Kiss the Bees

8

As the two men led the woman back toward the village, many of the Little People went away, but there was always a swarm of bees or wasps to guard the woman. On the fourth day of the journey, the woman pointed to the sky and began to dig holes in the ground. And the bees were very excited. They sang, "Rain, rain, rain!"

In two more steps ofTash — the Sun-in what theMil-gahn would call hours, the clouds appeared, and the rains came. The two men filled their water baskets and were glad. But the happiest of all wasJeweth — the Earth.

When the rain was over, the two men wanted to continue on, but the woman would not go. So the two men left the woman some pinole and went back to their own people. After a time the Indians returned to their own country. When they came to the place where the two men had left the strange woman, they found many houses. Thiskihhim — this village-had been built by people from the south. They said they had come to be near the great Medicine Woman of theTohono O'othham. Gohhim O'othham — Old Limping Man-was curious and asked where this Medicine Woman lived. The people of the village took him to a house made of sticks of ocotillo and covered with mud. There were two rooms in this house. The inside room was dark with an odd noise in it-a strange kind of buzzing.

WhenKulani O'oks — Medicine Woman-came out, Old Limping Man saw it was the same woman whom the Little People had saved. And so this great Medicine Woman, whose name wasMualig Siakam — Forever Spinning-told Old Limping Man how she had been among strangers in the south. When she had returned alone to join her own people, theTohono O'othham, she found her home village deserted. All the Desert People were gone. There was no water. The animals had gone too, and so had all the birds.

And so this woman, who had been left alone in the burning desert, sent up a prayer for help.Pa-nahl — the Bees-were the first to come. The Bees sent for help and broughtWihpsh — the Wasps. Then cameMumuwali — the Flies,Komikam — the Beetles, andTotoni — the Ants. They all came to help her, all the Little People who had not yet left the burning desert.

The woman said the Little People had told her to go to sleep and they would watch over her. That was all she knew.

As the endless questions droned on, Diana was more than slightly bored. Megan, her publicist in New York, had given her such glowing advance notices on Monty Lazarus that Diana had expected him to be someone who would come up with an original take on the standard author interview. Then, just when she was about to decide the whole thing was destined to be a flop, Monty surprised her.

Sitting back in his chair, studying her over his glasses and under steepled fingers, he finally asked one of the questions she had been waiting and wanting to answer.

"Tell me," he said. "After all this time, what made you finally decide to write this book?"

"I wanted answers," she said. "And some closure."

"After almost twenty years?"

"It's twenty-one now. It was seventeen when I started. That's the thing about being a victim of violent crime. I don't think you ever get over it, not completely. If you let your guard down, the memories are always there, just under the surface, waiting to come flooding back and zing you when you least expect them. I thought that by facing Andrew Carlisle down, by once and for all confronting everything he did to me, that I could put it in the past. I thought that maybe I'd be able to finally reach the other side of the nightmare and gain some perspective."

"Did it work?"

"I don't know. The jury's still out. I still dream about him sometimes."

"About the rape itself? We could talk about that if you like."

After all the innocuous questions that had gone before, that one rocked her. It meant that Monty Lazarus had read Shadow of Death after all. Diana felt blood warming her cheeks.

"I've talked about the rape all I'm going to-in the book itself. Megan was supposed to tell you that subject was off limits. Not only that, if you've already read the book, why did you ask me all those other questions?" she asked. "You must have known the answers to most of that stuff."

Monty Lazarus smiled. His eyes were very blue-a startlingly intense sky blue that was almost the color of Garrison Ladd's. Almost the color of Davy's.

"When you're writing, how many drafts do you do on a book?" Monty asked.

Diana shrugged. "I don't know for sure. Three-four maybe. I can't tell. Every time I open up a chapter on the computer, I end up changing something. Maybe it's nothing more than shortening a sentence here and there or breaking up a paragraph in a different way so the words look better on the page. Sometimes I find places where I've used the same word twice within two or three lines. At that rate, everything's a different draft."

"And you're polishing as you go."

"Yes, always."

"Do things ever change in all that polishing?"

"Well, probably, but-"

"You see," Monty Lazarus said with a smile, "the reason I like to do in-depth interviews is that I want to hear what the person is saying in his or her own words-without all the polishing. Without all the real feelings and emotions cleaned up and taken out. Those are the things that never show up on the pages of a book.

"For instance, a little while ago we were talking about your marriage to Brandon Walker. When I asked how long you'd been married, you said twenty years. Were you aware, though, that when you told me that, there was a little half-smile playing around the corners of your mouth?"

"No," Diana conceded. "I wasn't aware of that."

"And when I asked you about your children and you started discussing your stepchildren, you looked as though you'd put what you thought was a piece of candy in your mouth and discovered, too late, that it was really dog shit. See what I mean?"

Diana smiled. "Yes," she said. "I suppose I do."

Monty Lazarus smiled in turn and then leaned back in his chair, regarding Diana thoughtfully over the low coffee table between them. "I want you to tell me a little about the process of this book. Did you seek out Andrew Carlisle, or was it the other way around?"

"He asked me," Diana said. "He wrote to me in care of my publisher."

"Let me get this straight. The man who killed your husband, and raped you, wrote you a letter and asked that you write his story? And despite everything that had happened before, despite all that history, you still agreed?"

" Shadow of Deathtells both stories," Diana corrected. "His and mine."

"I'd have to say that the book is generally pretty unflinching," Lazarus said. "Blazingly so at times, but there's a gap that I find puzzling."

"Which gap is that?"

"You barely mention the interviews themselves," Monty Lazarus said. "I'm assuming they took place in the state prison up at Florence, since that's where Carlisle was incarcerated. Is that true?"

"Yes," Diana said. "In the visiting room up there to begin with. Then later on, when he was hospitalized for symptoms related to AIDS, they let me interview him in the infirmary."

"But why didn't you talk about that?" Lazarus persisted. "It seems to me that's an important part of the story, for the victim to triumph over the perpetrator, as it were. For you to see your tormentor laid low-blind, crippled, horribly disfigured, and finally dying of AIDS. I'm surprised you didn't share that satisfaction with your readers, that sense of vindication."

"I didn't write about satisfaction or vindication because they weren't there," Diana answered quietly.

"They weren't?" Monty Lazarus asked. Then, after a moment, he added, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. What did you feel then, when you met him again after all those years?"

"Horror," Diana said simply.

"Horror?" Lazarus repeated. "At the way he looked? Because of the burns on his face and chest? Because of his mangled arm?"

Diana shook her head. "No," she replied. "It had nothing at all to do with the way he looked. It was because of what he was-what he stood for."

"Which was?"

"Evil," she said. "Outside catechism classes, I had never actually met the devil before, somebody who could pass for Satan. I was afraid that if I wrote about him that way, no one would believe me. He seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect on people, certainly on my first husband. If Andrew Carlisle told Garrison Ladd that black was white and vice versa, I think Gary would have gone to his death trying to prove it was true."

"I see," Monty said, writing something down in his notebook, but Diana Ladd Walker wasn't at all sure he understood. In fact, she wasn't entirely sure she did, either.

The morning of Diana's first scheduled interview with Andrew Carlisle had dawned clear and dry and hot. Already dressed for work himself, Brandon Walker lounged in the doorway between their bedroom and the master bath, drinking a cup of coffee and watching as his wife carefully applied her makeup.

"I could always take the day off and come along with you," he offered. "That way I'd be right there in case anything went wrong."

"Nothing's going to go wrong, Brandon," Diana said, trying to sound less anxious than she felt. "It isn't as though I'll be alone with him. There are guards. There'll be other visitors in the room as well. I'll be fine."

For a time after that, Brandon Walker sipped his coffee in silence. "Are you going to try to see Quentin while you're there?"

Diana put down her mascara brush. Her gaze met Brandon's in the neutral territory of the bathroom mirror's steamy reflection. "I could," she said finally. "Do you want me to?"

Brandon's older son had been locked up in the state penitentiary at Florence for months now. On occasion, Brandon and Diana had talked about driving up there to see him, but each time, Brandon had changed his mind and backed out at the last minute.

"I guess," he said hollowly. "I do want to know how Quent's doing. I just can't bring myself to go there to see him. Still, no matter what he's done, he's also my son. Nothing's going to change that. Since we've already lost Tommy, we can't very well just abandon Quentin, can we?"

Brandon looked away, but not before Diana glimpsed the anguished expression on his face. She tried to read that look, tried to fathom what was behind it. Betrayal? Despair? Pain? Anger?

"No," Diana agreed at last. "I don't suppose we can. I can't promise I'll see Quentin today. It depends on whether or not there's enough time left in visiting hours after the interview with Carlisle is over. If they'll let me, though, I will."

"Thanks, Di," Brandon said gruffly. "I appreciate it."

And it turned out that there had been enough time for Diana Ladd Walker to see both prisoners that day. She had been waiting in the Visitation Room, amidst a group of other women who, armed with whatever difficulties were besetting them on the outside, had come either to rail at or to share their woes with their husbands or boyfriends or sons. Diana had brought only a yellow pad and a pencil, along with a pervasive sense of dread.

As one door after another had clanged shut behind her, Diana felt a sudden resurgence of that long-ago fear. In her ignorance, she had thought of the house in Gates Pass as a safe haven, yet Carlisle had found a way inside the house and had attacked her there, despite her careful precautions and numerous locked doors. Maybe, here in the prison, despite the reassuring presence of guards and iron bars, her presumed safety might once again prove illusory.

Andrew Carlisle was here, and so was Diana Walker. She was already locked inside the same complex. Soon the two of them would be within the same four walls. Would she be able to stand it? For the first time, Diana's courage wavered. At that moment it would have taken only the smallest nudge from Brandon to convince her to walk away and forget the whole project.

Quaking, fighting an almost overpowering urge to bolt and run, Diana followed the escorting guards into the grimly functional prison Visitation Room. It was lit by sallow, artificial light that gave everyone in the place a jaundiced, sickly look. The walls were posted with rules and regulations, many of them made illegible by layers of graffiti. The chairs in the room were all bolted to the floor. It was a hard, desperate place where people with no hope waited to see loved ones who had even less.

The guard leading Diana took her directly to the far side of the room, where the wall was made of thick Plexiglas so yellowed and scratched that looking through it seemed more like peering through a veil of smutty L.A. smog than anything else. Directed to a chair, Diana sat and waited.

The last time she had seen Andrew Carlisle had been years earlier at his double murder trial. One of his arms-the one Bone had snapped in two at the wrist-had been encased in a heavy plaster cast, and his face had still been swathed in bandages. The prison warden had told Diana in advance of that first visit that the injured arm had been permanently damaged, leaving him with only limited use of his fingers.

The mangled arm was one thing-more Bone's doing than Diana's. What she dreaded seeing was his unbandaged face, the one into which she had flung a frying pan full of searing-hot bacon grease. That grease had been Diana's last desperate line of defense against Andrew Carlisle's brute force and sharp knife. The grease had worked far better than she could have hoped. He had fallen on the slick floor, clawing at his scorched face and howling in agony.

This day, though, when Carlisle was led into the room, there was no such mummylike mask to lessen the horrible impact of what she had done to him. The guard brought him into the room, seated him on a chair across from Diana, and then placed the intercom receiver, one used to communicate through the Plexiglas barrier, in his good hand. All the while, Diana could only sit and stare. The third-degree burns had molded his once chiseled features into a grotesquely twisted, lumpy grimace. They had also ruined his eyes. Andrew Carlisle was blind.

No amount of anticipation could have prepared Diana for the way he looked. It stunned her to think that she had intentionally inflicted that kind of injury on another human being. Still, faced with the same set of circumstances, she knew she would have made the same decision and fought him again with the same ferocity.

"I'm told I'm quite ugly these days," Andrew Carlisle said into the intercom mouthpiece as Diana picked up hers to listen. "They're supposedly doing remarkable things with skin transplants and plastic surgery these days, but not for convicted killers with AIDS. Nobody exactly jumped to the plate and offered to get me the best possible care back then, or now, either, for that matter. Come to think of it, I wonder? Doesn't denying someone proper medical care constitute cruel and unusual punishment? What do you think? Maybe I could take the Pima County Sheriff's Department to court and sue them for damages."

"I have no idea," Diana said. "That's up to you."

He laughed then. "You sound quite sure of yourself, Ms. Walker. Have you changed much then since I saw you last?"

"Changed how?"

"Anything," he replied. "You haven't turned into one of those born-again Christians, by any chance, have you?"

"No."

"Good." He sounded relieved. "After you agreed to come see me, I started worrying that maybe you had transformed yourself into one of those religious zealots. They are all eager to come pray over me to save my immortal soul. Some of them even want to grant me forgiveness."

Diana took a deep breath and managed to find her conversational sea legs. "No," she said. "You don't have to worry about that, Mr. Carlisle. I've never forgiven you, and I never will."

"Good," Andrew Carlisle replied. "Very good. I'm delighted to hear it. Now, tell me about the way you look."

"What about the way I look?"

"Are you very different from the way you were that night we were together? You're the last person I ever saw or ever will see," he added, as his puckered mouth twisted into an oddly one-sided smile. "As a consequence, Ms. Walker, I remember everything about that night as vividly as if it had happened yesterday or the day before. I remember every detail about you, and I would suppose that you remember me in much the same way. We were both operating in what the experts call a non-drug-induced altered state of consciousness."

"My hair is turning gray," Diana answered, carefully keeping her voice even. "I'm over fifty. I wear glasses. Two pairs of glasses, actually-one for distance and one for reading."

"I'm far more interested in your body," Andrew Carlisle said.

Some blind people seem to gaze off into the far distance when they speak. Andrew Carlisle's opaque, sightless eyes seemed to pry directly into Diana's very being. She could barely breathe. An involuntary shudder ran up and down her spine while a hot flush covered her face. She wanted nothing more than to race to the door. She wanted out. She longed to be away from this monster, to be back outside in the straightforward discomfort of the hot desert air.

This must be what Brandon was trying to warn me about,she thought, fighting back panic.

When Brandon had said she would be putting herself at risk, he must have seen that even though Andrew Carlisle would not be able to harm her physically, he might still be able to invade her mind and infect her soul.

Pulling herself together, Diana sat up straight and squared her shoulders. When she spoke, she willed her voice not to quaver.

"Let's get one thing straight, Mr. Carlisle," she said. "I'm the one calling the shots here. If you want to do this project, we're going to do it my way. Basic ground rule number one is that we don't talk about that night. Not now, not ever!"

"But that's pretty much the whole point, isn't it?" Carlisle said, smiling his ruined smile. "Everything that happened before led up to it, and everything afterward led away from it."

"That night isn't my point," Diana returned. "And I'm the one writing the book. If you don't like it, hire yourself another writer."

"Hire?" Carlisle croaked. "What do you mean, hire? I already told you I can't afford to pay you anything."

"I'm being paid, all right," Diana answered. "My agent has pitched the idea to my editor in New York. The book I'm writing will be written, and I will be paid. The only question is whether or not any of your point of view actually appears in print. That depends on how well you behave, on whether or not you agree to do things my way."

Diana suspected that Andrew Carlisle was a vain man who was prepared to go to any length in order to be immortalized in print. He must have realized that Diana Ladd Walker was his best chance for getting there. In this case, Diana's instincts were good. Her threat of cutting his perspective out of the project immediately delivered the required result.

"All right," he agreed grudgingly. "I won't mention it again. So where do we start?"

"From the beginning," Diana said. "With your family and your childhood. Where you were born and where you grew up. I'd also like to interview any living relatives."

"Like my mother, you mean?" he asked.

Diana remembered being told that Andrew Carlisle's mother had been there in the yard at Gates Pass the night of her son's attack. Myrna Louise Spaulding had ridden down to Tucson from her home in Tempe with a homicide detective named G. T. Farrell. At the time Diana had been too preoccupied with everything else to notice. Later on, during the trial, Myrna Louise had been conspicuous in her absence. Diana had mistakenly assumed the woman was dead.

"You mean your mother's still alive?" Diana asked.

"More or less. She lives in one of those marginal retirement homes in Chandler. From the sound of it, I'd say it's a pretty awful place, but I doubt she can afford any better."

"Does she come here to see you?"

"Not anymore. She used to. The first time I was here. Still, once a year, on my birthday, she sends me a box of chocolates. See's Assorted. I've never bothered to tell her I hate the damn things. She's my mother, after all, so you'd think she'd remember that I never liked chocolate, not even when I was little."

"If you don't like the chocolates she sends you, what do you do with them, then?" Diana asked. "Give them away?"

Carlisle grinned. "Are you kidding? The guy in the cell next to me would kill for one of 'em, so I flush them down the toilet. One at a time. It drives him crazy."

Another shiver of chills flashed through Diana's body.

"Getting back to establishing ground rules," Andrew Carlisle continued. "How do you want to do this? We could probably sit here chatting this way, or else I could let you review some of the material I've already put together. Some of it is taped, some is on disk. I could print it out for you. That way, you could take it with you, go over it at your leisure, and then you could come back later so we could discuss it."

"How did you get it on disk?" Diana asked.

He gestured with his damaged arm. "I've learned to be a one-handed touch typist," he said. "Fortunately, this is one of those full-service prisons. Inmates are allowed to have access to computers in the library so they can prepare their own writs. I do that, by the way. Compose writs for those less fortunate than myself-the poor bastards who mostly can't read or write. Someone else has to do the editing and run the spell-checker. In a pinch, you could probably do that."

"I suppose we can try it that way." Diana did her best to sound reluctant, although in truth she was delighted at the prospect of any option that might spare her spending unlimited periods of time, shut up in this awful room, sitting face-to-face with this equally awful man.

"When can you have the first segment done?" she asked.

"A week or so," he said. "Sorting out the details of my childhood shouldn't take too long. It wasn't particularly happy or memorable. I doubt there'll be very much to reminisce about."

Diana raised her hand and beckoned to the guard. "I think we're through here," she said.

The guard glanced at his watch. "There's still plenty of time," he said. "Would you like to see your stepson, then?"

"Yes, please," Diana said.

Ten minutes after Andrew Carlisle was led from the room, the guard returned with Quentin Walker in tow.

"Oh," he said, his face registering disappointment as soon as he saw her. "It's you. I was hoping it was my mother. What do you want?"

A year and a half in prison had done nothing to diminish Quentin Walker's perpetual swagger.

"I came to see someone else, but I thought I'd stop by and check on you to see if there's anything you need."

"What exactly do you have in mind?" Quentin returned. "An overnight pass would be great. Better yet, how about commuting my sentence to time served? That would be very nice. And you might bring along a girl next time. Since I'm not married, I don't qualify for conjugal visits, but I'll bet my dear old dad could pull a string or two and help me keep my manhood intact."

"I don't think so," Diana replied. "Your father's not involved in this in any way. I was thinking more in terms of books or writing materials."

The superior smile on Quentin Walker's face shifted into a chilly sneer. "Writing and reading materials?" he asked. "Are we suddenly focused on educating poor lost Quent? Trying to make up for the difference between what you guys did for precious little Davy and that baby squaw you dragged home and what you two did for Tommy and me? I don't think it's going to work. Let's say it's too little, too late."

If sibling rivalry was bad, Diana realized, stepsibling rivalry was infinitely worse.

"This has nothing to do with David and Lani," she said evenly. "And I didn't come here to argue." She stood up. "Why don't we just forget I asked."

"Good idea," Quentin returned. "We'll do that. I don't need anything from you, not now and not ever."

"Good," Diana said. "At least that makes our relationship clear."

"So that's how you did it then?" Monty Lazarus asked. For a moment Diana wasn't sure what he was asking. "He gave you access to the material he had written?"

"Yes."

"But there's not really any acknowledgment of that in your book, is there? Shouldn't there have been?"

The question was a sly one, and Monty Lazarus kept his eyes focused on her face as he asked it. Realizing she was about to fall victim to a case of ambush journalism, Diana tried to play dumb.

"I'm not sure I understand what you're saying."

"If you used Andrew Carlisle's written material, shouldn't you have said that instead of passing it off as your own work?"

It took real effort to hold off a reflexive tightening of the muscles across her jaw. "It is my own work," she said coldly. "All of it. I did my own research, conducted my own interviews."

"Sorry," Monty Lazarus said. "I didn't mean any offense."

The hell you didn't, you bastard!Diana thought. She took a careful sip of her iced tea before she trusted herself enough to speak. "Of course not," she said.

Her reaction was so blatant that it was all Mitch Johnson could do to keep from bursting out laughing. And if she was prickly when it came to questions concerning her literary integrity, he wondered what would happen when they veered off into more personal topics.

"What kinds of interviews?" he asked.

"I tracked Andrew Carlisle's mother down at her retirement home up in Chandler. I thought hearing about him from her might help me understand him better. But he was already several moves ahead of me there."

Mitch Johnson knew exactly what Diana Ladd Walker was leading up to-the tapes, of course. He and Andy had discussed Andy's giving them to her in great detail, long before it happened. But he had to ask, had to convince her to tell him.

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"Andrew Carlisle was a master at mind games, Mr. Lazarus," Diana answered. "At the time we started the project, I still didn't understand that."

"Games?" he repeated. "What kind of games are we talking about?"

"Andrew Carlisle was toying with me, Mr. Lazarus, the same way a cat torments a captive mouse."

So am I,Mitch Johnson thought, concealing the beginnings of an unintentional smile behind his iced-tea glass.

"In the beginning," Diana continued, "I don't think he had any intention of my writing the book."

"Really. That's surprising," Monty returned. "Why, then, did he bother to write to you in the first place?"

"Of all his victims," she said slowly, "I'm the one who got away. Not only that, even before this book, I had achieved a kind of prominence in writing that Andrew Carlisle could never hope for. I think that ate at him for years. After all, I'm somebody he didn't consider worthy of being one of his students."

"That's right," Monty Lazarus said. "I remember now. Your husband was admitted to the writing program Professor Carlisle taught, but you weren't. Your husband-your first husband, that is-was he a writer, too? Did Garrison Ladd ever have anything published?"

"No," she answered. "He never did."

"But he was enrolled in Carlisle's class at the time of his death. Presumably he was working on something, then. What was it?"

Diana shook her head. "I have no idea," she answered. "I'm pretty sure there was a partially completed manuscript, but I never read it. The thing disappeared in all the confusion after Gary's death. I don't know what happened to it."

"Wouldn't it be interesting to know what was in it?"

Mitch asked the speculative question deftly like a picador sticking a tormenting pic into the unsuspecting bull's neck. And it did its intended work. It pleased him to see her struggle with her answer. She took a deep breath.

"No," she said finally. "I don't think knowing that would serve any useful purpose at all. Whatever Gary was writing, it had nothing at all to do with Andrew Carlisle's focus on me, which, in my opinion, boils down to nothing more or less than professional jealousy."

Oh, no,Mitch wanted to tell her. It's far more complex than that. Instead, Monty Lazarus looked down at his notes and frowned. "Let's go back to something you said just a minute ago, something about Carlisle being a couple of moves ahead of you. Something about him never really intending for you to write the book. If that was the case, what was the point?"

"He was hoping to humiliate me publicly," Diana answered. "I think he thought he could get me to make a public commitment to writing the book and then force me to back out of it. But it didn't work. I wrote the book anyway."

For the first time, Mitch was surprised. Diana's answer was right on the money. Andy had told him that he didn't think she'd have guts enough to go through with it. That was another instance, one of the first ones Mitch had noticed, where Andy Carlisle's assessment of any given situation had turned out to be dead wrong.

"It still doesn't make much sense," Monty said, making a show of dusting crumbs of tortilla chips out of his lap.

Diana knew it did make sense, but only if you had all the other pieces of the puzzle. Monty Lazarus didn't have access to those. No one did, no one other than Diana. Those were the very things she had left out of the book, the ugly parts she had never mentioned to anyone, including Brandon Walker.

She had absolutely no intention of telling the whole story to Monty Lazarus, either. Those things were hers alone-Diana Ladd Walker's dirty little secrets. Instead, she tossed off a too-casual answer, hoping it would throw him off the trail.

"Let's just say it was a grudge match," Diana said. "Andrew Philip Carlisle hated my guts."

Almost a month after that first interview with Carlisle up in Florence, Diana was still waiting for the first written installment, which had taken far longer for him to deliver than he had said it would.

Davy was home from school for a few weeks. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Diana and Brandon had planned to take Lani and Davy up to the White Mountains to visit some friends who owned a two-room cabin just outside Payson. The four-day outing was scheduled to start Thursday afternoon, as soon as Brandon came home from work. Fate in the form of a demanding editor intervened when the Federal Express delivery man came to the door at nine o'clock Thursday morning. The package he delivered contained the galleys for her next book, The Copper Baron's Wife, along with an apologetic note from her editor saying the corrections needed to be completed and ready to be returned to New York on Tuesday morning.

"I'd better stay home and work on them," she said to Brandon on the phone that day when she called him at his office. "You know as well as I do that I can't do a good job on galleys when we're camped out with a houseful of people up in Payson. I have to be able to concentrate, but you and the kids are welcome to go. Just because I have to work doesn't mean everybody else has to suffer."

Brandon had protested, but in the end he had taken Lani and Davy and the three of them had gone off without her. Once they were piled in the car and headed for Payson, Diana had locked herself up with the galleys and worked her way through the first hundred pages of the book before she gave up for the night and went to bed. The next morning, when she went out to bring in the newspaper, she found an envelope propped against the front door. Although it was addressed to her, it hadn't been mailed. Someone had left it on the porch overnight.

Curious, she had torn the envelope open and found a cassette tape-that and nothing else. No note, no explanation. She had taken the tape inside to her office and popped it into the cassette player she kept on the bookshelf beside her desk.

When the tape first began playing, there was no sound-none at all. Distracted by a headline at the top of the newspaper, Diana was beginning to assume that the tape was blank when she heard a moan-a long, terrible moan.

"Please," a woman's voice whispered. "Mr. Ladd, please…"

Diana had been holding the newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. As soon as she heard her former husband's name, she dropped both the paper and the cup. The paper merely fell back to the surface of the desk. The cup, however, crashed to the bare floor, shattering on the Saltillo tile and sending splatters of coffee and shards of cup from one end of the room to the other.

Diana leaned closer to the recorder and turned up the volume. "Mr. Ladd," the girl's voice said again. "Please. Let me go."

"No help there, little lady," a man's voice said. "He's out cold. Can't hear a word you're saying."

The voice was younger, but Diana recognized it after a moment. Andrew Carlisle's. Unmistakably Andrew Carlisle's and… the other? Could it be Gina Antone's? No. That wasn't possible! It couldn't be!

But a few agonizing exchanges later, Diana realized it was true. The other voice did belong to Gina Antone all right, to someone suffering the torments of the damned.

"Please, mister," the girl pleaded helplessly, her voice barely a whisper. "Please don't hurt me again. Please…" The rest of what she might have said dissolved into a shriek followed by a series of despairing sobs.

"But that's what you're here for, isn't it? Don't you remember telling us that you were taking us to a bad place? It turns out you were right. This is a bad place, my dear. A very bad place."

There was a momentary pause followed by another spine-tingling scream that seemed to go on forever. Diana had risen to her feet as if to fend off a physical attack. Now she slumped backward into the chair while the infernal tape continued to play. Gradually the scream subsided until there was nothing left but uncontrollable, gasping sobs.

"My God," Diana whispered aloud. "Did he tape the whole thing?"

Soon it became clear that he had. It was a ninety-minute tape, forty-five minutes per side. Halfway through the tape, the girl began passing out. It happened over and over again. Each time he revived her-brought her back to consciousness with splashes of water and with slaps to her face so he could continue the terrible process. Sick with revulsion, Diana realized he was orchestrating and prolonging her ordeal so the whole thing would be there. On tape. Every bit of it, even the horrifying finale where, after first announcing his intentions for the benefit of his unseen audience, Andrew Carlisle had bitten off Gina Antone's nipple.

Shaken to the core, Diana listened to the whole thing. Not because she wanted to but because she was incapable of doing anything else. She sat in the chair as though mesmerized, as though stricken by some sudden paralysis that rendered her unable to make the slightest movement, unable to reach across to the tape player and switch it off. Unchecked tears streamed down her face and dripped unnoticed into the mess of splattered coffee and broken china.

And when it was finally over, when Gina Antone's awful death was finished at last and the recorder clicked off, Diana leaned over and threw up into the mess of coffee and broken cup.

For a while after that she still couldn't move. Carlisle had made it last that whole time. He had tortured the girl for a carefully calculated ninety minutes. And that was just the part he had taped. From the sound of it there must have been some preliminaries that had occurred even before that. And for inflicting that kind of appalling torture, for premeditating, planning, and savoring every ugly moment of that appalling inhumanity, what had happened to Andrew Carlisle?

A superior court judge had allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of second-degree manslaughter. The torture death of Gina Antone hadn't even merited a charge of murder in the first degree. The State of Arizona had extracted a price of six short years from Andrew Carlisle in exchange for Gina Antone's suffering. Six years. After that, he had been allowed to go free. Free to kill again.

Stunned, Diana sat for another half-hour, trying to decide what to do. There was no sense in turning the tape over to the authorities. What would they do with it? What could they do? Preposterously light or not, Andrew Carlisle had already served a prison term in connection with Gina Antone's death. Double jeopardy would preclude him from being tried again for that same crime.

So should she keep the tape? Comments made by Andrew Carlisle during the tape seemed to make it clear that Diana's former husband, Garrison Ladd, had been present at the crime scene but drunk and passed out during most of that terrible drama. Twenty-two years after the fact, Diana Cooper Ladd Walker finally had some understanding of her former husband's involvement in Gina Antone's death. It would seem that Garrison hadn't been actively involved in what was done to Gina, but that didn't mean he was blameless. Mr. Ladd. Gina had called him by name. No doubt he was the one she knew. That meant Garrison was probably the one who had lured her into the truck in the first place.

When he did that, when he had offered her a ride, had he known what was coming or not? There was no way of unraveling that now, and listening to the tape again or a hundred times, or having someone else listen to it wouldn't have provided an adequate answer to that haunting question.

Getting out of the chair at last, Diana set about cleaning up the mess of vomit, spilled coffee, and broken pottery. Down on her hands and knees, for the first time ever she was grateful that Rita was dead. Had Gina's grandmother still been alive, Diana would have had to face the moral dilemma of whether or not to play the tape for the old woman. With Rita dead, that wasn't an issue.

But what about Davy? What would happen if he heard it? That thought hit her like a lightning bolt. Diana's son-Garrison Ladd's son-was still alive. If he ever came to know what was on that tape, it would tell him far more about his father than he ever needed to know.

Finally, there was Brandon to consider. He had headed the investigation into Gina Antone's death and he had eventually arrested Andrew Carlisle. The plea bargain that had followed the arrest had been negotiated behind Brandon Walker's back. If he had to endure listening to the grim recorded reality of Gina Antone's death, Diana knew Brandon would be devastated. He would blame himself for the unwitting part he had played in allowing Andrew Carlisle to slip off the hook and escape what should have been a charge of aggravated first-degree murder.

Thinking about what exposure to the tape would do to both Brandon and Davy was what finally galvanized Diana Ladd Walker to action. Brandon was already carrying around a big enough load of guilt. His son Quentin was in prison due to a fatality drunk-driving charge. As another source of free-flowing guilt in Brandon Walker's life, that tape was the last thing he needed.

With a fierce jab of her finger, Diana ejected the offending tape. She popped it out of the player and then carried it out to the living room. It was the first weekend in July. At eight o'clock in the morning, the air conditioner was already humming along at full speed when Diana knelt in front of the fireplace and opened the flue. Carefully, she laid a small fire with kindling at the bottom, topped by a layer of several wrist-thick branches of dried ironwood.

Once the kindling was lit, she sat on the raised hearth and waited until the ironwood was fully engulfed before she tossed the tape into the crackling flames. As the heat attacked it, the clear plastic container began to curl and melt. Like a snake shedding its skin, the magnetic tape slithered off its spindle and escaped the confines of the dwindling case. The tape writhed free, wriggled like a tortured creature, burst into flames, and then withered into a glowing chain of ash.

Only when there was nothing left of the tape and container but a charred, amorphous blob of melted plastic did Diana turn her back on the fireplace. Hurrying into the bathroom, she showered and dressed. Then, after raking the remainder of the fire apart, she left the house and drove straight to Florence. That day, Diana Walker Ladd was the first person inside the Visitation Room when the guard opened the door at ten o'clock in the morning.

Andrew Carlisle was led to his side of the Plexiglas divider a few minutes later. "Why, Mrs. Walker," he said, sitting down across from her. "To what do I owe this unexpected honor? I don't remember our setting an appointment for today."

"We didn't, you son of a bitch," she said.

He brightened. The puckered skin around his mouth stretched into a pained imitation of a smile. "I see," he said. "You must have received my little care package."

"Why did you send it to me?"

"Why? Because I wanted you to know what this was all about."

"That's not true. You wanted someone to know the truth about what you did and what you got away with. You wanted to gloat and rub somebody's nose in it."

"That, too," he conceded. "Maybe a little."

"Where was it all this time?"

"The tape? That's for me to know and for you to find out," Andrew Carlisle answered.

"Who brought it to my house? Who dropped it off? And how many more ugly surprises do you have in store for me?"

"One or two," he answered. "Or does that mean you're quitting?"

"No," Diana told him. "It doesn't mean I'm quitting. You think this is some kind of a game, don't you? You think this is a way to get back at me for what I did to you. Well, listen up, buster. I'm not a quitter. I'm going to write this damned book. By the time I finish, you're going to wish you'd never asked me to do it."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It is a threat."

"In other words, you're abolishing the ground rules."

"I'm writing this book regardless."

"That will make the process far more interesting for me. More hands-on, if you'll pardon the expression. Especially when it's time to talk about the time we spent together."

"Go fuck yourself, Mr. Carlisle!" She stood up, turned her back on him, and stalked over to the door. She had to wait in front of the door for several long moments before a guard opened it to let her out. While she was standing there she glanced back. Behind the Plexiglas barrier he was doubled over. And even though she couldn't actually hear him without benefit of the intercom-the sound nonetheless filled her head and echoed down the confines of the prison hallway long after the heavy metal door had slammed shut behind her.

That ghostly sound was one she would never forget. It was Andrew Philip Carlisle. Laughing.