not yet sufficiently upscale to serve as building sites for overpriced chalets.

It was a form of wasteland, belonging to an absentee owner, used occasionally by boys hunting for squirrels. If the entrance to the cave had ever been marked, the marker was too obscure to find in the dark.

Light, however, was only minutes away and Becker would be ready for it.

Pegeen regarded him as he squatted just below the crease in the hillside, too agitated to even sit. He reminded her of a cat waiting outside a mouse hole, ready to pounce.

"What now?" she asked.