Poison Flower

"I suppose not."

"I know you're skeptical of this stuff, but believe me, it's worth the effort. Anything you can change about yourself, you change. Some changes are hard. This is one of the easiest ones. You want all the cosmetic stuff done right away, before you go out where you'll be seen. And soon you'll have to rent an apartment somewhere. You don't want to show up looking dark, and then be light. Men don't do that very often."

"Let's do whatever we have time to do."

Jane patted his shoulder. "You're learning fast."

"A few years in a state prison gives a person great perspective."

She finished the dye, and then mixed the small amount of blond for the highlights, and brushed it on select strands. "We'll give it a few minutes, and then you'll get to see the final effect."

When the hair was done, she held the mirror so he could see himself. "What do you think"

"Hmm," he said. "I look really different. Maybe even better."

"Glad you think so. That's what we want. I like it, too. Any change you make is best if it's an improvement." She took all of the cellophane and packaging and disposable parts of the kit and put them into the shopping bag. "This is another precaution. If you do something like dyeing your hair, don't leave any of the materials in the trash. It's always possible that one of the chasers will get a tip or make the right guess. If you leave the dye or the box, they'll know you dyed your hair and the exact color."

"I understand."

"Good. The next thing is your skin. I've got a tanning lotion here that will change the shade of your skin. You won't be that pale prison color."

"Don't those things make you look orange"

"I've experimented with just about every version that's on the market, and this one is the most natural looking. It looks like a mild tan." She handed the tube to him. "You don't have to do it."

"I'll do it."

"I'll get you started. Take off your shirt." She applied it to his face and neck and ears, his shoulders and back and chest. "You'll notice I'm wearing gloves, because I don't want to turn the palms of my hands dark. There. I'm finished with that part. Take a pair of gloves and go into the bathroom to do the rest. Do every part that the sun would tan if you were on the beach, including your feet and the tops of your toes. Then take a shower to get the lotion off."

When he returned, fully dressed, she said, "Very good. You look natural."

"How long does it last"

"A few weeks, but it fades gradually, so it's possible to stop using it without suddenly looking pale. Or you can keep using it as long as you want. We're thinking in small increments of time now-how we can give you tomorrow and the next day. Anything that can disguise you for weeks is pure magic. Just keep reminding yourself that change is good as long as it doesn't attract attention. Here," she said. "I bought you some glasses. Try them on."

He picked up a pair of frames with faintly tinted gray plastic lenses, and put them on.

"Those are pretty good," she said. "The frames are like regular glasses, and they look expensive. That gives you the right kind of appearance-professor, not drifter. And they obscure the color of your eyes. Try the dark ones."

He put on a pair that wrapped around his face. "I like these."

"They're the right choice for sunny days. Take them off when you go inside. I try to do it before I open a door because I don't like that moment of near-blindness when I step into a building. I want to see everybody who can see me. Since the glasses you replace them with are nearly clear, you'll be able to take one step and stop to put them on, but use the time to survey the place. If you don't like what you see, you're already at the door."

"All right," he said. "What next"

Jane looked at the clock beside the bed. "It's getting late, and that's a good time to travel-there will be fewer people on the road. Now we pack up and clean the apartment. What we do after that is get your sister out of her hiding place and take her with us into a better one before somebody finds her."

She went to the desk at the side of the room, turned on the desk lamp, found the pen, and filled in the quick checkout card. She put his key card into the envelope with it; then she took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and left it for the maid.

She took a hand-towel from the rack and went around the room wiping things off-doorknobs, the television set and remote control, the surfaces of all the furniture, the thermostat.

When Shelby emerged from the bathroom and put his razor, hairbrush, and toothbrush into his suitcase, she used her towel and wiped off every surface in the bathroom, too-mirrors, drawers, drawer pulls, faucets, tiles-rinsed the glasses, and dried them.

"You're pretty thorough," he said.

"There's no reason to make it easier for the chasers. If they find this room, they'll have to do a thorough job of fingerprinting to know it's yours. And maybe if we work at it, they won't find anything."

"That would be good," he said. "If they even get this far."

She stopped and looked at him. "I'm afraid this is what it's going to be like. You leave as little trail as possible, and you take the extra few minutes to give the chasers a chance to make a mistake or miss something. If they do, you've won for this day. You get to go on living until tomorrow."

"It doesn't sound like victory, does it"

"No, because it isn't. Nobody comes to me until all his other options are gone. Your sister made it clear to me that yours were."

"They were. I was buying one day at a time by fighting off the inmates who had been trying to kill me in the yard or on the cellblock. The stab in the back came on a work detail. One guy came up to distract me while the one with the homemade knife came up behind me. Another one tried while I was still in the hospital. I don't mind precautions."

"Okay. Make sure we have everything."

He took his suitcase and hers. "Ready."

"Are you sure you can carry both of them"

"Having both keeps me balanced."

She let him out into the hall and wiped the doorknobs, then tossed the towel inside and shut the door. They went to the first floor and put the envelope in the box at the end of the cashier's desk on their way out.

Jane walked to the gray car she had bought for Shelby. "Put the suitcases in the trunk and drive." She got into the passenger seat. "Circle the hotel, and then head toward Route 15."

Shelby drove around the block where the hotel was, and Jane studied the traffic, the cars parked in the area, and the people visible on the streets. Then Shelby came past the front of the hotel along the route to return to the interstate. As they drove past, Shelby pointed. "Look at that."

There were four police cars at the front entrance to the hotel with their lights off, and another unit on each side, near the residential wings.

"It looks as though they may have gotten a report that there were a pair of fugitives living on the second floor," Jane said. "I'd say they haven't gone in after them yet."

Shelby looked stunned and frightened, but he drove on.

"Stop at the light," Jane said.

"Sorry," he said. "It's hard to do anything but floor it." He pulled to a stop at the red light. It changed to green in a few seconds, and he continued up the street.

"There. That's good," she said. "You don't want to run a light right now. There will be more cops, probably." They went under the overpass where the street met the interstate, and there were two more police cars parked beneath it with their lights off.

"How did you know"

"I guessed. Just before they go after somebody who's armed and dangerous, they block the streets so nobody walks into the middle of it."

"What should I do"

"Keep going. When you're past the interstate and out of sight, I want you to swing around the next block and come out near the hotel. Let me off in the park."

"Let you off Why"

"I don't have a lot of time to tell you the whole story. But I left somebody else in that hotel, a young woman I picked up on the way in Las Vegas who had been abused by her ex-husband. I shot him. I'm sure he'll try to use the police to get back at her-get her arrested for the shooting, and so on. If she gets held long enough for him to catch up, he'll kill her."

"My God. How did you ever get involved in that" He turned the corner and drove along a street parallel with the interstate.

"I guess I have a knack for making friends. Just let me off in Pioneer Park, and I'll take it from there."

"I can't believe you're going back for her," he said. He turned again and went under the freeway to the street behind the hotel.

"I think I may have made the mistake of assuming the cops were after the two of us-you and me. But maybe they're looking for the two of us-her and me."

He pulled to the curb and watched Jane get out. She leaned back in. "If things go badly in there, take the next street over to get on the interstate. Don't go past the cops again. Get on the highway just as we planned. Pick up your sister and do the best you can."

Jane walked across the parking lot, trying to make her limp less pronounced. There was a lock on the side door that was engaged at night, so she took out the key card she had retained from checking Iris in, swiped it in the slot, and entered the building. She went haltingly up the stairs near the door and came out on the third-floor corridor. She was relieved to see there were no police officers waiting in this hallway, but just as she found Iris's room, she heard the elevator give a faint ding, and the doors rolled open. Jane inserted her key card in the lock, the lock gave a green light, and she tried to open it. The handle wouldn't budge. The dead bolt must have been set from the inside.

She knew that if the police were in the next corridor, they would hear her knock. So she put her ear to the door and used her fingernails to scratch the door. It sounded a bit like a dog trying to get in. She scraped and scratched quickly and without stopping. If Iris was asleep, she didn't want to let her roll over and forget she'd heard anything. After a few seconds she heard something moving inside. She stepped back so she would be in the light if Iris looked out the peephole in the door.

The door opened, and Iris was smiling, about to say something. Jane held a finger to her lips and slipped inside past her, then closed the door. She whispered, "I came back for you. There are police in the parking lot, and I think they're on some of the upper floors. I don't know if they're looking for my client and me, or for you and me because I shot your ex. It probably doesn't matter, because I paid for both rooms with the same card. Get your things."

"Okay." Iris looked terrified, but she scurried around the room collecting the few items she had brought and stuffing them into her backpack, while Jane took a hand towel from the bathroom and repeated her routine of wiping off all the obvious places Iris might have touched.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door. "Police."

Jane put her face close to Iris. "Let them in. Don't lie about who you are. Maybe they'll want to see your identification. Fine. Just say you're alone."

Jane lay down on the floor beyond the bed and listened while Iris opened the door.

"Hi," Iris said. "What's going on, officer"

"Are you alone in this room, miss"

"Yes, why"

"We were called because someone thought they saw a man and a woman who are wanted, considered armed and dangerous, at the hotel. The man is six feet even, light hair, and about one-eighty. The woman is tall and thin with long black hair. Have you seen anybody like that"

"I don't think so," she said. "I just checked in today, and I haven't been out."

"One of the other officers thought he heard a stairwell door open on this floor, and then a room door opening and closing. He thought it might be your room. Was it"

"No."

"Did you hear it, too"

"If I did, it didn't make an impression," she said. "Doors open and close all the time."

"I know. Sorry to bother you."

"That's all right. Good luck." The door closed, and Iris clicked the dead bolt shut. Iris turned toward Jane, but Jane sat up and put her finger to her lips again and shook her head.

They both stayed still for at least thirty seconds, and then heard the two sets of heavy footsteps moving off along the hallway. Jane whispered to Iris, "You seem to be okay for the moment, but before long, somebody will notice the same card was used for both rooms. We need to get out to the car Sarah lent us before that happens."

"How"

"You have to leave right away. Put both room keys in the folder and leave them in the automatic checkout box at the front desk, then walk out to the car. I'll try to be there, too. If the cops stop you, fine. You don't know anything, and haven't done anything. You're leaving because the cop told you there might be armed and dangerous people in the hotel."

"I want to go with you."

"All right. Just do as I say for now." Jane practically pushed her out the door.

Jane thought for a few seconds. There was no way out by using the elevator or going down the stairs to the lobby. It would have to be up. She went out to the hallway into the stairwell, then climbed painfully up one level to the fourth floor. She knew that there was a pool on the fourth level, and she could see the door at the end of the hall. She went out through the door, and saw the lighted water moving gently, throwing a reflection on the white stucco wall. There was a sign that said, Lifeguard on Duty 8:00 a.m. Until 5:00 p.m. Beyond the sign she saw what she had hoped for. On a rack next to the lifeguard's elevated chair there was a circular life preserver with a long nylon rope attached to it.

Jane stepped to the side of the pool and looked over the low wall at the parking lot below. On this side were the four police cars parked in front of the entrance. She walked to the opposite side of the roof and looked down. There were two more cars, to watch the rear entrance. There was only one more side, and she went there, looked below, and found herself looking down at a flat roof. It was a one-story wing of the hotel that jutted out a bit from the main building. On it were various vents and ducts, and what looked like a big central air-conditioning unit. Beside it was a large enclosure with a high fence, and inside were two large Dumpsters.

She took the life ring and lifted its rope from the hook on the wall. She walked to the side of the pool above the lower wing, tied the rope securely to the iron railing, and slipped the life preserver over her head and shoulders so her arms were free. She took a last look down, then gripped the rope, wound it around her right forearm, and lowered herself over the railing. She rappelled down the wall of the hotel, pushing off and landing with her left foot only, taking it deliberately to keep from making noise or swinging too far out from the wall. She managed to lower herself about forty feet, but then there was no more rope. She looked down. She judged that the remaining distance was only about six or seven feet, so she carefully slipped her body out of the life ring, held on to it with both hands, then touched the roof with her toes. She let go, and her right leg gave a painful twinge.

She took a few seconds to verify that she had not injured herself, then walked to the edge of the roof and looked over. There was a set of steel ladder steps attached to the brick wall, so she sat down, lowered her feet to the first step, and descended cautiously. The steps stopped at the top of one of the Dumpsters. She stood on the closed steel lid and looked out over the fence at the lot beyond. She could see Jim Shelby's car out on the street, and she could see Iris in the black car in the parking lot. Iris was closer. Jane went around the fence and moved along the side of the building until she was far enough, then limped to the row of cars where Iris was parked, and continued up the row until she reached Iris.

She opened the door and sat in the passenger seat. "Drive," she said. "Go out to the street at the exit over there. Go no more than ten miles an hour."

Iris drove slowly and cautiously. Jane watched the hotel entrance, the police cars, and the cars in the street, but she saw no reaction, except one. As Iris pulled out into the street, Jim Shelby's car started.

"Good," said Jane. "He sees me." After they had moved off a hundred yards, Jane watched through the rear window while Shelby pulled out and followed.

Jane said, "Okay, my runner is following us. We'll keep going for a few minutes to be sure we haven't been spotted. Then you're going to have a choice."

"A choice What is it"

"The man behind us was convicted of murdering his wife a few years ago in California. I know he didn't do it, so about a week ago I broke him out of a Los Angeles courthouse where he was supposed to testify about another crime. He and I were the ones the police were looking for tonight."

"Oh, my God."

"There are also some other men paid to kill him, because it will close the case and nothing will ever happen to threaten the real murderer. They're the ones who shot me and then tortured me."

"Oh, my God, Melanie."

"Jane. Call me Jane."

"But what am I choosing"

"You can take this car and drive someplace where you will start a new, quiet life and try not to get found by your ex-husband. That would be the most sensible thing you can do."

"What's the other choice"

"You could go with us. Park the car in a lot somewhere, and then send the keys to Sarah at the Lifeboat, so she can send someone to pick it up. Then get in the other car with us. I'll try to get him settled somewhere, and then do the same for you. That's what I do professionally. So I might be able to make you better at disappearing. But it's a very harsh trade-off, because being with us is very dangerous. You would also have to protect my secrets and my runner's secrets, even if it kills you." She added, "And it might."

"I'll go with you."

"You're not giving yourself time to think."

"I know what I'm doing. There's no question in my mind that Steve will find me again. He's very good at these things. He used to work as a private detective-got a license and everything-but he got fired. If he finds me, he will give me all the pain and suffering he can while he's killing me. You got away from the police, and from the people who want to kill your friend. But I know I can't get away from Steve. I need your help."

"All right," Jane said. "Get onto the interstate and follow the signs to the airport."

Iris drove the black car to the long-term parking lot, and Shelby waited outside in his car. Jane and Iris walked out to the street and got into Shelby's car. Shelby drove off toward the interstate.

Shelby glided onto the entrance ramp and accelerated. He merged onto the right lane of the highway, then moved another lane to the left. Jane turned and stared out the rear window for a full minute before she faced the front again and settled comfortably in her seat.

"Jim, this is Iris. Iris, Jim."

"Pleased to meet you," Iris said. "Thank you for letting me come along."

"Nice to meet you. But don't thank me. Jane made the decision and took all the risk."

"I'm sorry," Iris said. "I'll do my best not to contribute to the risks. I just have to get away from my troubles and start over."

"Me too," he said.

"Jim," Jane said. "When you checked in at the hotel, did you have to write down your license number"

"No," he said.

"Have you driven this car since you arrived"

"No. I made one quick stop to buy some food and supplies at a supermarket on the way, in Provo. I didn't want to have to go out and show my face here, so I figured I'd take one chance and then stay in until you caught up."

"Good. This car is probably still safe for the moment. If people recognized us, they didn't connect us with this car."

"What do we do to be sure"

"We can't be sure," she said. "What we can do is keep moving. We'll take turns driving and sleeping. Every day or so we'll steal new license plates and change them. We'll pay in cash for the few things we need, and use the restrooms at gas stations. We'll get to your sister as quickly as possible."

"Agreed. I don't mind driving the rest of this shift," said Shelby. "You can go to sleep."

"Are you sure"

"I've been restless, waiting to get on the road. It feels as though we're making progress, not just waiting for them to catch up with us."

"As long as we're moving, we're okay. Wake me up if you get sleepy. We've got nothing to do but drive." In a minute, Jane was sound asleep. A short time later, so was Iris.

8.

It was late night in Chicago. Wylie lay on one of the two big beds in the hotel room, watching a rebroadcast of a baseball game. He didn't care at all about the fate of the Chicago Cubs, but he was too tired to keep pressing the remote control to search for something better. He supposed watching the Cubs lose was the price for watching them play.

Maloney seemed nervous tonight. He was standing on the balcony, staring out over the parking lot, waiting for Gorman to get out of the shower so he could have his turn. Maloney wasn't a good traveler. The constant motion and long hours seemed to make him tense, and it took him a long time to unwind before he could sleep.

There was a quiet knock on the door, and Maloney charged across the room to answer it. He squinted to look through the peephole. "It's Mr. Martel." Maloney moved his head back and forth to see if their visitor had brought anyone with him, but he realized that looking gained him nothing because he would have to open the door anyway. He pulled the door open wide and said, "Welcome, Mr. Martel." Martel was about forty, but he looked younger, with smooth, unlined skin that was always so evenly tanned it looked almost unreal; thick, dark hair; and a tall, fit body.

Martel brushed past him into the room, then turned and closed the door himself, as though he didn't trust Maloney to do it. "Turn that off."

Wylie sat up and clicked the remote control, and the screen went black. Maloney closed the big sliding window to the balcony, then the curtain. Next he went to the bathroom door, opened it a few inches, and called, "Mr. Martel is here." After a couple of seconds the shower stopped. While they were waiting for Gorman to appear, Maloney seemed to feel he had to fill the silence. "I was watching the parking lot but I didn't see you pull in."

Martel looked as though he had never before realized what a moron Maloney was, and the realization was painful to him. He went and sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room. It was the only place in the room for a person to sit with any sort of dignity, so Maloney stood. After a few more seconds a damp Gorman emerged from the bathroom wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe with the hotel's logo embroidered on the chest. He sat on the bed beside Wylie.

Martel said, "I understand that you discovered that the woman who got Shelby out of the courthouse is worth something."

"Yeah," said Wylie. "We were amazed. As soon as we realized she'd pulled it off, we grabbed her off the street. Maloney and Gorman pretended to be cops. We figured she could tell us where Shelby had gone."

"So"

"She wouldn't. First she jumped out of the car screaming for help, so all Maloney could do was act like a cop and shoot her in the leg. After the doctor patched her up we started working her over to get her to talk. We beat her up, burned her, shocked her, got ready to cut her, and she said nothing. Zero. I was curious about her, so I sent out some e-mails to guys I know, describing her and saying what she'd done. I got two answers right away, and two more a day later."

"What guys" Martel said it with a hint of irritation.

"I never let anybody know who I was working for, or what we were doing."

"I asked what guys."

"One is a private detective, only he lost his license. His name is Jack Killigan. He still works for some of his old clients, and he's done some searching for people. He gets so he knows who's worth finding. Another is Van Springer. He works as a go-between who buys things for people. One time it will be a clean car or a few guns, another time it's something else. Sometimes he gets asked to find somebody in particular. Another is a guy named Hosper, a bounty hunter."

"Okay. I get the idea. What did they say"

"That when we got this one we hit the lottery."

"Really"

"Yes. We just wanted to know where Shelby would be headed. When she wouldn't talk I thought if we found out where she was from, we could look there. But both these guys said they had clients who would pay seven figures for her. About five hours later, two more were sniffing around. Then I got an e-mail from a guy I didn't even know. He runs a big security company."

Martel said, "This is really interesting, Wylie. You amaze me sometimes. Most of the time you don't. When were you going to tell me about this woman"

"I did tell you."

"You told me after she got away. You had already started negotiating with all these buyers. You were going to sell her yourself."

"No," said Wylie. "I wasn't. I was just trying to find out what we had on our hands, so I could give you the whole story."

Martel stared at Wylie for a few seconds, not glaring, but looking at him calmly and evenly. Then he said, "We have a different situation today. You don't have him or her, and I want them both. They're probably together again by now. I assume they don't know that we've got his sister's new address-or even that we know he has a sister."

Wylie looked uncomfortable. "Well, yes. The woman knows that we know there's a sister. When we had her, I said if she didn't talk we'd get the sister to talk."

Martel slowly shook his head. "Then if you know where the sister is right now, why the fuck are you in a hotel in Chicago instead of on the way to her"

"We've been on the road for days, after cleaning up the place where we had her, and we were tired, dirty, and hungry for a decent meal. We'll do better if we feel better."

"Wylie. I want you to remember that the reason you're chasing around the country is that you fucked up. Repeatedly. Now you know the address, and here you are, resting up. I'm astonished. I'm sure you know that if you go up there and get Shelby and this woman, there will be a big payday for all three of you. I want her alive, and him dead. If you don't succeed, I'm done with you. I'm giving you a way to fix your mistakes."

Martel sat in the armchair staring at Wylie. Then he slowly moved his head to look at the other two. "Are you waiting for something"

Wylie said, "You want us to leave now"

Martel said, "Can you possibly think I don't"

The three men hurried around the room picking up clothes they had thrown on the floor, filling their pockets with keys, wallets, and change they had left on the furniture. "As soon as you're ready you can just go. Leave your room keys and I'll check out for you."

He waited in silence while they finished putting their belongings into suitcases and headed out the door. When they were gone he stood up, went to the window, and waited until he saw their blue Crown Victoria pull away from the building and drive to the exit from the parking lot onto the highway. He put the three room key cards in his pocket and went to the door.

It was these small, day-to-day decisions that made the difference between them and him. They avoided extending themselves if there was any discomfort, let themselves be distracted, stopped trying the minute they felt they'd expended exactly as much effort as they had to.

It depressed him that he had to pay men like these to solve problems for him. Eleven years ago he had started his business with the idea of never doing anything that would attract the attention of the authorities. That would allow him never to hire criminals. But here he was, years later, with not only these three but nine more on his payroll-a dozen men who were engaged in applying various levels of force to protect his interests.

He'd had the simplest sort of business plan. He had started a medical supply company and given it a name that sounded old and established. In order to have merchandise, he would induce a young salesperson from a pharmaceutical company to sell him medical drugs. He specialized in the obvious ones-Oxycontin, methadone, morphine, Vicodin, Valium, and a few others that were in such high demand he could charge huge markups and sell them instantly. For eleven years he had been an enormously successful drug dealer without ever having to step on a dark street or deal with anyone who used drugs.

He always paid the pharmaceutical company's bill on time. That kept the salesperson in the clear and the pharmaceutical company happy. He would produce paperwork that listed small resales to a large number of genuine hospital pharmacies, clinics, medical groups, and universities. The government looked closely at every prescription written for drugs like these. The prescription had to be written by an MD personally on a numbered prescription slip that carried the doctor's medical license number. But no prescriptions were ever written. In theory, the drug just stayed locked up in these institutional facilities for years. The hospital pharmacists had never ordered or received any of these drugs, so they never wondered where the drugs went. The drugs never got onto an inventory, so they were never reported missing.

Martel's companies never had his name on them. The officers and managers were all doctors. One of his brilliant observations that made his business possible was that it was absolutely futile to go to mature, practicing physicians and present them with a scheme to make extra money. They had money. And the ones who were corruptible were already working schemes of their own and didn't need a partner.

Instead Martel sought out very young doctors, men and women still in medical school or interning. Some were still paying tuition or huge student loans. If they agreed to be on the board of one of his companies, they would receive good pay for doing very little. They might notice at some point that their names appeared on other papers-on the letterhead of company stationery, or even as a signatory of a letter. But they would not know that their credentials were being used to get the company licensed to handle narcotics. After three or four years, the young doctor might move on to another part of the country and forget the relationship, but Martel's companies would not forget him.

Martel had operated some of the companies for as long as eleven years without raising much suspicion. The only way the authorities might find discrepancies was by comparing sales data from the giant pharmaceutical manu-facturers with the records of the hospital pharmacies to which Martel supposedly had sold small amounts of a drug, a form of check that seldom happened. When it did happen, he could produce receipts or drugs on demand. He knew that given the tiny amounts of drugs involved and the age of some of the orders, the authorities would see no point in an investigation.

Whenever it seemed to him that questions were about to be asked, he would dissolve the company or have another company he owned buy it and take over. On some occasions he had even made a show of turning over unsold drugs to the local authorities to be destroyed. When he did that, the bottles were full, but not necessarily full strength. At times he had such quantities of narcotics going through his companies that he could have made a fortune just diverting the number of bottles and pills that would constitute normal breakage from shipping that never took place.

He loved the business. It not only had made him rich but it had also brought him women. Pharmaceutical sales reps were nearly all young, attractive women. To them he was a very important customer. Unlike many of their other customers he was male, unmarried, only slightly older than they were, and unfailingly interested in them. He also traveled from city to city, where he met lots of other women who knew only that he was a rich, handsome man who had something to do with medicine.

Today he had changed his itinerary to stop in Chicago because he had sensed Wylie and the others needed to be reminded to be afraid of him. He had sent them out to kill Shelby-to finish killing him, really. Shelby was only a mild concern, but Martel hadn't forgotten him. Martel had made sure Shelby was convicted of the death of his wife, but having him in a jail cell was simply not enough. Every year criminals were released on appeals, new evidence was found, lawyers were declared incompetent. There was no reason for Daniel Martel to live with that risk-or any risk. Shelby was like a bee that had been swatted but hadn't died yet. More than one bee like that had staged enough of a recovery to sting.

This woman was something else. Wylie didn't seem to have fully understood what he'd had, and he'd gotten careless enough to let her escape. If there were four people who didn't know each other but knew who she was and wanted to bid millions for her, then there might be eight, or twenty. But Wylie was a man of action-another term for a fool. He had acted to get an auction going without first thinking through all of the implications.

Martel left the hotel and drove toward Midway Airport. He felt depressed when he had to think about men like Wylie. Having just two or three of them was enough to keep all of the pharmaceutical reps and interns and bookkeepers from becoming troublesome. But he had learned that he couldn't stop there. He'd had to hire a second set of three to serve as a threat to the first set. Then he'd needed to hire another six to counter the first six. He had forced himself to stop at a dozen. But he sometimes implied to each of them that there might be another dozen, or an unknowable number, waiting for them to cause problems and be annihilated.

9.

Jane woke at three a.m. leaning against the passenger door and sat up. She looked at Shelby beside her, then at Iris lying behind her on the back seat. "Time for my turn at the wheel," she said. They traded places and she drove for a time, then looked at Shelby. "This is a great time to sleep. In a couple of hours there will be bright sunlight coming through the windshield."

"It's taking me a while to wind down. There are too many days behind me when I would have given anything to be outside and watch the telephone poles going past."

"Iris is asleep. Are you in the mood to talk"

"Sure."

"I'm sorry about bringing Iris without giving you a chance to refuse. Iris is a good person in a lousy situation, and she needs a little help. And she'll help us, too. Unlike us, she can walk in any door without fear of being recognized."

"I understand," he said. "If you trust her, I do. Things happen, and we have to adjust."

"Things happen is right. I had expected that you and I would have to elude the police. I didn't imagine that the people who framed you would be there, too. Tell me what you know about them. Who are Wylie, Gorman, and Maloney"

"I have no idea. I know the names Wylie, Gorman, and Maloney because you told me. I can only guess they must be friends of the man who killed my wife."

"What about him-the man who killed your wife"

"Almost nothing. I know that he was living with her for a while. I saw some of his clothes left in a closet."

"If you don't know about him, let's talk about your wife."

"I met her in college. The University of Texas at Austin. She was beautiful. Long, honey-blond hair, a great smile, a body like a goddess."

"I have an unpleasant question. If I'm being insensitive, please forgive me. But your sister told me Susan cheated on you even then, right after you met her. Is it true"

Jane watched him shrug, and then stay silent for a few seconds. "At the time, I would have sworn she would never cheat. She could have just dropped me and had somebody she liked better. But in the light of what happened later, and what I think happened, I'm not so sure. An attractive woman always has men looking at her. Any day she's inclined to, she can bring the whole thing on and have it over with in an hour or two, including a bit of flirting ahead of time and putting on fresh makeup afterward. There were plenty of times when she could have, and catching her at it would have been the last thing I was thinking about."

"So you proposed and she accepted, and you married. What did you do for a living"

"I was a beginning executive at Cole and Castor, the office supply wholesaler. They started me as a trainee account manager and then moved me around a bit, so the departments and I got used to each other-sales, advertising, inventory, purchasing. Sue was in pharmaceutical sales at Megapharm, working mostly with hospitals and medical groups."

"And when did the problems start in the marriage"

"About two and a half years into it, I sensed that she wasn't quite right. First she was working late and tired all the time. I would get home around seven and she might show up at ten or eleven. She always dressed up with high heels and expensive clothes. She would come in and shed all that stuff on the way into the bathroom to wash off her makeup. When she came out she was in a pair of sweat pants and a big T-shirt. She would hardly talk to me while she had a snack and went to bed. Then we'd get up in the morning and start over."

Jane waited. He was talking steadily, moving in the direction of the crime, the moment when all of these details had made sense to him.

"Then she started having to go to medical conventions to lobby the doctors there to prescribe her company's products. This kept her away for three or four days at a time, with part of it being the whole weekend."

"When did you have time for each other" Jane asked.

"As she got busier, we were together less. Sex was practically nonexistent. She was gone so much, and then when she was home she was always too tired to even think about making love. I tried to be patient with all that. Then I thought I should say something, ask whether there was something I could change to make things better. She said no, the work would all pay off in the long run, and so I should be patient. I told myself she had a right to her career, and if working all those hours would get her somewhere, I should support her."

"So you dropped the subject"

"She said she loved me. We're all brought up to think we have to talk about everything, and that's all that matters. It isn't. What people do is the truth. If she doesn't have sex with you, she doesn't love you. If she isn't with you, it's because she doesn't want to be."

"How did it end"

"It took a while. I still thought that I was seeing things clearly. Then I happened to notice some new things. The first was while she was away at a weekend convention in Atlanta. She had left on Thursday morning. A notice came on her e-mail Friday that said her flight to Atlanta on Saturday morning was going to be delayed about fifteen minutes. I didn't see the e-mail until Saturday afternoon. The e-mail carried the six-digit confirmation number, so I looked up the reservation on the airline's site. Sure enough, the flight was Saturday morning, and the return flight was Sunday night. The flight wasn't charged to her company. It was charged to a credit card in her name, and it was a credit card I hadn't known about. The billing address was her mother's house. Naturally, I was wondering what she had been doing from Thursday morning until Saturday morning, and where she had spent the nights."

"What did you do"

"I called her, but everything went to voice mail. I went to visit her mother, to ask her if she'd heard from Sue. When I asked what she knew about the credit card, she seemed surprised. First it was `What card What do you mean' Then it was `Oh, that card. When you get married, plenty of things still come to you at your mother's house.' I could only pretend to shrug it off. I went home. When Susan came home on Sunday night I didn't say much about any of it. I just looked for signs. I noticed she didn't unpack that night. We both left for work the next morning, and I came back and opened her suitcase. She had a couple of tiny little bathing suits, but she loved to swim, and was at a big hotel, so it meant nothing. She also had business clothes and a cocktail dress, and jeans. Nothing conclusive."

"Did checking the suitcase help set your mind at rest"

"The opposite."

"Why"

"When I found myself sneaking around and searching my wife's suitcase for evidence, I felt I had come to a low point. I wanted to know once and for all. I also didn't want to know. Maybe it was a brief fling and it would end, and she'd learn she loved only me, and she'd be a great wife forever. I hated myself for having that thought, and for wishing I could be protected from the truth until the ugly part of the truth went away. I hated myself for suspecting her, and I felt self--loathing for ignoring the signs for so long. Some nights I was ready to confront her with the whole mess, and then I'd wake up in the morning and start wondering if I was just putting bad interpretations on innocent facts. It was horrible."

"So you did confront her"

"No. I came home from work as usual one night, and she didn't. That wasn't unusual. But I had a funny feeling. I noticed something was different in the living room. Things seemed to have been moved. No, I realized. They were -missing -a couple of pictures, a vase or two. I went into the bedroom and opened her closet. There was nothing left in it. Her dresser drawers were empty, and the drawers in the bathroom and the medicine cabinet. Usually the bathroom counter looked like a cosmetics store, but all the bottles and jars and tubes were gone. I went to the phone and called her cell number, but her phone was off. I called her private office number and it went to voice mail. I texted her-`Where are you' I figured if she was checking any e-mail it would be her office address, so I sent a careful e-mail, so I wouldn't embarrass her. I just said to please call me as soon as possible. And I waited up all night, but there was no response. At around five a.m. it occurred to me that I should check on some other things. I called the number for our bank, and punched in the account numbers for our accounts. The checking account had a hundred dollars, and the savings account balance was zero. She had moved away and cleaned us out. At seven I called in to work to take a sick day. At eight I called her mother."

"What did she say"

"That Sue wasn't with her, and her leaving town was my fault. She couldn't even go home to her mother, because I was too close by and wouldn't have left her alone. She had left Texas entirely."

"Did that make you think about backing off"

"No. I was frantic. I just wanted to know what went wrong. Was she in love with somebody else Was I just too repulsive to stay with for another minute Was she mad about something I looked for her. I finally went to see a lawyer, and while I was telling him the story I mentioned the whole money issue, because I couldn't pay him a lot of money until after payday. Right away he told me I didn't have a prayer of ever seeing the money again, but it was an adequate pretext for finding her and asking her for an explanation. He hired a skip-tracing company, and they found her new address, which was in California."

In the back seat, Iris stirred and sat up. "Hi," she said. "Where are we"

"We're still on the interstate, getting ready to make a stop for gas," Jane said. "It's a good time to use the restrooms and get a cup of coffee."

"Great idea," said Iris. "You two can just head for the restrooms and come back to the car. I'll be the one to show my face and buy the coffee."

Jane said, "Good idea," and looked at Shelby.

Shelby got the hint. "Thanks, Iris," he said. "It'll make stopping a whole lot safer for us."

Jane pulled off the interstate at a large gas station and bought gas, and they all used the restrooms. When Iris returned to the car with the coffee, Shelby was asleep.

10.

Jane still drove with her left foot so she could rest the muscles of her right thigh and help it heal. She had been trying for all of this time to keep her mind on Jim Shelby's troubles and off her own. But as she drove through the last dark stretch of night on the interstate, the thoughts and feelings came back to her.

She had been shot, captured, and tortured. She had not allowed herself to think about the horror and the brutality of the torture right away, because the memories and images might weaken her. She'd had work to do to get herself away from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and on to Salt Lake City, and then to get Shelby back in motion. But the darkness and the solitude brought her own experiences back.

The three men had done her terrible harm. She was afraid that she wasn't healing quickly enough, and that she and Shelby-and now Iris-would be killed because she couldn't run and couldn't fight, and her limping would make them stand out.

Now that she was beginning to heal, and the car made her injuries undetectable, she had a new concern. Now she was feeling the loss of the beautiful, strong, smooth body she'd had. She had always been a runner, a member of the track team at Deganawida High School and then at Cornell. Over the years she had kept running, and also done tai chi and practiced aikido each day, but she hadn't thought much about how it made her look. Now she knew that beauty had been more important to her than she had ever admitted to herself. What would Carey think when he saw her.

Her mind moved deeper into the experience. The captors had not raped her. She supposed that since she had been shot right away, rape would not have happened until she had recovered. And then their priority had been to find out where Jim Shelby was, so they weakened and marked her further. But she had expected that sometime soon she would be raped. If they'd had the chance to complete their auction, then she would have been at the mercy of men who had been hunting her for years, hating her for outsmarting and outrunning them, but most of all for freeing their prey. She would have suffered everything they had been wishing they could do to her. Rape would have been only the beginning.

Jane checked her rearview mirrors, as she did every minute or two. There was a set of headlights that had been behind them for a few minutes. When she went faster, the other car sped up, too. When she slowed down, the other car didn't pass. Instead, the car slowed down, too, hanging back just far enough so she couldn't get a look at what was behind the headlights. She accelerated sharply.

Shelby sat up. "What's going on"

"I'm just trying to figure that out," she said. "There's a set of headlights behind us that's been there too long."

He turned in his seat and stared out the rear window. "Could it be cops"

"I can't say no to anything, but usually if cops get curious, they speed up and take a closer look at you. They run your plates on their computer. If they're still curious they pull you over."

Suddenly the car behind them pulled out into the left lane. Jane caught a clear silhouette of the approaching car in the headlights of cars behind it. "It's a cop," she said. "I can see the light bar on the roof. He's going to pass us. Sit tight." She slowed down.

The car moved steadily up to their left, accelerating all the time. It slid past them, and the cop in the passenger seat glanced at them but then let his eyes focus on the next car ahead. The police car was moving fast now, and its red taillights gradually diminished into the distance. "I guess we're not the ones he wants."

"That's a relief," said Shelby. "Want me to drive for a while"

"Not yet. Feel like talking some more"

"About what"

"When I've taken people out of the world in the past, all of them had somebody chasing them. But I can't recall any who were already serving a life sentence in jail and still had enemies trying to get at them. Why do you"

"I don't know. They sent me to prison for life. They should have been satisfied."

"I keep thinking it has to be something about the murder. If we can figure out what happened to your wife, maybe we'll know what these people are so afraid of."

"My sister told you the essentials, and I've told you most of what went on between Susan and me."

"You said she moved to California. What was there"

"Supposedly it was to be able to start a new life without interference from me."

"`Supposedly'"

"Her mother said that. After I found out where Sue was, I called her mother to ask if I could come over and talk. She said she thought that might be a good idea. She said to come over to her house at seven, and we could have a real conversation."

"Did you tell her you knew where Susan was"

"No, I didn't," he said. "I didn't feel as though she had ever been on my side, and I certainly didn't that night."

"And nothing new happened the weekend Susan went away No argument, no big fight stands out in your memory"

"No fights. The only thing that stands out is that I'd found out she had concealed a lot about her business trips, and I had asked her mother about the credit card. The next thing that happened was that she was gone."

"About the money-"

"I didn't care about the money."

"I believe you weren't motivated in any of this by money. The victim often isn't. The thief is. Otherwise she wouldn't steal. How much was in the account she emptied"

"About two hundred thousand. What I'm saying is that she didn't decide to leave me to get my part of the money."

"Why do you think she left"

"Embarrassment. Humiliation. I had evidence that she'd been having an affair, and evidence that her mother had known and helped her. They had both lied to me. As soon as her mother told her I'd found her reservation and the credit card number, she knew what our next conversation would be about, so she decided there wouldn't be one."

"Was she afraid you would do her physical harm"

"She couldn't have been. She'd known me since college. I've never done anything violent. I just wanted to talk, so I could either close the door on the whole marriage, or know what to do to save it."

"But you decided to start with her mother"

"Yes. If I was polite and respectful, I thought she might give me an idea of what to expect from Sue. I even thought that if it went well, she would tell Sue I was being reasonable and deserved an explanation."

"How did it go"

"I went to her house at seven, and she opened the door. When I stepped inside, I saw she wasn't alone."

"Who was there"

"Her brother-Sue's uncle Dave-and his two sons, one they called Little Dave after his father, and Cody. When I walked in, they were all sitting in the living room scowling at me."

"How did you react"

"It didn't look good, but I thought I had to try. So I said, `All right, then. We can all talk. Here's the situation I'm in. The wife I've loved since freshman year has taken off and left me without saying a word. She took with her our savings, about three quarters of which came from my paychecks, and a new car that belonged to both of us. I had been planning to ask her about her last business trip, when she left home two days early and came home a day late. She charged the trip to a credit card that I didn't know she had, and it is billed to this address instead of ours. I'd like to hear her explanation of all of this. Since she's gone, I thought you might be able to help me understand what she was thinking.'"

"What did she say"

"Her mother said, `I can't believe you've come into my home and in front of my family accuse my daughter of adultery and theft.'

"I said, `I didn't come here to call her names.'

"`Why did you come, then'

"`I'd like to know if she has plans to come back to me. I'd like to know if she's found somebody else, and if she plans to file for divorce. If so, we'll have to get some legal help and make an agreement about how to proceed.'

"The one to answer was Uncle Dave. He said, `You came in here with an attitude. You accused the lady of conspiring with her daughter to steal your money and then helping her daughter to whore herself out to other men. Now, it's time for you to get yourself out of here.'

"I said, `I'll leave in a moment, but first I'd like to say something to Mrs. Owens.' And I turned to her. That was a mistake. The two boys were on me from behind. The pair of them were grappling with me and throwing punches at once. As soon as I was fully engaged in fighting them off, the father got up and started throwing hard punches from the outside. A few of them landed. Pretty soon I was worn out from struggling with the boys and bleeding from the punches. The only satisfaction I got was watching them wreck the house doing it. They threw me out on the lawn and locked the door."

"Did you just go home"

"I went home the long way. They called the police, who got there in a minute. There were two of them, an older one and a young one. The older one explained the situation. When they're called out on a domestic disturbance, they have to arrest somebody. There were four witnesses on one side, and one on the other. Guess who got arrested."

"Couldn't the cops see who got the worst of it"

"Of course. What the older cop said was that I had obviously been hit in the head a lot, and since this was about my absent wife, I was obviously living alone at that time. It was better not to leave me alone, since there might be a concussion or something. So I was going to spend the night at the station."

"I suppose that makes sense."

"The problem was that it gave me a record. I had been arrested for domestic violence."

"They released you. What happened next"

"I flew to California, to the place where the skip tracer had found Sue. I drove straight from the airport to her apartment building in Santa Monica. I had no idea how long it would take to wrap this up, so I'd taken a week off work and bought a one-way ticket."

"What did you do first Did you sit in the car and watch the building to see if she was alone"

"It never occurred to me. It was a first-floor apartment in a big stucco building that was one of about seven buildings on the block, mostly condos. I just figured I'd go talk to her."

"Was she there"

"It was around midday, between twelve and one, and I figured she couldn't have found a new job to go to this quickly. And she didn't need to, because she had all our savings. But when I rang the bell, nobody answered the door. I knocked, stood around, looked in the underground garage to see if our car was there. The spaces were just about full, but ours wasn't one of the cars. At this point I was wondering if I had the wrong address. I went to the side windows to peer in. But when I got to the side window, I saw a plant in a pot on the ledge outside. Susan was one of those women who didn't have much self-discipline, so she found ways to make up for it. She set her alarm clock fifteen minutes ahead to fool herself into getting up. She bought candy, but froze it so she couldn't eat it on impulse. And she always hid a spare key outside so she wouldn't lock herself out. The pot looked to me like the sort of place where she'd hide a key, and I didn't see any others, so I poked my finger into the dirt and found the key. I unlocked the door and went inside."

"Did you learn anything"

"It was the right address. The first thing I saw was the vase that used to be on our mantel-blue and yellow glass melted together in swirls. It was on a coffee table next to an issue of Maxim."

"The men's magazine"

"Yeah. There were things of hers-or ours-around the place. I would say exactly one carload of them. And there were other things that belonged to a man. The place had leather furniture, a big-screen TV. I noticed that on the kitchen counter there were two coffeemakers, and one of them looked exactly like the one from our house in Texas. The bedroom had a king bed, two dressers, and two nightstands, and on one of them the alarm clock was set fifteen minutes ahead. I sniffed the pillow on that side, and it smelled like her hair. I went to the closet. About half of it was taken up by a man's clothes-sport coats, shirts, jackets, baseball caps, a panama hat, lots of sneakers and shoes. The other side was full of clothes I'd seen Susan wear. There was also a really short, sheer red nightie that she had tossed toward the laundry basket, but the basket was full, so it was draped over the rest. For years she had been wearing T-shirts and sweat pants to sleep in."

"What did you do"

"I went back to the living room. I sat by the coffee table and looked at the mailing label on the corner of the magazine to see what his name was. The label said `Megapharm,' which was the name of her company, but the address was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. I started looking in drawers and things to find something-bills or other mail that would at least give me the name of the guy she was living with. But after a while it occurred to me that I was being stupid. I was in a place I had no legal right to enter. The marriage was over. So I took a sheet of paper from a notepad by the phone and wrote her a note. I said, `When you're ready for the divorce, get in touch. You know the address and phone number. Jim.'"

"After all that, you just wrote a note and left"

"I turned in my rental car at the airport, then waited about three hours for my flight. I remember wondering if I should go back to try again, but I couldn't think of anything that would accomplish. I had my cell phone on all that time, but she hadn't called. I even checked the voice mail at home in case she left a message for when I got home. When I boarded my plane I turned off the phone and that was that."

"That was that"

"As far as I was concerned, she was out of my life. I went home and went to work for a month or so. I did my best to stop thinking about her. I started to date a woman I knew from work. I suppose it was nothing serious. We had known each other for years and both kind of wondered what it would be like. She'd been divorced for a year and a half, and now I was separated from my wife, so we found out, and it was pleasant. Then, about three weeks later, Sue was killed. The day after they found her body there was a knock on my door. The California police had asked the Texas police to find out just where her husband was."

"Standard procedure."

"Well, they woke me up, and with me was the woman I'd been dating. That went into the record-that I wasn't a grieving husband, but a guy who had already replaced his wife. Then there was the domestic violence arrest at her mother's. At that point I learned that both of them-Sue and her mother-had gotten restraining orders against me in both states, saying I represented a danger to them. Sue's death was settling on me just about the time the police started telling me why I was a great suspect and trying to get a reaction on tape."

"Did they tell you the details of the murder"

"She was found in the apartment by the building manager, who wanted to talk to her about why her rent check had bounced. He couldn't get her to answer the door, so he opened it, and there she was. She had been hit with a heavy metal object several times, and then stabbed. They didn't have a time of death, and it was impossible for me to provide an alibi to account for every possible time."

"Did the cops give you any useful information"

"I learned pretty quick that I was the only suspect. What I didn't know yet was that the man who shared the apartment in Los Angeles with her was gone. He had moved every single thing of his out of there. Then he had given the place a careful cleaning. My prints were on a few things, but his weren't. The apartment lease was in her name. The note I'd left proved I'd been there. I hadn't put a date on it, and so the guy who framed me left it on the counter as though I'd been there in the past few days."

"Tell me about the trial. At least some of the men who have been after us were there. Did you see them"

"I was in Los Angeles County Jail for ten months before my case came up on the docket. My sister told me there were men going around in Austin scaring off people who might testify for me, but I never saw them. Once the trial got going, I got the rest of my education. I was a man with a history of domestic violence, a person who broke a restraining order to get to his ex-wife. Everything the prosecutor could say I'd done was against me. But he also brought out everything bad Sue had ever done to me, and that was against me, too. The fact that she'd cheated on me and stolen our savings didn't make anybody sorry for me, but it was a convincing motive for murder. They brought her mother, uncle, and cousins to testify I was crazy with anger. Sue had supposedly even said something to some woman at work about how, if she was murdered, it would be me. I'm sure the woman was paid to say that."

"How long did it take the jury to convict you"

"They had a verdict in three and a half hours. They put the cuffs back on me as soon as the verdict was read, and took me back to the county jail. A week or so later they got me out to hear my life sentence."

The voice from the back seat startled him. "You poor thing."

He turned his head to look at Iris. "I thought you were asleep."

"I woke up. I hope you don't mind that I heard." She put her hand on his shoulder.

He shook his head. "There aren't any secrets. It was all in the papers and on TV at the time. It probably is again right now, so everybody knows what kind of man escaped."

"Nobody escaped," Jane said. She glanced at Iris in the rearview mirror. "Neither of you escaped. Those people don't exist anymore."

11.

They stayed on the road as long as they could, and stopped only to change drivers and buy necessities. They paid in cash for everything they bought. The long, straight highways in the middle of the country gave Jane time to begin teaching the others how to stay difficult to find. "Every time you deal with anybody, there is information to protect, and misinformation to plant. Even here on the road."

"On the road" said Iris. "You mean we lie just for the sake of lying"

"We hide the truth, or anything that could lead anybody to the truth. The fewer people who see Jim, the smaller the chance he'll be recognized. I was photographed at the courthouse, so I'm a potential problem, too. So we have you do most of our talking, and if only one person needs to show her face, it will always be your job. We want to protect the car, and have as few people as possible associate it with us. That's why I try to park it where it's not easy to see, and there are no cameras to leave a record of the license number. If we talk to anyone in a station or restaurant, always lie. If we're going north, say south. Any misdirection might save your life."

When it was Jane's turn she drove hard, staying at or slightly above the speed limit for each three-hour shift, pushing it when the rest of the traffic was fast, and then keeping the needle glued to the speed limit when the rest slowed down. She didn't accelerate or touch the brakes for long stretches of road, because keeping a car moving at the same speed used the least gas and put the least strain on the car's parts.

They drove for almost three days, over nineteen hundred miles from Salt Lake City to Delaware Avenue at Gates Circle in Buffalo, and they arrived at one forty-five p.m. When Shelby began the arc that would take them halfway around the circle, Jane said, "Keep going north for a few blocks, then pull over wherever you can do it safely and we'll change places."

He pulled over a few blocks farther on, and Jane took the wheel. She went around the first block, then came back south on Delaware and into the center of the city.

Shelby said, "Where are we going"

"To a place where you'll be safe while I pick up your sister and bring her back."

"She's my sister. I should be with you."

"She and I have met, remember" Jane said. "This is the best way."

Iris said, "But what's the point in splitting up"

"Anybody who knows where Sarah is will be waiting near her, trying to get Jim. When I was in Los Angeles, one of the men who held me there told me they knew about her and that she'd be the next one if I didn't tell where Jim was. She'll be a priority for the police, too. They always expect fugitives to turn to a relative, and most of them do. The reason we've been tearing across the country is to get to her before anyone can figure out where she is."

"But we could all do that together."

"If you stay here with Jim, he doesn't have to go out and be seen. You don't fit the description of the woman who helped him escape, so you make him safer. There's only one person looking for you, and he's in a hospital or a prison cell for now."

"But you're still hurt."

"I'm not planning to do anything strenuous."

"But-"

"Don't bother," Jane said. "This is something I'll do better alone."

Jane called from a pay phone on the way to reserve a room, then drove them to the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Buffalo as though she were a friend who had picked them up at the airport. She paused at the entrance and watched them go inside with their suitcases. As Jane had instructed her to, Iris went to the desk with a credit card of Jane's to register while Shelby disappeared into a men's room in a corner of the lobby. Jane had seen enough. She drove off.

The drive to Ithaca was exactly as she remembered it from the years when she was a student at Cornell. There was a very long stretch of the New York State Thruway, and then the exit at Waterloo, and the long drive beside Cayuga Lake to the southern tip. She stopped in a gas station in Tompkins County near Ithaca to fill the tank, then went into the ladies' room to change the bandage on her leg again. For the whole trip she had been careful to keep the dressing fresh and clean, and she had used her left foot on the pedal when she drove, so her injured right leg was improving rapidly. Jane found her way to Dryden Road just after seven in the evening.

This was farm country, but most of the property this close to the university was no longer planted, and the only domesticated animals seemed to be dogs and a few horses. She had to read the house numbers stenciled on the sides of galvanized-steel rural mailboxes at the side of the road, but the long gravel driveways led to suburban houses, a lot of them probably owned by professors at Cornell or Ithaca College.

When Jane found the address she was looking for, she got only a second or two to glance down the driveway at the house. She saw a flash of lighted windows, and that was all. She drove on for a few hundred yards before she found a place to pull over. She looked in every direction, then saw that the nearest farmhouse was old, and apparently whoever owned the land didn't live there. She backed her car into the orchard and parked it.

Jane sat in the car for a few minutes and watched the traffic while she thought. There was something that bothered her about what she had seen at the house where Sarah was staying. At the end of the driveway was the house, and beside it a two-car garage. That looked fine. The garage door was shut, and there was no telling whether Sarah's car was there or not. But there had been a lot of lights on in the house, and no blinds or curtains shut. There was something inviting about all the lights, but it didn't feel like a house where someone was trying to wait quietly. Maybe Sarah was one of those people who felt safe only if every bulb in a house was blazing, but she had not struck Jane that way.

Jane reached under the seat and picked up the pistol she had brought with her across the country. She released the magazine and made sure the fourteen rounds she remembered were still there. She clicked the magazine back in, pulled the slide to cycle the first round in, and flicked on the safety. But the gun didn't make her feel better. Something was wrong.

Jane opened the glove compartment. She found the plastic pack of razor blades she had used to scrape off the dealer's stickers on the windows. The blades were the old-fashioned kind with one sharp edge and one thick and blunt, used mostly for linoleum cutters and paint scrapers. From the drugstore bag on the floor she picked up the roll of adhesive tape she had used whenever she changed the bandage on her thigh. She took off her shoes and socks, taped one razor blade to the top of each foot, and replaced the socks and shoes.

The house was about a quarter mile back up the road, so she began to walk. The right leg was still weak, but the pain had subsided over the past few days. She kept to the shoulder of the road, but when a car came along she diverted her path into the orchards and bushes where the headlights would miss her and she wouldn't be seen in the dark. She walked back to the mailbox, but she went more slowly up the outside of the driveway, where the view was complicated by trees, then slipped across to the side of the house.

It was a single-story house with a high, pitched roof and narrow clapboards painted the dried-blood color of a barn. She looked in the first window and saw the dining room. There had been an attempt to furnish the neat little house with authentic early-nineteenth-century furniture. The dining table and chairs were bird's-eye maple, and in the part of the living room she could see were a couple of red cherrywood tables and short cabinets. There were built-in bookcases along the far wall.

For all the lights, Jane could hear no sounds inside, and saw no people. Before she went to the front door and knocked, she wanted to reassure herself that Sarah Shelby was here, and alone.

Jane walked farther between the driveway and the side of the house, and around to the kitchen window in the back. She had to go up the first step of the back porch to see in the window. There was a counter, and in the sink she could see pots and pans that Sarah must have used to prepare her dinner. She pulled herself up a little farther and peered in at the kitchen table. There were four dirty plates, four glasses, and four sets of silverware. Everything was pushed aside or piled, as though dinner was over and four people had eaten. It was too many. Who could Sarah Shelby know in Ithaca, New York.

Jane walked to the garage and looked in the side window. There were two cars inside. One would be Sarah Shelby's. Jane had an awful suspicion about whom the other might belong to. She tried to assure herself that if someone were trying to ambush Shelby when he came to meet his sister, he wouldn't leave his car in the garage. But she couldn't prove that to herself.

Jane moved to the front of the house and crouched among the shrubs. She was careful not to touch the clapboards and not to make a sound that could be heard inside. Slowly, carefully, she raised her eye to the corner of the front window.

Sarah came through the living room, but right behind her was Maloney, the man who had shot Jane in Los Angeles. Sarah was carrying some beer bottles that someone had left in the living room, and Maloney was carrying something, too. As Sarah went through the dining room into the kitchen, Jane could see she was hobbling, as though her ankles were tied with a short rope to keep her from running.

Jane moved with her along the outside of the house, then saw her in the kitchen starting to wash the dishes in the sink. Then Jane saw Maloney step in. This time Jane could see that what he was carrying was a short-barreled pump shotgun. The sight of it made Jane sick. She knew what he would do with it if he met resistance. If Sarah tried to run, or if someone tried to drag her away, Maloney could hardly miss. There wouldn't be much chance of her surviving.

Jane couldn't see a simple way to get Sarah out of the house without getting her killed. If Jane got the right angle, she could probably shoot Maloney in the head and kill him before he killed Sarah. But then Sarah would still be in the kitchen when Gorman and Wylie raced in, guns drawn.

Jane walked carefully along the side of the house, moving from window to window to determine exactly where Gorman and Wylie were. She had to make whatever move she was going to make before Sarah finished with the chores. When she was done, they would almost certainly make her more difficult to rescue-maybe with the shotgun and maybe by tying or chaining her to something immovable, with someone close enough to kill her.

At least they didn't seem to have harmed her yet. She looked all right. Jane thought carefully as she searched for Wylie and Gorman. If she could find them in one place close together, she might be able to take them both out. She could fire without warning, take the first one through the head, and then immediately fire several rounds at the other, who would be a moving target by then. If she got the second one, she could move around the corner of the house to the kitchen window, and maybe shoot Maloney from behind as he stepped to the other room to see what had happened. Sarah had seemed smart when she had visited Jane. She could only hope that Sarah was also alert enough to know that when shooting started she should duck and run from a man with a shotgun. But Jane knew it was a terrible plan. It depended on so many unlikely breaks. She craned her neck to see if anyone was in the living room to her left.

"Hold it." The voice was Wylie's terrible Texas drawl.

Jane turned her head slowly in the direction of the voice. She could see him at the corner of the house to her left. Only his right arm and gun hand and his right eye were visible. Jane was standing in front of a lighted window, her body not even turned far enough toward Wylie to see him clearly, let alone take her gun out of her pocket, aim, and fire at him. Her right leg was still weak from the wound in her thigh, and she couldn't hope to run fast enough to avoid getting shot.

Jane threw her body backward between the bushes, rolled and pushed her gun into the center of a thick, dense yew bush, then kept crawling back away from the house and the light.

Wylie fired once and hit a tree, exploding particles of bark above her. Then he fired low and to the side, missing her again and spattering dirt in the air. "Last chance. You've got no place to go."

Jane's heart beat harder with anticipation. That was exactly the impression she wanted him to have-that she was unarmed and helpless. She stood and raised both hands in the air.

"That's right," Wylie said. "Much better." In the corner of her eye she saw him come slowly around the house. His gun was still aimed at her, but his body was fully visible now. "Let's walk slowly to the front door."

Jane took two steps forward, and that brought her up to the low yew bush where she had hidden her gun. In a moment she would drop to her left knee, snatch her gun from the bush, turn, and fire. One more step.

"Not that way." It was a second voice, coming from the opposite direction. It was Maloney. "Over this way toward the light."

They had her in a cross fire. Maloney was aiming his gun at her with both hands, and he had a perfect view of her back, with nothing to shield her. Jane's heart dropped to her stomach. She had told herself she would never let herself be taken alive by these men again. The reason she had taken such a foolish risk was that she didn't want Sarah to be in their hands as she had been. Now they had not only Sarah, but her. She should have shot Gorman through the window as soon as she'd seen him, and taken her chances with the others. If she picked up the gun now, they would kill her in a second.

"Come on. What's it going to be"

Jane stepped past the yew bush toward the light, her hands in the air. She had just thrown her life away, and probably Sarah's, too.

The front door opened before she reached it, and Maloney came up behind her and put his hand in the center of her spine. He pushed her in. Jane saw Sarah across the room, standing with her back to the wall with Gorman, who held the shotgun on her.

Jane stared straight ahead so she could hold all three men in her peripheral vision and detect any sudden movement. She would get another chance, she told herself. She only had to be ready to take it. And her gun was still a secret. It was in the yew tree with its safety off and a round in the chamber so all she had to do was grasp it and pull the trigger.

The next few minutes were unbearable. It was worse because this time she knew all of it before it happened. Wylie and Maloney searched her together, roughly and with no restraint. Jane made sure to seem as weak and injured as possible, to be barely able to stand. When she thought it was over, Wyle knelt and lifted her pants legs to be sure she didn't have a boot knife. He ran a finger around the inner elastic of her socks to be sure there was nothing else, then stood. She knew that as soon as they had reassured themselves that she had no weapons, they would begin with, "Where's Shelby" They would go on from where they had left off in Los Angeles. She knew every painful sensation that was coming, every stifled wave of fear.

"Where is Shelby right now" Wylie asked. "I'm sure Sarah would like to hear about her brother."

"I don't know," Jane said. "I was supposed to meet him in Salt Lake City. Because of you, I got there late and he had already left. I thought this would be the first place he'd come." She braced for a punch.

Wylie grasped her shoulders so hard she winced from the pain, and looked into her eyes as though he were searching for the truth. Then, surprisingly, he shrugged and pushed her. She fell, as though she could barely stand.

"What" Jane said.

"You're probably right. He seems to be the sort of guy who will travel across the country and end up here at some point. I'm not surprised that you're faster at it than he is. He's not a pro like you."

While Maloney watched her, Wylie stepped into the kitchen and returned with a length of rope and a roll of duct tape. He tied her wrists in front of her with rope, then wrapped duct tape around the wrists and covered the knot so she couldn't untie it or slip out of it. Then he knelt and took a second length of rope and tied it around her ankles, so she could take a stride of only about a foot.

He stood and looked at her. "That ought to do it. With that bullet hole in you, I guess you won't get in too much trouble."

Jane gave him a frightened, defeated look, but she was elated. He had missed the two razor blades taped to her feet under her socks.

Wylie said, "You're wondering why I'm not worried about Shelby anymore."

She looked as though her immediate predicament left little room for caring. "A little."

He put his face close to hers. "Because he's practically dead already. The cops will get him in the next few days, probably, and if they don't, we know he'll turn up here eventually. You're the one we're thinking about. Now that we've caught you, we'll be able to take the next few years off." He turned. "Hey, Gorman. You're the best kiss-ass we have. Give our esteemed employer a call and tell him what we've got."

Gorman pulled his cell phone out of the pocket of his jeans and walked out of the room through the short hallway into the kitchen. His voice could be heard muttering and mumbling through a conversation that took place mostly on the other end.

Wylie said, "This is going to be about you."

"What about me"

"It's the auction I was trying to get arranged when we were in Los Angeles. As soon as he gets the bidders here, we'll go ahead with it. Since you showed up, Jim Shelby is a minor worry for him."

"I thought you said you weren't interested in Shelby anymore, and you'd let the cops arrest him. Why is he a worry at all You could let Sarah go, and forget trying to trap Shelby. He can't harm you."

"We can't just drop it, because that's the way our employer is. It's what made him rich. He doesn't leave things to chance; he makes sure."

"Why Shelby"

Wylie moved close to her ear and said quietly, "Because our boss is the one who killed Shelby's wife."

Jane heard Sarah Shelby's indrawn breath. She must have heard what he'd said, even though it was close to a whisper. Jane kept her face expressionless. "What for"

Wylie shrugged. "Beats me. He wanted her for a while, and then I guess he didn't." He smiled. "That's just an observation. He doesn't talk about his love life to me."

Gorman came back into the living room, putting his phone back in his pocket, and Wylie stepped away from Jane.

"What did he say" asked Wylie.

"He's happy. I think he's going to have a party or something. He kept saying we'd get part of the take."

Wylie took Jane into the bathroom. "Stay in here for a few minutes. Don't try anything, and don't come out until I let you out." Jane stood in the bathroom, her ear to the door.

"How much" It was Wylie's voice.

"He didn't say anything you can get a grip on. He said half, then he said, `You'll get a slice,' and then it didn't sound like enough, so he said, `a big slice for the three of you.'"

"Shit. Sounds like ten percent," said Maloney.

"Sounds like ten each," Wylie said. "If we got a million for her, we'd keep a hundred grand each. That's not bad."

Jane considered trying to say something that would undermine their confidence, but she sensed she would only make them angry. She wanted them to see her as weaker and more debilitated than she was. The best she could hope was that their greed and their distrust of the boss would offer some opportunity later.

Maloney said, "When's this auction going to be"

"Tomorrow night," Gorman said. "He doesn't want her on our hands for too long."

Wylie said, "I'm pretty sure we can handle that."

"If you disagree, call him. He's not afraid we can't hold on to her. He's afraid if the word gets out, people big enough to kill us might take her for their own auction. If she's been at this for long enough, she could have pissed off just about anybody."

Wylie paused for a moment. "All right. There's not much point in arguing with him."

Jane was beginning to feel more anxious. If the auction was going to happen tomorrow night, there was very little time. She had to find an opening and get herself and Sarah out of this house.

Then Wylie said, "I want to keep the women separate. Let's keep this one in the living room. I'll go tie Sarah in the bedroom where she's been sleeping. Whoever's awake on the next shift can come and check on her every hour or so. I don't want anybody messing with her, though."

Gorman chuckled.

"I'm not kidding," Wylie said. "We've got people coming tomorrow, and then we've got to ask her some questions. One thing at a time."

"I agree," said Maloney. "What we ought to be thinking about is if somebody shows up early to take the other one away from us."

A few minutes later, Wylie opened the bathroom door and let her out. Jane was never alone. There was always someone sitting within a few feet of her, and she was always secured to an immovable object. Now and then, when one of the men had to use the bathroom, they would untie her wrists and let her go afterward. She would get there in an exaggerated limp, as though her leg were useless. On the first trip, she got the razor blade out of her right sock and retaped it to her back just below the belt, but she didn't try to escape. There was always a rope tied around her neck and draped out the door, so she couldn't get out a window. When she came out, they would tie her wrists to the free beam above the living room.

Hours passed, the sky brightened, and then it was too late to think of slipping away into darkness. Jane was tired, but the men all seemed to be fresh and alert. She knew the impression had to be an illusion, but it made her more wary. The men would not free Jane's hands even for a few minutes to help Sarah, who had to do all of the cooking and serving and cleaning alone. There was no chance to speak with her. As the day went on, the three men became more tense and nervous. They were always up, standing by a window to look out, checking their guns, or going out to the road to watch for suspicious cars.

And then, slowly, the sun went down again. Jane had remained quiet and watchful all day, and never had a chance to make an escape attempt. Then, at just after nine in the evening, Wylie's cell phone rang. He spoke a few sentences in a low voice, his face turned away from her. But finally he said, "I'll see you in a few minutes." He pressed the disconnect button and called out, "The first one's here. Get ready, everybody."

Gorman sat Sarah on a kitchen chair in the living room and untied her wrists so she could serve drinks if they were needed. Her ankles were still tied about a foot apart so she couldn't run. Maloney and Wylie moved furniture so all the seats faced the front of the living room.

Gorman took the shotgun and went out the back door of the house. Jane knew he would take up a position among the trees outside so he could guard against someone taking Jane by force. After a short time, Wylie's telephone buzzed again, and he had the same kind of conversation. "Come ahead. We'll be ready to start within a half hour." Several more times in the next few minutes, he received calls. Each time, Jane felt her chances to escape fading.

There was a knock at the front door and Maloney went to answer it while Wylie pulled Jane out of the living room into Sarah's room. He sat on the bed and let her sit, too.

"Why are we in here"

"A little suspense might jack up the price. You need to make an entrance."

They sat in silence and listened to the sounds of men arriving, coming into the living room, and being seated by Maloney. Jane thought she heard him say "Welcome" about eight or nine times. A few minutes passed, and then Gorman appeared at the bedroom door. "They're all inside, all gathered in the living room. It doesn't look like anybody's prepared any tricks ahead of time."

"Good," said Wylie. "Go back and keep an eye on them, and we'll be there in a minute." He sat on the bed beside Jane, studying the floor in silence. She assumed that he was trying to think of a safe way to divert some of the money from the auction. Finally he stood. "Let's go."

He clutched Jane's arm and pulled her roughly up the hall into the living room. She limped as though her right leg were paralyzed and as if she were in terrible pain. While they had been out of the living room someone had brought a low, thick-legged round coffee table that was about a foot and a half high and set it under the free ceiling beam. Wylie saw it and said, "Up there." He could see she could never do that with her ankles tied, so he took the rope off her ankles and half-lifted her onto the table, but her hands were tied behind her. She stood there, looking ahead at the far wall. There was a loud wave of murmuring and whispering. She looked down, first at Wylie's sardonic smirk, and then let her eyes rise a bit to survey the audience.

Ranged around her on three sides she saw men whom she recognized. Near the front was Rhonda Eckersly's ex-husband. She hadn't seen him in fifteen years, but he looked at her with eyes that seemed almost inhuman, eager and hungry. There was Phil Barraclough, the brother of the man she had killed in the snow outside the deserted factory. He looked like his brother, but his face was unmoving and pitiless, just a mask of patient hatred. She looked away to keep track of her captors. There was Maloney, who was watching the door, and Gorman, who seemed nervous and eager to be finished with her and gone.

Wylie lifted his arm up and gestured at her. "There she is, gentlemen. She's the one you've all been searching for, and we have her once again. I'll bet when you first learned about her, you all thought you were hunting for someone else who had run away from you. But by now you know that she's the one you really should have hunted. The people you wanted didn't hide themselves. She did it. She knows their new names and where they are right now, because she made up the names and took them there."

"Come on, Wylie," said Gorman. "The sooner you start the bidding-"

"What's the hurry"

"Every cop in the country is looking for her. So let's get her sold and on her way before we all get put away."

Wylie frowned at him, but seemed to relent. "Gentlemen, I'd like to hear some bids."

She saw the bidders lined up before her, and it was like an inventory of her nightmares. She looked at Rhonda Eckersly's husband, and felt a wave of nausea. Rhonda had tried to leave him because of his cruelty. He was from an old southern family with lots of money and influence, so when she ran away, he simply reported her car stolen, and the police brought her back. He had put an iron ring in the floor of their living room and kept her chained to it by the neck. When he was tired of hurting her, he invited some like-minded friends and let each of them have a turn. Jane had taken her out of the world at least fifteen years ago. She had a new name, was married to a man who cherished her, and had two boys and a girl who were growing up fast. Every year she sent Jane an unsigned card that had something to do with "Indian Summer" from a different city to let her know she was still safe.

Eckersly looked old now, his cheeks sunken like an unwrapped mummy. He said, "A million."

Wylie frowned. "The bidding has begun at a million. And all the bidder wants is a chance to convince this woman that she made a mistake. Remember, everybody. She knows where somebody you want is hiding. But she also knows where somebody he wants is." He pointed at Eckersly. "And where somebody he wants is." He pointed at Phil Barraclough, the brother of the man she had shot.

Barraclough raised his hand. "Two million."

"I hear two million," said Wylie. "I want to remind every-one that all bids must refer to cash money. No checks, real estate, stocks, bonds, or precious stones; no gold or business partnerships." He looked around. "If you outbid Mr. Eckersly and Mr. Barraclough, you know they'll each pay you a couple of million to get the use of her, and find out what she did with someone they're hunting for. And you'll still have her."

The bidders looked at each other, as though each were trying to assess how much the others might pay. Grady Lee Beard said, "Three million."

Jane said, "You don't have that much."

Wylie's right arm straightened and he hit her, a punch on the jaw. The punch knocked Jane to the side, so she fell off the table, but Gorman leaped forward to catch her before she hit the floor in the midst of the bidders. Wylie shook his hand and blew on the knuckles as though they hurt him.

Grady Lee Beard said to Jane, "I'll have that and plenty more after I get you. I know a dozen guys like these who will pay big for a chance to talk to you. They just don't know we've got you yet."

"I've got a bid of three million," Wylie said. "You bidders might also think about the fact that she doesn't just know about somebody you're hunting for. She knows about you. She knows whatever her client knows about you-anything you might have done that wasn't strictly legal, and even what we're doing now. You can be sure she never tells any secrets that could put you away. Buying her is the only way to buy your safety. Her new owner will get every one of your secrets. What will it cost you to be sure that Mr. Beard, here, guards those secrets"

"Four million," Eckersly said.

"Four million to you, gentlemen. This is a slave market. Once you own her, you can do anything you want with her. If you hate her, you can show her how much pain can be inflicted on a person before she dies. Or you can find out what you want and then resell her to the next customer for a profit. Whoever wins the bidding tonight reaps the benefits, because she'll only get more valuable. Any more bids Do I hear five"

There was silence. Some of the men in the room stared at Jane, as though they were trying to read her mind and determine how much the contents of her memory were worth. She refused to let them make eye contact.

"The last bid was Mr. Eckersly at four million. Final offer"

The silence took on a resentful, shamefaced quality, the bidders looking down at their shoes rather than at Wylie. "Mr. Maloney, call our employer and see what he thinks of four million."

Maloney dialed a cell phone and spoke into it. "Hello, sir. The bidding is now at four million, and no counterbid. Is that an acceptable price" There was a pause while he listened. "Thank you, sir. I'll tell them." He put his phone in his coat pocket. "I'm sorry, gentlemen. At four million the price is not high enough. Our employer has submitted a token bid of eight million dollars. He's going to give you one final chance to do better. If nobody beats eight million, he'll take her off the market."

Phil Barraclough said, "I thought the rule was that you had to bring your stakes and pay off at the end of the auction."

"That's right," Wylie said.

"You're telling me that you've got eight million here in this house"

Wylie shook his head. "We brought the merchandise for him. She's worth eight million."

"That's just bullshit," said Barraclough. "He's wasting our time. He's not going to sell her."

"If that's how you feel, I can't say I blame you for dropping out. If anyone wants to go on with the auction, the bidding will start again at eight million."

"When do we have to hand over the money" asked Beard.

"When we get the cash, you'll get her. But we've got to be gone in twenty-four hours, so it'll have to be before then."

Beard looked around him at the others. "All right. I want to be in on this. There are people I've been looking for, and she knows where they are. I have two million in cash in this backpack. If a couple of you want to go in with me, we can get together and make eight million."

The other bidders were silent. Two million was clearly not a big enough percentage to make them risk an ongoing partnership with Grady Lee Beard. He was tall and rangy, with very light skin that had the ability to hold scars as raised pink lines, so the history of his dealings with others was written on his face.

Wylie said, "Our employer doesn't care how you get together, or who contributes what. All he wants is that we go home with upwards of eight million, and somebody else goes home with the woman."

A few of the bidders whispered together and there were muttered expletives, but no deal seemed to be concluded. There were frustrated scowls in parts of the room, as several bidders whose pitches had been rejected looked for each other in the crowd.

"Eight million and one thousand."

The whispering and murmuring stopped. One by one, the men in the room found the source of the words. Jane felt sick.

"Is that a bid" asked Wylie. "I believe we have a bid. It's eight million, one thousand dollars. Does everybody hear the bid"

The murmuring increased again, and this time Jane could see that the men were talking faster. There was some desperation as they tried to cobble together instant alliances to beat the bid. After a few more seconds, the side conversations died out and the men's attention was on Wylie. "Mr. Eckersly has bid eight million one thousand." Wylie was much more animated, and Jane could tell he must be delighted. His cut would be eight hundred thousand.

"Let's get our boss on the phone," Wylie said, looking at Gorman.

Gorman leaned into the alcove that led to the kitchen and talked into his phone rapidly, with his free hand covering his ear so he could hear above the hum of side conversations. He nodded and said "Okay." He held the phone up so his boss could hear, and called out, "The bid is in range. He doesn't want to beat it."

This set off some more conferring as aggressive bidders tried once more to put together partnerships.

Wylie let it go on for a few minutes, until the voices began to die off. "I have a bid of eight million and one thousand. Do I have any other bids Does anyone want to beat eight million and one thousand Any bids for the woman who has hidden so many people for so long" He stood tall, moving to look over the heads of the nearby bidders who had been walking around to talk to others. "No bids Then it's going . . . going . . . gone! For eight million one thousand to Mr. Eckersly."

The men who were still seated all seemed to pop up at once and mill around the room talking to the others. Between two of them Jane could see Eckersly sitting in his chair with a smile just barely lifting the corners of his lips. He suddenly seemed to be aware of her, and his eyes turned to settle on her and the smile broadened. The effect was like looking into an open coffin and seeing the corpse open its eyes and the face powder at its mouth wrinkle and crack as it smiled.

Jane knew terrible things about Eckersly. Rhonda had been twenty-five when Jane had taken her away, and Eckersly had been in his late forties. Now he was in his mid-sixties, but he looked ancient. The people in this room probably all thought that he was an astute speculator who would make a profit by forcing her to betray the people Beard and Barraclough and the others wanted, and then kill her for simple revenge. Jane knew him better than that. After all these years he wanted Rhonda back. He wanted to drag her to the same room and renew her torment where he had been interrupted, and then he wanted to do the same to Jane. He was a sadist, and simple murder would not be enough after fifteen years of waiting. He would prefer to keep them both alive for months, maybe years.

Jane saw a few of the bidders begin to leave. Some seemed angry at particular men who had not seen fit to join an alliance. Others looked merely tired and frustrated. She saw Wylie and Gorman make their way through the group to talk to Eckersly. She hoped there would be a delay, a problem of some kind with the cash. He had a large hard-sided case that sat between his feet. Was it big enough to hold eight million dollars

Wylie and Gorman were obviously thinking the same thing. Jane looked around her for Maloney, and she found him near the front door, watching the bidders filing out. As she watched, she saw Ronald Hanlon stop at the door, give her a smirk, and then blow her a kiss.

She looked away as he stepped outside, and she had to keep herself from shuddering. She hadn't thought about him in years. When she had crossed his path, he had been a trafficker in women from eastern Europe. His business was buying groups of them from a fake employment agency based in Kiev, and promising them jobs in the United States. In order to get into the country they had to sign loan papers for his high fees, and then swear to false answers on what they thought were immigration papers, but were just requests for tourist visas. When they arrived he kept them in isolation and forced them to work as prostitutes for two or three years until they paid off his fees. One of them who had served her indenture had come to Jane to ask for help to get her sister away. Jane had managed to get a dozen other girls out with the sister and into new lives. Hanlon had apparently been waiting for a chance for revenge.

As the rest of the bidders left, Jane looked at each one and remembered. It occurred to her that in this small house tonight there had been only a few whom she didn't know to be killers. The few faces Jane had never seen before had simply been speculators in misery, professional hunters who had heard of Jane's existence and shown up to see if she could be had for a reasonable price.

Now the bidders were all outside, and Maloney stood beside the front door looking out the small window set into it, with the shotgun in his hands. He was watching to be sure the disappointed men really were getting into cars and driving off. She looked at Wylie and Gorman, who were still occupied with Eckersly and his suitcase. Jane did her best to look weak and in pain. Finally she stepped down from the low table and then sat on it. Wylie noticed, but it didn't seem to worry him. It didn't matter if she couldn't stand up on the table anymore, because the sale had been made. He looked down at Eckersly and listened to something he was saying.

"You can't seriously expect me to sit here all night watching you count my money."

Wylie said, "What we're going to do is count out a hundred thousand in hundreds and weigh it. Then we're going to weigh the rest of it, a bunch at a time. And we're going to look at it while we do that. So if there's something wrong, tell me now."

"There's nothing wrong with it," Eckersly said. "This is four million. The other four million is in Jack Killigan's car. He's sitting up the road waiting for my call, and he'll bring in the rest of the money anytime you want."

"I'm just giving you fair warning. If we find a one-dollar bill, you'd better be able to make it a hundred. If we find blank paper cut to dollar size, we'll kill you. Got it"

"You have no reason to talk to me like that. I came here and bid in good faith."

"If you pay in good faith, too, you've got nothing to worry about."

Jane felt the tension building in her chest. She had been waiting for a chance, an opening, an opportunity, for two days, but Wylie and his friends had never seemed to lose their interest in watching her. She had always been in their sight, tethered and hobbled by ropes. But now she sensed that her chance was coming. The men weren't watching her now. They were watching each other.

Jane's eyes moved to Gorman, who was at the front window with his hand on his pistol. She saw the watchful look on his face, then looked at Maloney, who was still standing at the front door. He had the same stern look, almost squinting to be sure he missed nothing that was going on outside. They were on guard, but not guarding Jane anymore. Then she realized that they were right to be anxious.

The house had just been visited by fifteen or twenty men who had killed people and were engaged in trying to find other victims who had eluded them. All of them knew that each of the others was carrying a lot of money-enough to bid in a million-dollar auction. Somebody was going to be attacked for that money, and it had to happen in the next few minutes, before the bidders dispersed. Jane retrieved the razor blade from the waistband of her pants and sawed through the rope that held her hands. She kept the hands together behind her.

Jane focused her eyes on Sarah Shelby, and Sarah understood that it was a summons. She edged close to Jane with her hobbled legs. Jane whispered, "In a minute there will be gunfire. When it happens, I'll be running. You'll have to stick close to me."

"How can-"

"Sit."

Jane put the razor blade behind her on the table, where only Sarah could see it. Sarah sat on the table beside her, picked up the blade, held it behind her back while she adjusted her grip on it, then bent to tie her shoe while she sliced through the rope that held her ankles close together to prevent her from running. In one motion she sat up and set the blade behind her near Jane.

Jane picked it up, keeping both hands out of sight behind her back.

Suddenly all thought was obliterated as the world seemed to explode into deafening noise and flashes of light. Glass from the dining room window blasted into the house and peppered the hardwood floor. There was thumping as someone ran up the hallway near the back of the house. There was firing outside, but it was impossible to tell who was shooting at whom.

Eckersly half-rose from his chair and then collapsed to the floor, bleeding. There was random fire from the direction of the dining room as someone emptied a magazine in the general direction of the men standing near Eckersly's suitcase. Wylie and Gorman drew their pistols and fired a half dozen shots each at the opening in the window.

Maloney raised his shotgun to his shoulder and flung open the front door, then fired into the night. He pumped the shotgun and stepped back as Jane hurled herself toward him. Instead of letting go of the gun and fighting his much smaller attacker, he tried to swing the barrel around to shoot her. She was less than a foot away from him when she slashed the razor blade down the side of his neck, just below his jawbone. He dropped the shotgun and grasped his throat with both hands as though he could hold it together and save himself, but the blood spurted out between his fingers while Jane moved past him to the front door. He collapsed to the floor as she ran out into the night with Sarah beside her.

Jane ran to the yew bush where she had left her gun, knelt and grasped it, then raised it in both hands and spun around just in time to see Gorman come out the front door after her. She fired at his chest. He jerked backward, but still stood, so she fired twice more. The second shot went high through his throat, and the third hit the center of his chest. Jane could hear volleys of shots from somewhere up the road. The bidders must be fighting each other for the cash they'd brought.

She turned to look in the front window of the house, but she saw only Eckersly lying on the floor. She pivoted and followed Sarah to the left front corner of the house. She had not seen Wylie yet, and she couldn't go anywhere while he was alive. "Stay here," she whispered, and cautiously made her way along the side of the house to the back corner. Lying there was the body of Ronald Hanlon, probably shot through the dining room window by Wylie or Gorman. She stepped around it and aimed at the back steps by the kitchen door, but the door was already wide open and there was nobody to be seen. She advanced toward the garage quickly, trying to get there in time. She heard a car start, and knew she was too late. She heard the car squealing out of the garage, then kicking gravel up from the long driveway.

Jane hurried past the house to the driveway, and saw the big blue Ford Crown Victoria speeding down the narrow drive with its lights off. She used both hands to steady her aim, and fired four times. She punched a hole in the trunk, then the back window shattered and the car wobbled from side to side, but it didn't stop. The car reached the end of the driveway, swung out onto the highway, and drove out of her sight.

The gunfire out on the road had stopped. Some sets of robbers must have triumphed and left, and the losers were probably dead. Jane stepped to the kitchen door. She moved carefully down the short hallway to the living room, and found what she had expected. Maloney was lying by the door. The blood that had pumped out through his severed carotid artery had run all over the hardwood floor into a pool, then stopped when his heart did. Outside the front door she could see Gorman's body on the porch. Eckersly was sprawled on the floor where she had seen him fall. His suitcase of money was gone. And so was Wylie.

12.

Jane drove south out of Ithaca, heading for Route 17, the Southern Tier Expressway. Sarah sat beside her for a few minutes in silence, then said, "I can't believe we're alive." Jane said, "We did what we could do, and didn't make any mistakes, so here we are. I can only hope it lasts. We're going to have to be very careful, and find a place where you can stay put for a while."

Sarah didn't seem to hear. "And now I know who murdered Susan."

"Yes. The man Wylie and his men were working for, whoever that is. It was pretty obvious before, but Wylie admitted that much."

"But I know the name. Right after they broke into the house and captured me, Wylie told Gorman to call the boss and tell him. When Gorman called, somebody else answered, and Gorman asked for Daniel Martel."

"Are you sure about the name"

"Yes. Absolutely. I could never get that wrong, and I'll never forget."

"Now that you've told me, neither will I."

Jane brought Sarah into Buffalo, and then to the Hyatt hotel. She parked a short distance up the street near the convention center, because there was a pay telephone on the outer wall. She got out and called the hotel room. After a few rings, Iris answered the telephone. "Hello."

"Hi, honey. You know who this is."

"Yes," said Iris. "We've been worried about you. What happened"

"It took longer than I thought."

"What time is it"

"It's about three a.m. I've got Sarah with me. What I want you to do is wake Jim if he's asleep, and get the two of you packed up. Then I want you to wipe every smooth surface of the room for fingerprints. When you're satisfied, fill in the quick checkout card, put the key cards in it, and drop it in the box. Don't forget to wipe off the key cards and the checkout card. Then come out to the street."

"Uh, okay. Jim Time to get up."

"Good. Get going." Jane ended the call and looked at Sarah, and she was glad Sarah was standing by the car and she'd had the phone clamped to her ear so Sarah couldn't hear. At three a.m. Iris had been asleep so close to Jim that she'd only needed to speak a bit above a whisper, and probably touch him.

Jane got back in the car and made a circuit of the block before she pulled to a stop a few yards up the street from the hotel where she could see the front entrance. She thought about her decision to leave Iris and Jim alone in a hotel tonight. In retrospect, it seemed obvious that she was leaving them in a position that was likely to lead to intimacy. She decided not to tell Sarah anything.

In fifteen minutes, Jim and Iris appeared just inside the hotel entrance, and Jane started the car and began to move. As the two came out the glass doors, her car pulled up the driveway and stopped under the overhang. Jane popped the trunk lid, and Jim put the two suitcases in the trunk.

The two got into the back seat, and Jane began to move. Jim said, "Sarah. I'm so glad to see you."

"I'm glad to see you, too. It's the first time in years when I saw you wearing regular clothes."

"This is Iris. Iris, this is my sister, Sarah."

Sarah looked at Iris for a moment, made a decision to smile, and said, "Pleased to meet you."

"Me too," said Iris. She decided to smile, too.

Jane drove out the driveway and down the street, and headed south away from the center of the city of Buffalo.

Jim said, "Where are we going"

Jane said, "I'd like each of you to think for a moment. Is there any good reason why any of you can't live in Pittsburgh"

"What sort of reason" Sarah asked.

"You didn't go to college there, or have a favorite aunt who lives there. You didn't once have a job there, or have a former fiance who lives there. Nobody who looks closely at your past will find any reference to Pittsburgh."

"Not me. I don't know much about the place, really," said Jim. The others looked at each other, but said nothing.

"Perfect," Jane said. "We'll go take a look. We'll be there in a few hours."

"What are we going to do there" asked Iris.

"We'll find a nice house, probably in the suburbs, and then we'll begin the next phase."

"What's that"

"Trying to create a new normal. Pittsburgh may not be the place you stay for the rest of your lives. But it's the real thing, a city where there are jobs and everything a person needs to live a good life. There are over three hundred thousand people in the city itself, and two and a half million in the general area around it. You've gotten used to using new names and being alert. We've changed your looks a little. Now you live. When you get good at it, and your permanent ID catches up with you, then you'll be ready for anything-finding jobs, making a few casual acquaintances. We'll take all of this slowly."

"How long will it take" Sarah asked.

"A few months. Six, probably, to get you settled. Of course, you always have to be ready to get out fast, if something makes you nervous. Then we'll replant you somewhere else and start over."

"What makes you think we're ready for this" Shelby said.

"You've all got the basic tricks, and you've practiced a bit. You don't break character, and you never forget you're in danger. The part that's important is to remember that you can never go back to being the people you used to be, even for a minute, and you can never drop your guard. The rest is refinements."

"Like what"

"Pay attention to appearances, always. If you must meet people, you smile. If people like you, they're not suspicious. You keep yourself in places where you're relatively safe. You go to plays and chamber music concerts, not sports events where there will be a thousand cops and fifty TV cameras. Every step is slow. You aren't in a hurry. Every day you're alive and unnoticed moves the odds over to your side a tiny bit. For the moment, let Iris be the one who deals with strangers, with Sarah as the backup. As time goes by and you get more settled, Jim can get out more."

Jane, Iris, and Sarah checked into a big hotel in Pittsburgh, then went to search for apartments while Jim stayed in the hotel out of sight.

After two days of searching, they drove to a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of town, where several sets of duplexes had been built. There were perfect, thick lawns that they could see had been laid in as sod like strips of carpet. There were two trees per lawn, roughly fifteen feet tall, planted with a backhoe that moved from building to building, all landscaping completed in an afternoon.

They toured the model duplex, and Jane, Sarah, and Iris were intrigued. The hardwood floors were perfect blond wood, the crown moldings were eight or ten inches to give the ceilings a vaulted look. The counters were all granite, and the cooking island was exactly like the ones in the home magazines. The master bathroom had a deep tub with jets, and the shower was surrounded by glass and had multiple heads, as though a team were going to use it.

Jane told the rental agent that she and Sarah and Iris would have to think about it. As they drove off, Sarah said, "Is that kind of place a real possibility"

"It's leading the league right now," Jane said. "It's upscale, the sort of place that won't have lots of surprise police visits-or worse, surveillance. The place is so new you can smell the paint, so everyone will be a stranger, and nobody will be suspicious if you don't know your way around Pittsburgh."

"Let's talk to Jim."

They took the apartment. They paid the first and last months' rent with an electronic transfer from a Chicago bank account Jane held in the name Heather Gollensz.

Jane helped Iris and Sarah shop and decorate the apartment. They registered a sale of the Honda in the name John Leland, and got Pennsylvania plates. Other electronic transfers gave the Lelands a bank account, and Iris another. On the fifth morning in the new apartment, when Sarah emerged from her room on her way to the kitchen, she saw that Jane was sitting in the living room, fully dressed, with her suitcase at her feet.

"You're going"

Jane nodded. "It's time."

"I guess I felt it coming."

Jane said, "I left the things you'll need on the counter in the kitchen-a lot of cash, another gun, and some ammunition I brought with us from Ithaca. As soon as the permanent IDs and things show up in my post office box, a man will call me, and I'll pick them up and send them to you. Remember, the best way to keep from making a mistake is to stay scared."

There was a short, tentative honk of a car horn.

Jane stood up and moved the curtain aside, then let it drop. "That's my cab. I was going to say good-bye to Jim and Iris, too, but you'll have to do it." She hugged Sarah. "I'll see you before too long." She took her suitcase and went out the door. Sarah watched her get into the cab and then saw the cab moving off down the street toward the highway.

13.

Dr. Carey McKinnon had performed his first surgery of the day at seven in the morning. It had been a relatively routine removal of a gallbladder with no complications, and as of his evening rounds, Mr. Gryzkowski and all of his other patients had been recovering well. He had completed four surgeries today, five yesterday. If he kept up this pace, he would probably catch the attention of the Medicare people who looked for false billings.

For the two weeks since Jane had left, he had been fully scheduling his mornings with surgeries, then spending the afternoons seeing patients in his office. He ate his meals in the hospital cafeteria and went through his rounds in the evening. Then he left to drive to Amherst and put his car in the old converted carriage house next to Jane's car, and then walk up the driveway to enter his dark, empty house. Each night he did exercises for an hour, showered, and watched the news on television before he collapsed into bed.

Staying busy was the best thing he could think of to do. There was no question that the tall, dark-haired woman on the television news who had freed a convicted killer from the Los Angeles courthouse was Jane. It hurt Carey to know that she would do something crazy and audacious now. It meant that she not only was willing to risk her life but had been willing to risk his, too-or at least his chance for happiness.

What she did was illegal-buying or making false identities; obtaining and carrying unlicensed guns; operating imaginary companies to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering. But what kept him in a constant state of anxiety was the danger. The service she offered was to put herself between killers and their victims. He could understand some of this as part of her family history and traditions-the glorification of the warrior, the horror of incarceration and confinement, the contempt for fear, the peculiar Native American notion of changing names to fit new circumstances, the well-founded distrust of government. He understood all of these things and their origins. But comprehending the logic of a situation was not the same as accepting it. He hated this.

The idea that his beautiful wife had for years before their marriage harbored and transported fugitives had always made him sweat with retroactive fear for her. The fact that she was doing it again made him frantic. She helped fugitives out of a kind of idiosyncratic public-spiritedness. To her, saving people from danger was just something a person did, if she happened to have the skills.

The difference between public duty and personal responsibility was utterly lost on her. The idea that only duly sworn peace officers were supposed to save people from criminals struck her as absurd. She had said, "Fine. I'll do it only when they can't, or won't." The only difference she could see between herself and the authorities was mere legality, and she had no regard whatever for legality. When she heard someone talking about "obeying the law," it was as though he had announced he lived his life according to the rules of mah-jongg or gin rummy.

He loved her. He was never going to end the marriage, and everything else was empty chatter. He had not even asked her to quit. She had simply promised. It was just before their wedding, maybe two weeks. She had been on the road, and come home safely. She said to him, "Well, that's over. I'm through being a guide. If I'm going to marry you, I can't do that anymore."

She had stopped. She had turned her attention to the sorts of things that surgeons' wives did. She helped raise money for the hospital. First she took her turn serving on committees where her job was to fold letters and type envelopes, and slowly moved up to chairing committees and putting on benefits. She became active on the Tonawanda reservation and taught an after-school class in the Seneca language for middle-school students. Jane had become the ideal middle-class married woman of two generations ago. He had tried to talk to her about her decision, but she didn't seem to be sensitive about it. She said, "I took a lot of people out of the world and made new people turn up in other places. I'm glad I did. Now the last person I have to make disappear is me. There is no Jane Whitefield. I'm Mrs. Carey McKinnon."

After three years, she had announced it was probably safe to have a baby. Nobody had found his way to the house in Deganawida, nobody had arrived from some faraway place asking for Jane Whitefield, and no word had come that one of her old runners had been found. She had chosen the room next to theirs in the big old stone house that would be the baby's room. They had painted it a pale yellow with bright woodwork and crown moldings, and bought furnishings, and even a few stuffed animals. She had gone to the attic in the Deganawida house and brought back an antique cradleboard. She had taken it from a box and unwrapped its paper wrappings and shown it to him before she'd hung it up. It was made of a frame of half loops of bent hickory like ribs, and had a few wooden hoops at the top like a canopy to protect the baby from sun and rain. The frame was covered by a skin of beadwork. The background was black, with a pattern of green stems and leaves topped by forest wildflowers in white, red, and yellow. Carey could see it was very old, too old to be anywhere but a museum, but he said nothing except that it was beautiful. She hung it on a wall with a picture hanger, a substitute for the way a -seventeenth-century ancestor had hung it in a longhouse while she was inside, and on a low tree limb while she worked in the fields or orchards.

They had tried to have a baby for two years, but so far, it hadn't happened. After a year he'd had a colleague do workups on both of them, but they learned nothing. Their infertility was unexplained: everything was working perfectly but had not resulted in conception.

A few months later, a pregnant twenty-year-old girl had shown up looking for Jane Whitefield. One of Jane's old runners had been the girl's teacher in a San Diego high school. The girl's much older former boyfriend, a small-time criminal, was trying to find her so he could take the baby. Jane had put the girl into her car and driven off. But months later, when Jane had come back from wherever she'd taken her, she had seemed different. After she'd been home two days, she took down the antique cradleboard, carefully rewrapped it, put it back in the attic, and then closed the baby's room.

Since then, Jane had gone out with runners twice. One was an advertising man named Stephen Noton who had somehow gotten his hands on a document about drug smuggling, and was being hunted for it. The third runner Jane had taken on since she'd quit was James Shelby.

Tonight Carey was tired. The loneliness, the obsessive brooding on where Jane must be at this moment, got much worse at night, and he couldn't fight it by staying busy. He looked at his watch. It was after midnight. It was Friday, so it wasn't as bad as it could be. He could sleep until noon tomorrow if he wanted, and then go in for hospital rounds at two or three in the afternoon.

He went to the kitchen without turning on the bright light, opened the cupboard, and took down the bottle of Macallan twelve-year-old single malt Scotch. He set a heavy crystal glass on the counter and poured, then held his glass under the faucet and gave it a small squirt of water.

"Doc Holliday, I presume"

He turned toward the kitchen door and there she was, standing in the dim light just inside the doorway. For an instant the word "hallucination" came to him, but her image didn't fade or waver. He said, "Calamity Jane," then lifted his glass to salute her.

"I meant he ruined his health drinking and smoking."

"You're leaving out the effects of tubercular bacilli, I think."

"Then how about a drink"

"Name your poison."

"I'll have what you're having," she said.

She set her purse on the counter beside her and watched him fill a second glass and add water. She took a step toward him and reached for the glass, and then saw his eyes widen.

"My God, Jane. What happened Was it a car accident Have you been seen" He looked down at her leg, and up to her face, hair, eyes. She could see that his assessment of her appearance was not good.

She took the glass and sipped from it. "A lot happened, not much of it good. And yes, a doctor saw me right away to clean the wound and sew me up. Since then I've taken care of myself."

"You said `wound.' What sort of wound"

"Oh, it's a lot to say at once. If you missed me, come give me a kiss."

He stepped to her, set their drinks on the counter, and gently put his arms around her. He did kiss her, but she could tell he was impatient. And he was so gentle it made her impatient, too.

"I won't break," she said. "I'm just a little tender in spots. A lot tender, actually. Fortunately for you, none of them are your favorite spots."

"All of your spots are my favorites."

"After I finish my drink I may be in the mood to let you prove it."

"There's nothing I'd like better."

"Well, I should hope not."

"But you've got to stop trying to change the subject. You're injured, and you look terrible. What happened"

"I'll tell all."

"How badly are you hurt"

"I'm actually waiting for your opinion and dreading what it might be. It happened about two weeks ago, so I'm out of danger-not stoically bleeding to death or anything. But I've got some marks on me. There's one that will be at least big and ugly forever, and might even make me limp."

"Okay," he said. "I'm about through waiting in suspense."

"I've been dreading your seeing me, and being disgusted or something."

"Hold on to your drink." He put an arm around her back and the other swung to the back of her knees. He scooped her up and carried her out of the kitchen, across the living room, and then to the stairway. He carried her upstairs to the bedroom and set her on her feet.

"The service around here is slipping," she said. "I almost spilled my drink."

"Disrobe, please."

"You have some nerve."

"This isn't funny. Do it."

She took another sip and set her drink on his dresser, then turned and unbuttoned her blouse, and took it off. She looked into his eyes, and kept looking at them as he bent lower to examine her stomach and ribs.

"Some bad bruises." He turned her around so he could see her back, and gently touched the skin a few times. "And what the hell Those are burns. How did you get burned"

"They heated some skewers, the kind you might use for shish kebab. They were trying to make me tell them where Shelby was."

"Somebody tortured you Tortured you Who did that to you"

"Enemies of Shelby's, who didn't want him to escape." She felt his arms circle her waist to come around and undo her belt. Her slacks fell to her ankles and she stepped out of them. She reached for her drink and took another sip, then put it back on the dresser.

"This is really something," he said. From the sound of his voice, he had gone to his knees behind her. He unwrapped the bandage on her thigh. "That's an exit wound. Who shot you" He turned her around again to look closely at the entrance wound in the front of her thigh.

She looked down at him. "I can tell you he was no gentleman," she said.

"Stop, Jane. I told you, this isn't striking me as funny."

"Okay. One of the same men. They were pretending to be cops. When I realized they weren't, I tried to get away, so one of them shot me."

"And who sewed you up and dressed this Some old mob doctor who doesn't report bullet wounds"

"He was young. His nurse was his girlfriend. I almost won her over to my side, but she was smitten with him, and a little stupid. The doctor was kind of angry. It was as if he agreed to treat a gunshot, and only after he got there realized it was likely to get him in trouble-that it wasn't an accident, and the victim wasn't going to be grateful for his work and for not reporting it."

"You probably already realized this, but he did a pretty good job. Good closure, no signs of infection, no indication there's anything inside. You were also very lucky. The bullet didn't hit bone or sever the femoral artery. It was a clean through-and-through shot. I'm sure he told you that. It's just a question of the muscle having time to heal now." He rewrapped the bandage. "I want you to tell me who did this."

Jane stared at him. She could see he actually intended to go find the men who had hurt her. "You can't do anything to him, Carey. He's dead." She paused. "The other one is dead, too." She didn't take her eyes off Carey. She could see that she must not let Carey know that the third one, Wylie, was alive. He lowered his eyes and glowered at a spot on the floor.

"You haven't told me what I want to know," she said.

"What's that"

"I guess it's, `Do you love me'"

"This is a lousy time to ask that question. I'm damned furious at you for putting yourself in the position to have this happen to you. But that doesn't change the situation between us-either the bad parts or the good. I love you." He paused, as though he dreaded what was coming next. "Anything I'm not seeing Is this the extent of it"

"Yes."

He took a deep breath, irritated that he had to be more specific. "Were you sexually assaulted"

"No. Maybe they would have, but they were very interested in finding Jim Shelby, and everything they did was intended to make me say where he was. Then I got away."

"I guess you didn't tell them where he was."

"No, he's still alive and relatively well." She frowned. "You still didn't really give me my answer."

"About what"

She put her hands on his shoulders. "Look at me. Do you think I'm ugly now"

"No. You're beautiful. I'm just upset at what you put yourself through. And I'm really angry. You don't have the right to marry somebody and then, whenever a stranger knocks on your door, run off and act like some kind of amateur police force. You told me that crap was over years ago."

"Yes, I did," she said. "I thought it was. But then one day somebody comes to your door and says, `My brother, who is innocent, is about to be murdered in prison.' You have only two choices. All you can be is the person who decided to keep him alive, or the person who decided not to. For the rest of your life, that's who you'll be. I decided I would be the one who did."

"No matter what it cost." He looked at her from head to toe. "Well, as I said, you're lucky this time. What you were apparently most worried about didn't happen. Your body is still beautiful and healthy, and with time, you'll be about the same as before."

"Thanks, Doc," she said. Then she waited for a few seconds, looked down at herself and then at him. "Are you even just a little bit turned on"

He nodded, but grudgingly.

She unhooked her bra, shrugged it off, slipped her panties down and stepped out of them. "Then I'd hate to have all this nakedness and hard liquor go to waste."

He frowned. "I'm sorry, Jane. I don't think this is a good time." He walked to the door, then turned. "Let's get a night's sleep, and then talk in the morning." He walked down the hall.

After a few more seconds she heard him go down the staircase. There were the familiar sounds of Carey checking the locks on the doors and setting the alarm. She showered, brushed her teeth, and got into bed with the light on. She waited an hour for him to come back upstairs, but when she heard his tread coming back up, he went to one of the other bedrooms. She turned off the light and went to sleep.

Later, when the night was at its darkest and the birds in the trees outside the old stone house had not yet begun the predawn chirping, she was aware of him. He was standing in the doorway, silent and motionless. She said, "If you're staring at me, you must have eyes like a cat."

"I'm looking. Can't see you, though. You had sort of an intriguing idea before."

"I thought you said it wasn't the right time."

"It wasn't."

"And now it is"

"If the offer is still open."

"Always," she said.

14.

Jane had been at home for ten days. She spent her evenings and nights with Carey at home in the big old stone McKinnon house in Amherst, New York. To her it was a bit like a honeymoon, a vacation from reality that had turned into a lazy enjoyment of the man she had married. This was not what she had intended in coming home, but she had felt that way the minute she had been in the kitchen with him the first night.

She knew the strength of her reaction to him and this taste of life was partly caused by the fact that she had never expected to be here again. After a few days with Wylie, Maloney, and Gorman, she had relinquished any thought of seeing Carey again. She had become like the old-time warriors, the Grandfathers. All she had hoped for was a chance to fight her enemies at the end-to snatch one of the tools of torture or an unguarded weapon and stab or slash until they overpowered and killed her. After she had become used to that idea and then escaped, even feeling the warmth of sunlight on her face had become a complex and delicious sensation. She had resigned herself to death, and now to be home again with her tall, strong husband was enough to make her feel as though she must be dreaming.

The days, from the time when Carey left at six in the morning for the hospital until late afternoon, she spent trying to speed her recovery. Carey had begun rubbing Neosporin on her burns and scrapes as soon as she had come home. There had been no need by then for any antiseptic effect, but the stuff seemed to help prevent scars. She did her series of tai chi positions, and she could feel herself stretching farther and becoming more flexible. After that she left the house and went for long walks, lengthening her stride a bit each day and raising the rhythm of her steps to go faster. She lifted light weights to strengthen her upper body, but most of the time she concentrated on her right leg. When she was not exercising it she was resting. She took special care to eat well and get lots of protein and take vitamins, and to get plenty of sleep.

On the eleventh morning when Carey left, she took a bus to Rochester, New York, and bought a used car at a big car dealership. It was a gray four-year-old Honda with low mileage. She bought it under the name Emily Westerveldt, an identity she had built with many others, but had seldom used. When she got her car back to Amherst, she had it washed and waxed at the car wash on Niagara Falls Boulevard, and then drove it to her regular mechanic. She asked if he could check it over for a friend of hers. He glanced at it and said, "I'll take a look at it."

"Thanks," she said. She knew he would take care of it, even if it meant he had to drive across the county for parts.

"Pick it up after four."

When she picked it up, she filled it with gas and then stopped to buy the things she carried when she was on the road-a case of bottled water, bags of nuts, trail mix, dried fruit. Then she drove the car to her old house in Deganawida, put it in the garage, and went inside to make other preparations.

This was the house that her grandfather and his friends had built, the house where her father had been born, and where Jane had lived until she'd gone off to college, then returned to after graduation, and stayed in through the death of her mother. She had lived here until she had married Carey. She had kept it since then, partly because she couldn't sell it to some unsuspecting stranger who might wake up in the middle of the night to hear an unfortunate runner knocking on the door for help-or to hear someone worse coming in a window.

There were still things hidden in the house. For a few years she had stopped thinking of them as the tools of her profession, and had begun to think of them as precautions, like the fire extinguishers in the kitchen and the upstairs hallway in Amherst. She went down the cellar stairs gingerly, trying not to put too much weight on her wounded thigh. She walked to the far end, near her father's old workbench, took the stepladder, and carried it back to the area beside the old coal-burning furnace that had been left here when the oil furnace was installed when she was a child.

She climbed to one of the old, round heating ducts, disconnected two sections, and reached inside. There was a box that contained four pistols, all of them loaded, and boxes of extra ammunition. There was a metal cash box full of money. There was another in the back. When she opened it she found, carefully wrapped in plastic, pieces of identification. Some were for a woman who looked like Jane, and some for a man who looked like Carey, but who had names that weren't McKinnon. There were birth certificates, passports, driver's licenses, and credit cards.

Jane took some stacks of money, and then a Beretta nine-millimeter pistol like the one she had taken from Maloney, and a spare magazine. She set them on the ladder and then fitted the two sections of heating duct back together so they looked as though they hadn't been touched since the 1940s, moved the ladder back beside the workbench, and climbed back up the stairs.

When she came into the kitchen, she partially dismantled the gun, wiped the parts with a soft rag damp with gun oil, reassembled it, and then put it into her purse. She called a taxi to meet her three blocks away and took it home to Amherst; there, she hid the gun and the money in one of the spare rooms on the second floor with a small suitcase she had selected.

On the twelfth day she went to visit the Jo-Ge-Oh, the little people. They were very small, but they looked very much like the Senecas. They had been around for longer than the Senecas, but they had such a peculiar relationship with time that it was difficult to make assertions about it. They preferred to live in places where Seneca villages had been, either because those were simply the best sites in New York state-always near water and close to ground that was fertile and tillable-or because being close to full-size human beings scared off the animals that tended to trouble and annoy anyone their size. Raccoons, possums, skunks, and squirrels were particularly bothersome. For that reason the little people prized fingernail and toenail clippings, which they scattered around their settlements to give off a scent of big people. They were also extremely fond of the sort of tobacco that the Senecas favored, grown in western New York and Ontario, and mixed with a few shavings of sumac.

Jane had often visited them near the site of a large village that had once been along the Genesee River in Rochester. She usually approached the spot from Maplewood Avenue and climbed down the rocky sides of the chasm to the pebbly shore. But today, Jane didn't relish a climb, so she selected another place closer to home. She drove to the Niagara River, and then along River Road to the South Grand Island Bridge. She went over the east river and across the nine-mile-long island to a spot near the northern tip, then drove south along the river road. When she reached the right spot she parked and got out of the car, then walked along the eastern shore of the island to the site of an old, long-vanished hotel called Riverhaven. It was directly across the river from the old ferry landing in the city of Deganawida, and boats had landed here before the bridges were built at either end of the island. But the human occupation was much older than that.

This was a place that had been full of activity since long before the Senecas took the land by conquering the Wenros and Eries in the early seventeenth century. It was the site of one of the very few deposits of flint in the western part of the state, and it had been visited by Native people since the end of the last ice age. Jane walked the shore for a while, and then spoke. "Jo-Ge-Oh!" she called softly. "It's me, Jane Whitefield. I'm Nundawaono, and I've been away. I didn't want to leave again without visiting you."

The Jo-Ge-Oh were known for taking in people who were in terrible trouble and hiding them from their enemies. They would conduct such people to their settlements and let them stay until they were safe. Often the person would think he had been with them for a week or a month, and then come back to the full-size world and discover that many years had passed. His enemies would be long dead and forgotten. Jane had admired the Jo-Ge-Oh and felt close to them since she was a little girl.

"Jo-Ge-Oh! Little people! I've brought you some presents." She opened a foil package that the clerk in the store at the Tuscarora reservation had sold her. "Here's some tobacco. I hope it's good and strong." She made small piles of it on the rocks along the shore. "Here are some clippings from my fingers and toes. I hope it keeps the pests away." She took out a plastic sandwich bag and scattered the clippings around her.

She spoke to the little people in the Seneca language. "I came to thank you for helping me get home alive and be with my husband." Her speech was in keeping with Seneca practice, which was to thank supernatural beings for whatever they had given, but not to ask for anything. In English she said, "Thanks, little guys." After a few minutes of listening to the silence and watching the flow of the beautiful blue river, she turned and went back to her car. Tomorrow would be the thirteenth day.

That evening Jane had dinner ready early, and made sure she and Carey were in bed at shortly after ten. They began by making love slowly and gently, and then lay still for a time, holding hands. Then Carey moved again and loomed above her, kissing her hard, and she realized that she didn't have to tell him because he had already seen something-the overnight bag she'd packed, maybe-or just sensed the return of the melancholy she always had before she had to leave him. They began again, turning to each other wildly and passionately, as though it would be the last time in their lives and they were saying good-bye to everything that they loved and wanted.

Jane awoke at five a.m. as she had awoken many times, lying with her head on Carey's chest, feeling the rise and fall of his strong respiration, her long black hair spread over him like a blanket. She raised her head slightly and looked at him. His eyes were open, and he was looking at her.

"Good." She put her hands on the sides of his face, and gave him a long, gentle kiss. "One more chance to get that baby started. I'll be gone when you get home tonight."

15.

An hour after Carey left for the hospital, Jane locked the door of the big old stone house in Amherst, walked to the driveway, and got into her cab. She took it to Deganawida, walked to her house, opened the garage, and started the used Honda she had bought.

She stopped at a large sporting goods outlet in Niagara Falls and bought a Remington 1200 shotgun and twenty-five double-ought shells. When the man asked her what she wanted that kind for, she said, "Home defense." She bought a gun cleaning kit and a box of rubber gloves; a large, razor-sharp folding knife; a short-handled spade; and a hatchet. She stopped at an electronics store and bought four pay-as-you-go untraceable cell phones with cash.

In another few hours of driving east she was past Syracuse and making the turn onto Interstate 81, heading north to Watertown. From there Route 3 took her east on a winding road into the Adirondacks, and she drove the rest of the day to reach Lake Placid, where she checked into a hotel and slept.

It was mid-afternoon the next day, after she had read the rental listings in the papers and had spent hours combing the area around Lake Placid, when she found the house she wanted. Jane walked the property, climbed on the woodpile outside and looked in the windows, and then walked in the woods nearby. She found the trails: one a game trail that went only as far as a tiny clearing with weeds that had been flattened by deer as a resting place; and the other a man trail, bare of vegetation, that led two hundred feet or so to a small, dark Adirondack lake.

She liked the fact that the building had two stories. The upper story would give her a chance to see what was coming toward her from a greater distance. Because she had driven into the Adirondacks to a place that got cold in the winter, it hadn't been hard to find houses of brick and stone built to hold up to the weather. They would also stop a bullet. This one she judged to date from the 1930s. It had a sloped cellar door that led down steps to a second, vertical door to a basement. The windows were all old-fashioned thick glass, all two-light, opening inward like little doors, secure on the inside and equipped with shutters. She could see through rooms to the inner sides of some of them, and they all had iron fittings so in the winter they could be barred with two-by-fours. The snow in the Adirondacks had been known to pile up to twenty feet, and the windows had been built to hold up against the weight and the winds. The roof had a steep peak to prevent snow and ice from building up and getting heavy.

She took another look around, and then drove up the dirt road to the county highway, and then into Lake Placid to find the landlord. The owner turned out to be a young blond woman whose main business was a store that sold things summer visitors wore-high-end sunglasses; hiking boots; hats for keeping the sun out of the eyes; helmets and bright synthetic shirts and spandex shorts for those who rode the bikes hanging from the rack overhead.

Jane walked in, saw that the blond woman was the only person in the store, and said, "You're Cora Willis, right I want to rent your house."

"The cottage Don't you want to see it first"

"I've seen it," Jane said. "I was just out there. I like it. My name is Janet Keller." She held out her hand and the other woman shook it. "In fact, I was surprised you weren't asking more for it."

Cora Willis shrugged. "I get a lot more earlier in the summer. Usually I close it for the summer at the end of August, and then do whatever upkeep I need to do. There are plenty of years when the nights start to get cold by now. I should warn you about that-you could wake up one morning and find it's fall."

"It's okay," Jane said. "I'm prepared. I saw it was empty, and I'd like to move in later today or tomorrow, if I can."

"No reason not to. I don't need to wait for your check to clear. You seem honest."

"I am. But I assumed you would be careful, so I brought cash." She counted it out onto the counter silently. "Is there a security deposit"

"Uh . . . no," said Cora Willis. She went to a cabinet behind the counter and produced a rental agreement, a pen, and a key. She walked around her store hanging up clothes that had been left in the dressing room while Jane filled in her false name and address. When Jane was finished, Cora Willis glanced at the agreement as she put it into her computer printer and made a copy for Jane, signed it, and handed it to her. "You should have a nice, quiet time. I always do when I'm out there. My great-grandfather built it."

"It's just right," Jane said. She walked toward the door. "Thanks a lot. I'll be back in two weeks to turn in the key."

"Okay. If you forget, mail it to me. You're the last renter of the season, so there's no rush."

Jane had not intended to move into the cottage right away, but she didn't want anyone around when she got there, and she needed to have the deal be a certainty, so she had started the rental period right away. She drove to Watertown and began to shop for the items she would need. She went to a military surplus store and bought a marine K-Bar fighting knife with a black blade; a blood gutter and a hilt to keep her hand from slipping onto the blade; a whetstone; some basic cooking utensils; a high-intensity flashlight; a camouflage tarp; and a hundred feet of rope.

At a Target store she bought men's jeans, shoes, a shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, a box of rubber gloves, dishwashing detergent, and some sheets and blankets.

She stopped at a copying and mailing store, where she rented a computer and sent Stewart Shattuck an e-mail. Stewart Shattuck was a highly skilled forger and a dealer in false identification with whom she had dealt a number of times over the years. "Stewart, I need a favor. Please make sure that a few of the wrong people find out that I asked you to mail me some new cards-maybe an e-mail acknowledgment that looks as though you accidentally hit `reply all' would do it, but you know best. Here is the address." She put in the address of the cottage near the lake.

Jane waited nearly an hour before she received the reply: "It's done. If you have any doubts about this, don't ever go there."

Near the mailing store was a party goods store. As she had hoped, the paucity of holidays in the latter part of the summer had forced the staff to lay out the Halloween costumes and decorations early. She went through the displays of masks until she found the one she wanted. It fit over the whole head and had close-cropped brown hair and a smooth complexion. The name on the label said "George Clooney mask." She bought it and a set of rubber hands and rubber feet.

It was nightfall by the time Jane was finished with her shopping. She decided she was not ready to drive several hours to arrive in the dark at a dirt road to an unoccupied house. She drove to the entrance to Route 81, where she remembered there was a large, pleasant-looking hotel, and rented a room for the night. She went back outside to move her car to a spot in the parking lot where it was lighted and she could see it from her room, then went to sleep. She had gone to sleep so early that she awoke at four, then drove the four hours to reach the cottage by eight.

Before she left the highway she refilled her gas tank. She had learned over the years that eluding pursuers was often a matter of tiny precautions, many of them no more esoteric than maintaining a full tank. Afterward she drove the rest of the way to the dirt road and up to the house, where she unloaded her supplies into the kitchen. Then she drove the car back along the dirt road to the highway, and then up the man-made trail she had found in her initial visit. She kept going past the distance where her car would become invisible from the highway, until she found the slab of rock. She parked the car on it, covered the car with leaves and branches, and then followed the trail the rest of the way to the small, calm lake and along the shore to the path that led up to the house.

She locked the doors and began to deal with the supplies and equipment she had brought. She went upstairs and made the bed in the master bedroom, which was at the head of the stairs. Then she went down the hall and selected a second bedroom where she would sleep. There was a lot of work to do, and she had only the hours of daylight to accomplish it. She went downstairs, emptied a half dozen glass iced tea bottles into a pitcher, tied the bottles together with nylon fishing line, and set pairs of them along the upstairs hallway from the stairway to the second bedroom. If anyone came up here in the dark, he would set off a racket with the falling bottles, and very likely tangle himself in the fishing line.

The men's clothing she had bought she filled with leaves, pine needles, and a few sticks, making the most realistic dummy she could. His head was the rubber pullover George Clooney mask filled with crumpled paper bags. His hands were the rubber hands from the party shop. She tried using the rubber feet, but ultimately settled on the shoes with the rubber feet stuffed into them, so the human-looking ankles could be seen. After several experiments with the dummy, she found that the best place for him was seated on the bed in the master bedroom with his back propped up on pillows, the small reading light on the headboard turned on behind his head so his face was in shadow, and a book from the bookshelf propped in his lap. She plumped up some pillows and put them under the covers so it looked as though a woman were asleep on the far side of him.

From time to time Jane stopped her preparations and looked out each of the upper windows, standing still and silent as though frozen, watching the world around the house. She had no reason to imagine anyone could have found her this soon, but the men chasing her now were completely unknown to her. She had no idea what they could do. The thought reminded her that there were many more things she wanted to do before nightfall.

She went to the unoccupied room just beyond hers, tied the rope to the steel frame of the bed, took the screen out of the window, opened the window, and looked down. Directly below the window was clear grass, but on either side there was shrubbery.

In the room she had selected for sleeping, she loaded her shotgun. She dragged the mattress off the bed and put it right at the door, then cycled the shotgun to put a double-ought shell in the chamber, and laid the shotgun on the mattress. She took ten more shotgun shells out of the box, put them in the pockets of her black jacket, and left the jacket there.

She stood still, looked, and thought. The house was stone, impervious to gunfire except through the windows. If people got inside, they would search downstairs, and then they would climb the stairway to the second-floor hall. They might go to investigate the dimly lighted master bedroom where she had left the dummy, or they would come up the hallway and knock over the bottles. Either way, they would warn Jane. If she was stationed in the doorway on her mattress, she could fire eight double-ought blasts into the narrow, dark hallway, reload, and probably fire eight more. She made a few alterations. She adjusted the mattress so she could lie on it and fire, showing only her right eye and right shoulder to the intruders. She walked to the staircase, descended to the ground floor, and counted windows. There were eight. She went down into the basement and found the eight precut and painted two-by-fours, barred the shutters, and latched the windows.

The front and rear doors each had an assortment of locks and dead bolts. She was a bit uncomfortable with them, because she didn't want it to be impossible to get in. She wanted the shooters to get inside. She wanted them to climb the stairs.

Jane walked the paths through the woods and then among the man-tall reeds at the edge of the lake, memorizing the contours of the land and the marshy places. She stayed out while the sun went low and she could see the water of the lake as a copper-colored mirror shining through the foliage. She knew it was very unlikely that anyone could find her in one day, so she was in no hurry to fortify herself in the house. She walked the deer trails quietly, and heard the deer stir ahead of her, then go crashing through the underbrush and away. She walked out to the highway and stared into the trees to be sure she couldn't detect light emanating from the house. She walked along the grassy shoulder of the dirt road to the house so her footprints wouldn't show.

She picked out landmarks as she walked. The tall pine that rose above the hardwoods stood about halfway to the house. The clearing where the trees had died out was three quarters of the way. As she walked, she heard something big moving through the underbrush, and she suspected it was a bear. She stopped to gauge the wind direction. It was blowing toward her from the lake, so she would probably be safe if she waited for the bear to move on. In a few minutes, she heard it moving off toward the water.

She went inside the house and turned on the downstairs lights. The shutters were all closed, so the light could not be seen from a distance. She made herself some dinner, and washed the dishes. She went to the front door and disengaged the dead bolts. Then she went to the back door and did the same, but left the standard locks on each door locked. If she unlocked a door they would suspect the truth-that she wanted them to come in.

She turned off the downstairs lights, climbed the stairs, and stopped at the top. She turned on her dummy's reading light in the master bedroom, shut the door, and made her way down the hall, stepping over the nylon fishing line tied to the bottles. She showered, brushed her teeth, and dressed for sleep. She wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and her black jacket. She had a Beretta pistol in her pocket, and the K-Bar knife in its sheath at her back. The shotgun was on the mattress beside her. She lay there in the silence and darkness, and was surprised at how comfortable she felt, with all the physical work done, her hair and body clean, and lying on the firm mattress. It was only a few minutes before she was asleep and dreaming.

16.

In her dream, Jane did something she had done a hundred times during the day. She went to her open window and looked outside. This window faced in the direction of the lake. She looked out over the glassy black surface, and saw nothing but the undistorted reflection of the moon and a few stars. Near the shore, where the cold water met the warm earth, there was a layer of fog a few feet thick. She heard a faint sloshing sound and saw the tall reeds forty feet beyond the shore moving a little. A man slowly rose from under the lake and walked with slow determination among the reeds toward the shore, the fog hiding all but his human shape at first. As he approached the shore, the muddy water ran off his head and down his face in streams. He was wearing a coat, and water ran from the sleeves to make ripples on the surface. She knew him, and she felt a deep dread. He was dead because of the worst mistake Jane had ever made-Jane had once been fooled into leading a killer named John Felker practically to his door. And Harry didn't haunt her dreams to bring her good news.

When the man was fully up and out of the water, he stood still for a moment, slowly raising his head to look up at her window as though he had heard her thinking. His eyes focused on hers. There were a few long, mossy strands of water plants on his shoulders. Without moving his eyes from Jane's, he reached up and brushed them off, then began to walk toward the house.

Jane shut the window and barred it, then put her eye to the shutter and watched him walking toward the kitchen door. As he came, water ran down from his clothes, and his shoes made a squish noise with each step. He stopped on the slab of concrete at the back door, and she could see the wet footprints there. He looked up at her again for a moment as though determining whether she would come down to let him in. Then he simply opened the locked door and stepped inside.

Jane slowly moved along the hallway and listened to the watery squish of his shoes as he ascended the stairs. He reached the top and stood on the landing. At his best, Harry Kemple had looked as though he had never cared for himself. He always wore the same sport coat with a very tight herringbone pattern. It must have started out gray, but the fabric had acquired a greenish tint, as though the years of poker table air thick with cigar smoke had reacted with the harsh light to work a chemical change. The elbows were a slightly lighter color because they were worn. He had a bony, unhealthy build, like a too-tall jockey, and his brown pants were too wide for him, gathered above his waist and cinched by a thin belt. His shoes looked as though he had sprayed them with floor wax and given them a varnish-like shine that preserved the scuffs.

"Hello, Harry," Jane said.

"I notice you didn't fall all over yourself to let me in."

"You're a ghost, Harry. Doors don't present the problem to you that stairs present to me. I'm sure you know I've been shot."

Harry nodded. "I know what you know. The nine--millimeter bullet missed the femur and the femoral artery, but it tore the muscle up a bit. In eleven months you'll be as fast as ever. . . ."

Jane's heart beat faster. She couldn't believe the good news.

". . . If your body is still alive."

"You always know how to raise my spirits."

"You raise us yourself," he said. "Me in particular. I get no rest because I'm your mistake. The minute you took John Felker to see Mr. Shaw in Vancouver to get a fake ID, I was a dead man. I could still walk around while he stole Shaw's record of the IDs he'd made and found my new name and address. But I was already on Hanegoategeh's to-do list."

"I wasn't being careless. I believed in John Felker."

"Enough to spend the previous two weeks fucking him, like it was a honeymoon."

"I was an idiot, Harry. I'm sorry. I've been saying it for fifteen years, and I know I'll never stop having these dreams." She reached out and touched his hand, but it was freezing cold from the mountain lake, and bloodless. She withdrew her hand, trying to hide her revulsion.

"What You can't be surprised I feel like a dead guy."

"No," she said. "I just forget all of that sometimes, Harry."

He looked at her impatiently, then turned his head and looked over his shoulder, taking in everything around him like a man who has suddenly had a blindfold removed. "Oh, shit," he said. "You're the One Who Stops, aren't you You were running away with the other fighters, and you're the one who stops and fights. That's why you're way up here alone."

"This is the place to do it," she said. "Nobody else can get hurt. The outer walls are stone, and the doors are split timbers. There won't be any innocent bystanders."

"Oh, there won't be," he said. "Not the ones who are after you, and not you."

"Innocent isn't what I want to be."

He looked around again, and she was aware he was seeing through walls and floors. "So this is the spot where you're choosing to block the trail and fight to the death."

"Not `the' death. Their death."

"Do you know who and how many there are"

"No. I'll know that when they come."

"What part of the wars is this"

"What do you mean"

"Shelby and his sister don't know anything, and neither does Iris. But you know it's about Sky Woman's twin grandsons, the right-handed and the left-handed, Hawenneyu the Creator and Hanegoategeh the Destroyer. So whose work are you doing up here"

"Hawenneyu's."

"You've made sure that killers will come here for you, and that somebody is never going home. Can you kill for the Creator"

"I think you can," she said. "If you stop the heart of someone who kills and kills, you can."

"If you're sure, then before they come, do all your thinking. See everything from every direction and tell yourself every story of the fight. Plan what you'll do in every story, so when you see it beginning to happen, you can move. Trade your life for something. Don't throw it at them because you're angry."

"Is that it, Harry You've finally come to tell me this is my time"

"Maybe one of the twins knows when you're going to die, and maybe both do. I don't. I exist only in your head. I'm a synapse in your brain that fires when you're anxious."

"Come on, Harry. Am I doing the right thing"

"You're stopping on the path, turning your face toward the enemy, and preparing to fight alone. The old ones, the warriors and clan mothers from that time, would recognize it, and see you as one of them. I don't know if that makes you right."

"You're hedging, Harry. Are you saying I should do this, or go back to the others and run"

"You've decided to be Hawenneyu's warrior, fighting death for lives. You'll die this time or another, at this turn in the trail or another." He lifted his head as though he were listening to something only he could hear. Then he said, "Rest tonight. It's too early for them. But tomorrow night, be ready."

Jane slept soundly, then woke at dawn. She rose and walked from one window to the next on the upper floor of the house, looking out. It was cooler this morning, the reminder in the air that it was not going to be summer for much longer. Above the mirror surface of the lake she could see the wispy white fog that she had dreamed of, deep as a man's waist and stretching out past the reedy shore. She saw the first few waterbirds. There was a great blue heron that stepped out from the reeds in the fog, striding in the shallows, then standing still again.

She felt strong. She still had a day, a whole day that would go on until dark. She had realized in the night that time was something she needed, and now she had it. Even if the men were off their flight by now and driving this way, they would not come close enough to be seen until nightfall. They would be searching for the address she had given Stewart, not for a place that could be known and explored. Jane ate breakfast, then took the knife, the hatchet, the spade, and the rolled-up plastic camouflage tarp she'd bought into the weedy fields between the house and the dirt road.

She walked toward the first bend in the road that was also its halfway point, the tall pine. She stayed on the game trail, only a narrow line where the deer had stamped down the weeds on their way to and from the lake. When she found the right spot, she knew it. There was a slight depression in the level field that put it below the surrounding weeds. She moved carefully to the right of the path, and began to dig. The ground here was damp, black with centuries of rotted humus, so it was soft and heavy. She first removed the layer of weeds in clumps, set them away from the hole, and then dug. She used her uninjured left leg to push the spade into the earth, and stood on the right. She dug for four hours, beginning in the cool morning. After a while she discarded her sweatshirt and dug in her T-shirt, feeling the sweat cooling her. The hole was about ten or twelve feet long, and six or seven feet wide. At the end of four hours it was over six feet deep.

She went to work on the long mound of dirt she had shoveled out. She would cause a small avalanche to get a pile of it onto her tarp, and then drag it to a spot at the edge of the woods near the lake. Then she would repeat the process. It took her two more hours to move it all.

Near the pile of dirt she found a stand of hardwood saplings, mostly oak and maple, and used her hatchet to cut ten of them, then cut them into about a hundred inch-thick stakes. With her K-Bar knife she whittled sharp points on both ends of each. She used the foliage to cover the mounds of dirt, then took her stakes to the hole in the field.

She sank each of the stakes into the ground at the bottom of the pit in a pattern that left nowhere for her to stand, then dug her way out. She went back to the stand of saplings and cut two dozen lengths of thin, five-foot saplings, leaving the network of spreading branches on. In the field she laid some of them across the width of the pit, then placed others at angles, weaving some of the smallest branches with others so she had almost a net covering the pit. She placed the camouflage plastic tarp over it.

The clumps of weeds she had removed to dig her pit she placed upright on the tarp. Then she filled in the spaces with new pieces of turf, some fallen leaves, and loose grass, until it was extremely difficult for her to see the difference between her pit and the rest of the field.

By the time she was finished, it was late afternoon. She went back to the house, cooked eggs and bacon for lunch, and ate on the front porch, studying the land in the direction they would come from. In the afternoon she examined all of her preparations in the house again, then walked from the main road along the dirt road to the house, so she would see it exactly as the men would see it. Be ready tonight, Harry had said. And Harry knew what Jane knew.

17.

Jane showered, added the bottles from the iced tea she'd had during the hot afternoon to her string of bottles in the hallway, rested, and watched afternoon turn into evening. As darkness came, she reviewed in her mind all of her preparations, and fell asleep. She left the window open in her room. In the night it was easier to separate noises that were natural from sounds like car engines and the jangling of metal, so she was sure she would hear them.

Six hours later, she did. She stood and looked out her window. Her ears had been correct. They were walking in pairs up the dirt road toward the house, and she could hear their boots crunching bits of dirt and stone as they came. There were eight of them, and the number momentarily shocked her. How could there be so many Maloney and Gorman were dead. It didn't matter-there they were. She hoped one of the men coming toward the house was Daniel Martel.

She closed the window and the shutter so there would be no moonlight behind her, went to lie on the mattress at the doorway, raised her shotgun to her shoulder, and made it snug. She pushed the door closed as far as she could to hide any silhouette she made. Only her shotgun barrel protruded through the open space.

The men were fiddling with the doors downstairs. She heard a faint, battery-operated buzz and knew that one of them had brought a lock-pick gun. A hand turned the doorknob. She half-felt, half-heard the door opening. One by one they entered and stepped away from the door, and she heard the same board creak over and over.

She heard whispering, or maybe it was only the nervous breathing of so many men in a dark, empty house. It occurred to her that they were probably just in from Los Angeles, so their lungs would not be used to the altitude of the mountains yet. There were quiet footsteps on the stairs, climbing up, closer and closer. The men were feeling good now. They had gotten in with little noise and no resistance. They were all together, and taking possession of the house. Jane kept her eyes trained on the hallway.

The first one appeared at the top of the stairs carrying a rifle. She decided to wait. He moved to the side of the master bedroom door, pointed down at the dim light coming from the crack beneath it, then beckoned, and a second man came from the staircase to stand on the other side of the bedroom door. The third man was just visible at the top of the staircase, still half protected by the wall.

She barely moved as she aimed her shotgun at the third man. He stepped up onto the floor of the hallway and raised his foot to kick in the master bedroom door. He kicked, the door swung inward, he fired at the dummy on the bed, and the other two pivoted to fire through the doorway, too. Jane pulled the trigger, and her shotgun blast killed the third man. The other two looked at him and each other, confused, half deafened by the firing in the narrow space, and their confusion gave Jane a second to pump the shotgun and fire a blast into the chest of the second man. The first man, now aware that the fire was coming from behind him, must have heard her pumping the shotgun again. He tried to spin around, but made it in time to see the muzzle flash coming from Jane's shotgun. Her shot caught him in the head, and he fell across the others.

Jane began to reload, but then there was a fourth man running up the hall toward her, firing a semiautomatic rifle. Holes appeared in the wood above her head. She fired at him, but she seemed to miss. She pumped again, but then he had disappeared into the doorway of one of the rooms. If she waited, the other four would be up here in seconds.

She stepped into the hall with her shotgun aimed at the doorway, slipped into the next room, locked the door, jumped onto the bed, and ran on it to the open window. She dropped the shotgun, threw the rope out the window, and crawled out after it. She lowered herself most of the way down, dropped, hit the ground, and ran along the house to crouch at the side of the front porch.

She drew her pistol and rested her arm on the lower part of the railing between the spokes, and took deep breaths while she waited. Two men rushed out the front door heading for the steps. She was so close to them she fired upward into them, not at them. She pulled the trigger five times.

She turned and ran back along the side of the house past her rope, toward the back door of the house. She reached the corner as she heard two more of them coming out. It was too late to ambush them, so she went low, then brought her arm around the corner of the house and fired wildly six times. She knew she hit one, because she heard him yell and fall against the house, and a rifle scraped it, then fell on the ground.

There was no way to be sure of the other, so she ran again, this time away from the house into the brush and weeds. She ran fifty or sixty feet to a thicket, dropped to the ground, replaced the magazine in her pistol, and cycled the slide to put a round in the chamber. She waited for the other man to come around, but he didn't come. He was probably trying to get a better angle to fire the rifle at her.

She had to move before he got a view of her. She would move to where he had been, because that was the one place she could be sure was clear. She would pick up the rifle of the man who had never fired, slip inside, and lie on the floor of the kitchen, where she would be able to hit anyone who came down the stairs or went to the front door. She came around the corner and stopped. There were two men with rifles, both standing up. They quickly swung around to face her, and she dashed back around the corner. She sprinted into the field, trying to dash into the deep darkness. She made it to another thicket, dropped into the weeds beyond it, and aimed at the corner of the house.

It was taking too long. At least one of them was moving to a new firing position. But what was the best firing position The upstairs window where she had climbed out and rappelled to the ground. From that elevation he would be able to see her perfectly and put a rifle bullet through her.

Jane ran toward the house until she was twenty feet below it. She imagined the man going in the door, through the kitchen, down the long hallway to the foot of the stairs, then up the stairs. He would run along the upstairs hall to the room where she had left the rope. He would kneel on the bed, prop an elbow on the windowsill, and look down the barrel.

Jane stood below the window, her pistol gripped in both hands, and aimed at the center of the small, dark square of the upstairs window. She saw the rifle barrel come out the window, and fired. She fired twice more, but there was no return shot. The rifle rested on the sill, the barrel now pointing out and upward at nothing. She turned and ran.

Behind her she heard more shots. They were rapid, but there was no overlap between them. There was only one man firing. She heard rounds crack as they passed over her faster than the sound barrier, heard thumps as they pounded into the ground. She didn't have the speed that she'd had all her life. It was frustrating and frightening, and she hated it, but she kept sprinting, trying to move as quickly as she could right now, because now was the only time that mattered, that was even real. She couldn't increase her speed, but she could strain to keep moving at the same rate in spite of the fatigue.

She stayed low, running in a particular direction, gauging her position by the tall pine tree jutting upward from the canopy of hardwoods. She crossed the game trail, veered to the right to follow it, and heard a shot hit behind her. She could hear the man now, his loud, heavy footsteps as he ran across the field to get a better shot at her, his heavy breaths coming closer in the silent night air.

Then she was at the pit, much closer than she had imagined it was, and she nearly stepped into it, her right foot dislodging a little dirt from the edge. She straightened her path, then veered to the right again beyond the covered pit. The man fired once more, but the shot went high. He was already trying to cut across her path to make the next shot easier and closer. He was not zigzagging as she was, not slowing at all.

She suddenly realized what he was doing. He had begun to think he could run her down and take her alive. As soon as they had realized she was armed and killing their comrades, the men must have assumed the best they could accomplish was to kill her. But now she was in the open and not running too fast to overtake. She wasn't shooting back, so maybe she was out of ammunition. The man was alone, but if he could catch her, he wouldn't have to split any money with partners. She was worth very little to him dead, but alive, she was priceless. He could sell her to her enemies or torture her, just as Wylie had wanted to do.

She heard it behind her, hardly daring to think it was that, and yet knowing it had to be, and then heard the voice-"Aah! Aah!" again and again, pitched higher than a man's speaking voice but still his voice. She thought she recognized the voice.

Jane slid to put her feet ahead of her, rolled over on her belly, and aimed her pistol in the direction she had come from. There was nothing to shoot at. She could see the whole marshy field all the way back to the house, but there was nothing in it taller than the weeds. She waited, stared down the sights of the pistol, but saw nothing. She stood and cautiously walked back toward the pit. She circled and approached it from the end so she could look the long way into the twelve-foot pit.

The tarp she had used to cover the pit was pushed aside off half the length of it, and the man lay on top of it. She could hear labored, raspy breathing. She could see the man's rifle had fallen about five feet from him. It seemed to be out of his reach, but that could be intentional.

She stepped closer. "I hear you up there," he shouted. "Help me." She had been right. It was Wylie's voice.

"Wylie. How bad are you"

"Bad. I've got a stake sticking in me."

"Toss your pistol out."

He didn't move. "I can't reach it. I can't hurt you now. Get a stick, something I can hold on to. Maybe I can get up."

She moved to the edge of the pit farthest from him and took the thickest and longest of the branches she had used to hide the pit. She held it out and he grasped it. She pulled.

"Uh," he grunted. "Let me do it."

Jane looked down and she could see that a pool of blood was collecting in the tarp below him. "How many stakes are in you"

He moved his free hand to explore. "Two. No, three. God, it hurts." He breathed hard a couple of times, then reached for the stick Jane held.

She said, "Tell me about Daniel Martel."

"A rich guy. He does what he wants. Sometimes he needs protection from what he does. He wanted Shelby's wife, he got her, kept her for a while, and then he killed her. He hired us to make sure Shelby got convicted, and then died, so nobody would ever reopen the case or come after Martel. When Shelby got away, Martel hired some more to help us hunt him down."

"Where is Martel now"

"I don't know. Probably LA."

"Not good enough. I can leave you here just like this, so you can tell the cops who you and all these armed dead men are."

"I'll help you get Martel if you'll help me get through this. I'll call him and bring him to you."

"All right. Can you lift yourself The stakes aren't in the ground deep. You can probably move them."

"I'll have to. I know that." He pushed up with one arm and dislodged two of the stakes from the ground. "Oh, Jesus," he muttered. "Oh, Jesus." Then he moved the third, and lay on his side, regaining his strength.

"Okay," Jane said. "Here. Hold on to the stick and I'll pull while you try to stand. Then we can get you up to the surface."

She saw him grasp the stick with both hands and brace himself. She pulled, and she saw in the moonlight a peculiar look appearing on his face. Then he did what she had expected. He made an incredibly fast tug on the stick, trying to pull her in onto the stakes that remained upright.

She let the stick go, and he fell backward. He was reaching into his jacket pocket when she backed away from the pit. As she turned and ran, she heard him moving. She ran a few more steps and dived into the weeds, just as he raised his hand above the edge and fired in her direction.

A moment later he called, "Come back."

She called, "You're on your own now. Look at your belly. You're bleeding out. I can wait."

"No. Stop. I'll do what I said, and bring Martel."

"Your chances got used up, Wylie."

She crawled a distance away, got up, and went to look at each of the other men to be sure none of them had survived. There were two on the front porch, one in the back. There were three she had caught shooting the dummy in the master bedroom. There was a man lying on the mattress where her rope was tied, his rifle still resting on the windowsill.

She took the rope and began the hard work of moving bodies. She dragged each of the four men lying on the second floor to the edge of the stairs and pushed him so he slid down to the first floor. Each of them stopped at some point, snagged on the railing or jammed against the wall, so she went down and pushed the body with both feet to get it moving. Then she dragged it to join the two who were already splayed on the front porch.

As she stepped off the porch, she heard the report of a pistol come from inside the pit she had dug. She paused for a second, then walked to the side of the house and out to the field, approaching the pit from a new angle so she could look down the long side.

When she was close, she pulled out her gun and stepped close to the pit. She looked inside, then away again. Wylie had put the barrel in his mouth and ended his pain.

Jane walked back into the house, found her cell phone, and called Stewart Shattuck's number. When he answered, she said, "I knew you'd be awake. Do you recognize my voice"

"Yes."

"I just killed eight of them. If there are others who might know you helped me, be ready."

"I'm pretty sure there aren't. I got the impression they were one little expedition after a reward. They wouldn't have passed on a tip to anybody. But thanks for the warning. You all right"

"I'm the only happy person for a few miles in any direction."

"Good enough. See you."

"See you."

Jane went upstairs and took the blanket off the bed where she had slept. She rolled one of the bodies off the porch onto the blanket and used it to drag him to the pit. She carried the blanket back and rolled the next one onto it. She worked hard and tirelessly. She had decided to do as much of this work as she could tonight, while it was cool and the bodies were fresh, and it was dark and she didn't have to look at their eyes. By the fourth body the blanket was soaked with blood. It didn't matter, she thought. The men were just bleeding into the grass. The ground of the state of New York, the country her people called their longhouse, had been soaking up human blood nicely for about fourteen thousand years.

When she had all seven bodies at the pit, she went through each man's pockets, dumped the contents onto a growing pile on the grass, then rolled him into the pit. When she had rolled the last one in, she lay back in the weeds and stared up at the dark sky. Clouds were coming in, and she knew that later on, there would be enough to snuff out the stars. After a long time, she got up, put the men's belongings into one man's ammo bag, and carried them to the house. She turned on the porch light and read the names on the licenses and credit cards. Wylie had not been lying-none of them was Daniel Martel.

She found the spade, then began to fill the pit. It was hard work. She took her jacket off and shoveled, letting the sweat pour off her, and soak the spine and armpits of her T-shirt. Her hair was a long, wet rope down her back. The volume of eight men and their weapons was considerable, but after the mass grave looked even with the rest of the field, Jane still kept bringing dirt until it was a bit higher. She had saved the layer of turf and weeds she had used to hide the pit, so she replanted them now in the topsoil. When she was finished, she took the tarp and spade to the house.

She turned on the hose at the side of the house, hosed off the grass, then went to the front porch and washed off all the blood she could from the high-gloss enamel paint.

She knew the men had come in some kind of vehicle, and she didn't want to leave it where they must have parked it, halfway up the dirt road. She went inside, searched the men's belongings, found three sets of car keys, took them all, walked up the road, and found the van. She tried a set of keys, got in, and drove the van to the house, then around the side to the back, where it would be hard to see from any angle.

Her night of killing was nearly used up. She began to pile things in the big brick barbecue behind the house-the tarp, the blanket, the leather wallets and other perishable items the men had in their pockets. She kept the money, identification, credit cards, and loose slips of paper. In the kitchen she found a glass jar and a rubber tube that attached to the faucet for spraying dishes. She went to the van, siphoned off a quart of gasoline from its tank, and soaked the things in the barbecue. She rinsed the jar and tube with the hose.

The last thing she did was stand on the grass in the moonlight and strip off her clothes. When she was naked except for her hiking boots, she took a windproof lighter that had belonged to one of the men, lit it, and tossed it onto the pile.

The air gave a "huff" sound and the fire came into being above the pile of human things like a little explosion that puffed against her hair. It was a big flame, at least ten feet tall at first, bright orange with an aura of blue around it. Jane watched it for a minute, until it had begun to calm down and settle into devouring what it had been given. Then she walked out of the firelight and went about two hundred feet to the edge of the lake.

She kept walking, and her boots sank into mud at first, making a sucking sound as she lifted them for the next step. The water was icy, but to her it felt clean and fierce and scouring. She kept going until the water reached her chest, and then bent her legs and ducked under. She came up gasping, feeling as though her skin were burning instead of cold. She took two more deep breaths and then went under again, scrubbing herself all over with her hands. She took off her boots and cleaned them of the lingering bits of mud, then walked up through the reeds to the shore. She put her boots back on and walked up toward the fire.

She was shivering when she got there, but she stood in the heat for a few minutes, feeling the fire evaporating the moisture almost instantly. Already there seemed to be nothing recognizable in the fire, only ashes and black residue. She walked to the house, and left her boots on the back porch to dry. She locked every door, barred every window, and went upstairs. She stepped into the shower and washed herself carefully and thoroughly, beginning with her hair and ending with her feet, then dressed in a clean sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers.

She reloaded her pistol and her shotgun. Then she went to a room that had not been touched, lay on the bed, and went to sleep.

Over the next few days she would search the van, remove its license plates and VIN tag, and abandon it deep in the woods. She would perform many hours of scrubbing in the house, fill holes in walls, and paint over them. She would do some more planting over the grave. But most of the time, she would rest and recover.

It was not until the fourth day, while she was indoors during a heavy rain organizing the information she had gleaned from the men's belongings and the contents of the van, that she admitted to herself what she was going to do next.

18.

Jane drove west on the Southern Tier Expressway over a hundred miles before she stopped at Oil Springs. This was a tiny bit of land that had been left as a Seneca reservation to preserve Seneca ownership of the spring. The water flowed into a pond and was clear and cold, but had a coating on top that was oil. In the old times, the Senecas used to collect it by dragging a blanket along the calm surface and then wring it out into containers. She had heard that the prophet Handsome Lake, who had lived not far from here in the 1790s, used to come to make medicine.

The spring was at the end of Cuba Lake on County Route 50. She parked her car, put some equipment in a bag, and began to walk west from the pond. It didn't take her long to get far enough inland on the swampy ground to begin spotting the flower she was looking for here and there. She looked for healthy plants over seven feet tall with complicated branchings that each ended in the flat white groups of tiny flowers that looked like circles of lace.

Harvesting was dangerous. She had retained a few pairs of surgical gloves from the housecleaning, and she put on a pair now. She used the long, razor-sharp blade of the K-Bar knife to dig up the muck around the bottoms of the plants so the roots would come up easily. She collected the roots of about fifty of the tall water plants.

She loaded the roots into one-gallon ziplock bags, then went to a spot in the shade where there were a few large flat limestone slabs. She set the bags on the flat stone surface and used the blunt side of her hatchet to pound the roots into a mash. She repeated the process with each of the bags. Finally, she stretched the leg of a pair of panty hose over a glass jar, put a pinhole in the first of the plastic bags, and squeezed the pale yellow juice from the pulverized roots out the hole and through the homemade filter into the jar.

Jane was always extremely cautious with water hemlock. Just handling the stems with bare hands could make a person lose consciousness, but the strongest poison was concentrated in the roots. It was a powerful nerve toxin, and eating a couple of bites of a single root would kill a person in minutes. She kept working with her bags of root mash, moving the panty hose occasionally to present a fresh filter. She filled four quart jars with the filtered root juice before she ran out. The juice she obtained was strong and clear, free of root particles. She capped the jars, reloaded her equipment into her backpack, walked to her car, and put everything in her trunk.

She drove on, bought a ten-foot coil of copper tubing and a camp stove in a hardware store in the next town, then stopped in the cooking section of a small department store and bought a teapot and a cooking thermometer. She drove another thirty miles and followed signs to a picnic area by a campsite. Cicutoxin, the poison in water hemlock, was a complex alcohol. Alcohol boiled at a lower temperature than water, so purifying and concentrating the juice was done by distilling it. She set the covered pot on the stove, attached the copper tubing to the spout, sealed the openings with duct tape, and let the tubing extend in a downward spiral into an empty jar. When the juice in the teapot boiled, the cicutoxin would vaporize at around seventy degrees Celsius, then condense in the long copper tube, and drip into the jar. The water wouldn't boil off until it reached one hundred degrees Celsius. She boiled the juice until about a quarter of the liquid remained, then refilled the pot and repeated the process. When she had finished, she had about a quart of highly concentrated poison. The clear liquid had lost almost all of its yellowish tinge.

She sealed everything she had contaminated in a big plastic bag, put that into a second plastic bag, stopped after dark at a Dumpster behind a large store, and put the bag in the Dumpster, a few feet down where no human being might touch it. The Dumpster would be lifted by the mechanical arms of the garbage truck and dumped in a landfill. All she had kept was one quart jar of concentrated poison. She wasn't sure that it was as strong as the best batch she had ever made, but she was sure it wouldn't take more than a tablespoon of it to kill a person.

In Erie, Pennsylvania, she turned in the rental car and went to a car lot and bought a used Camry for a down payment of five hundred dollars and a promise that Heather Gollensz would begin paying two hundred dollars a month after a three-month grace period. She drove on into Ohio. As she traveled, she fell back into the old discipline. She never let her gas tank go below half full, and the nearer she could keep it to full, the better. She traveled at night by preference, moving along the highway at a steady, unchanging speed with feigned patience.