Revolution No.9

NEW MURDERS INCREASE PANIC

Wendy Reicher

Tribune staff reporter

Published March 10, 2004

Chicago-The latest in a series of more than a dozen multiple murders tentatively linked to the “Calamity Jane” killings was discovered early this morning near Lake Forest.

Walter R. Krieger and his wife, Nancy, were found shot dead in their home in the exclusive gated community of Avalon Greens. Krieger was an executive who sat on several major corporate boards and an influential industry lobbyist. His status in the business world, along with the killers’ penetration of heavy security and the lack of any apparent motive, fit the pattern of previous crimes.

Police confirmed that items were taken from the home but refused to say what. In the past, stolen items have been dumped out in inner cities and homeless camps, among them expensive jewelry and the rare golf clubs that gave the murders their name. This has given the killers a growing Robin Hood image in some areas. Baseball caps and T-shirts with the “Calamity Jane” logo have even appeared, sparking outrage and demands for swift police action from citizens’ groups.

“We’re aggressively pursuing a number of promising leads,” FBI spokesman William Joslin told a press conference earlier today. “It’s only a matter of time before these people are brought to justice.”

But a Chicago police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “It’s almost like they’re thumbing their nose at us-trying to prove there’s nothing anybody can do to stop them.”

With no suspects in custody, widespread concern is on the rise.

24

Monks cut the last of the pressure-treated two-by-ten deck joists with a Skilsaw and laid it on a stack with the others, then paused to rest, wiping a film of sweat from his forehead. He glanced out to the hazy Pacific horizon for signs of incoming weather, as he had gotten in the habit of doing. It was early March. Spring came more slowly to the North Coast than to other parts of California, and storms were still frequent. But this was a clear day, and the afternoon sun was warm on his shoulders.

He had found out why Lia-he still thought of her as Marguerite-had recognized tools like bolt cutters and pipe wrenches. Her mother, Sara Ferraro, was a professional builder, with her own all-female construction company. She lived in the hills above a little town called Elk, about fifteen miles south of Mendocino and a two-hour drive from his own home in Marin County. He had spent quite a bit of time here over the past couple of months, and had volunteered to rebuild the deck behind her house, one of those things that she had been meaning to get to for years but never had the time. His carpentry skills were decent, but nowhere near Sara’s level, and he was feeling under the gun, performance-wise.

His watch read 4:43 P.M. Sara often worked late, but this was Friday, so she’d be home soon. He figured he had just enough time left to set the joists in place. Then he would have the completed substructure to show off to her.

Standing in the middle of the deck’s twelve-by-sixteen-foot rectangle, he fit the two-by-tens, one by one, into the metal hangers he had nailed at twenty-four-inch intervals along the rim joists. He was careful to keep the lumber crowns pointing up-that was important, he had learned from her, for load-bearing members.

When he finished, it looked pretty good, and he was feeling pleased with himself.

Then he noticed that some of the joists were as much as a quarter-inch higher than the rim joists where they met.

“What the fuck,” he said. When he got his tape measure and checked, he found out that the two-by-tens varied from about nine inches in depth to almost nine and a half inches. The bigger ones were sticking up too high. He dropped the tape back into his tool belt, feeling disgusted, ripped off. What the hell kind of world was this when you couldn’t trust lumber dimensions?

He could hardly leave the joists as they were-that would create humps in the decking. He supposed he would have to pull them out again and notch them underneath-a major, and time-consuming, pain in the ass.

But not today. He got a cold bottle of crisp Kronenbourg beer from the kitchen, then went back out and sat on the lumber pile. The beer was cold and rich, and that dry pilsner taste was just right for the end of a sweaty day of physical work.

In the weeks after the fire at Freeboot’s camp, Monks had dealt extensively with law-enforcement authorities, and had lobbied hard to get Marguerite a deal without jail time. The courts took into account her brainwashing and her help in escaping, and agreed that there was nothing to be gained by punishing her. She had been sent to live with relatives in Phoenix. Privately, Monks thought her cooperation seemed more dutiful than wholehearted, but as long as she kept her job and stayed out of trouble, the law would consider her on probation.

Monks had driven her and the Sara to the San Francisco airport to send her off. When the boarding gate closed, Sara, tough and fiery through the entire ordeal, had collapsed against him and said, “Now take me home and fuck me, will you?”

That first coupling had been more combative than gentle, and it had lasted some time. He had his own tensions to work out. He had battled with guilt about taking a lover while his son was still missing, and with the fear that both he and Sara were in brittle states-using each other for the wrong reasons, which could come around to harm them. It might have been better to cut clean. But it was also really good, and as those things will, it kept happening.

Mandrake was in a long-term care ward for juvenile diabetics, and much improved; tests had found him free of HIV or other serious complications. Monks had been to see him once-an official visit to consult with medical and social services authorities. Mandrake’s reaction to Monks was one of wariness and withdrawal. Psychologists had decided that it would be best if Monks faded from his memory, along with all the trauma that he represented. Monks agreed, but it hurt.

There had been no news about Freeboot, or any of the others-including Glenn.

The human remains found at the fire scene-the only ones-were, in fact, female. They belonged to Mandrake’s mother, aka Motherlode, whose real name was Alexandra Neville. All indications were that she was unconscious, perhaps already dead, when the fire got to her. Given her addiction, she might have passed out, or even overdosed, and been overlooked by the others until it was too late.

But the possibility of murder existed, and Monks couldn’t help suspecting that Freeboot had killed her because of his insane conviction that she was responsible for Mandrake’s illness.

If this were true, then killing Glenn to get revenge on Monks seemed an all too likely possibility. That fear ate at Monks like a sarcoma, keeping him awake for hours at a time in the middle of most nights. Rationally, he had over and over again justified leaving Glenn there. But when it came to something like this, rational thought didn’t cut it.

When Sara’s beat-up Toyota pickup truck pulled into the driveway, Monks got up to greet her. She leaned out the window and eyed the deck approvingly.

“Good boy,” she said. “You’re due for a reward.”

“I screwed up.” He pointed to one of the uneven joints.

“Oh. You should set the hangers low, then shim. There’s no ceiling underneath, so it doesn’t matter down there.”

“Now you tell me.”

“Hey, I can’t be giving away all my secrets too fast. You already know plenty of them.”

She got out of the truck, dressed in blue-collar drag-boots whitened with drywall dust, faded jeans stained with construction adhesive and caulk, and a torn sweatshirt. Her dark hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail. It was a look that wouldn’t have worked for a lot of women, but on her it was sexy. The hard labor of her job kept her taut and lithe-she could touch her palms flat to the ground without bending her knees. In bed, she liked to clasp her ankles behind his neck.

He saw that she had groceries, and went to help carry them inside.

“Shrimp, scallops, and rock cod,” she said, handing him a plastic sack filled with cold paper-wrapped parcels. “We’re going to have seafood pasta. Frutti di mari. Okay?”

“Wonderful,” Monks said.

She frowned. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he said, but then realized that his uneasiness must be showing. “Do I seem out of it?”

“Like you’re carrying a granite block on your back, baby. More and more.”

“Sorry. I’m fine. Really.”

“Yeah?” she said, and smiled, maybe a little sadly. “I know it’s tough for you, Carroll. I can’t even imagine. At least I know where my kid is.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek and went inside.

Monks gathered up the rest of the groceries and followed her. The kitchen was small and neat, smelling of herbs and garlic, its butcher-block counters scarred and the Creuset cookware much used. Like the deck, it was something she intended to redo if she ever got the time. He liked it as it was.

“You pour us a drink and shell the shrimp, I’ll do the rest,” she said. She liked to get everything ready in advance, then kick back, and do the final cooking when they were good and hungry.

“Done,” Monks said. He opened the bottle of Guigal Côtes du Rhône that she had brought-seafood or not, Sara was a red wine drinker, with a keen sense for good inexpensive varietals-then poured himself his old standby of Finlandia vodka on ice, touched with fresh lemon. This was the time of year that he had planned to be in Ireland, but that had been put on indefinite hold.

He dumped the big tiger prawns into a bowl. Sara turned on the TV news, and Monks half-listened as he pried apart the carapaces. They were barely thawed, the shells’ icy edges stiff and sharp against his thumbs. While his hands moved automatically, his senses drank in the pleasantness around him-the lovely woman, the cozy place, the savory food and drink. He had enough money, enough of everything. What he needed was to feel more useful, he decided-not too useful, just a little.

His mind started going over employment options. He still worked as an investigator for a malpractice insurance firm in San Francisco. His case load had been light lately, but only by his choice. He could let them know that he was willing to take on more. There were also many hospitals and clinics that would gladly hire him for temporary locum tenens work, including a couple around here. He could arrange a schedule that would satisfy him and still leave him plenty of free time. That would be the ticket.

“…this country better be ready for a wake-up call, because it’s about to get one,” a man’s angry voice said on the television. In the background came the shouts and mutterings of a crowd.

Monks paused, his attention caught by something he could not quite identify.

“It’s bad enough they don’t give a damn about us, but then to come in here and treat us like this,” the speaker fulminated. “Those politicians better start realizing, there’s twenty million people out here who got nothing. Outlaws, or damned near.”

Monks dropped the shrimp he was holding and strode to the TV. Sara glanced at him in surprise.

“What-” she started to say, but he held his hand up for silence.

The television screen showed a fiftyish white man with the look of the homeless-thin and bearded, wearing a greasy parka and mismatched pants and shirt-stabbing a forefinger with violent emphasis as he spoke. A mob hundreds strong was grouped behind him, murmuring and erupting in shouts of anger and menace. The background looked somehow familiar-a slum in an older city, four-and five-story brick buildings with rickety back porches hung with laundry.

“There’s an army already out there, and it’s ready to fight back.” The speaker thrust his fist into the air in a Black Power salute. The crowd repeated the gesture, pumping fists up and down and raising its collective voice to a roar.

The TV screen switched back to the studio anchorwoman, well groomed and professionally poised.

“Again, Chicago police came down hard on an urban homeless camp after items were discovered there that might be linked to the ‘Calamity Jane’ killings,” she said.

Chicago. That’s where he’d seen those buildings-on the South Side, where he’d grown up, down by the Rock Island Railroad tracks.

“Officials deny that any brutality was used, but a videotape has surfaced of police rampaging through the area, evoking outraged comparisons to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles,” the announcer went on. “Authorities say they’re looking into the matter.

“Up next, a look at the weekend’s sports. Stay with us.”

Sara’s face was questioning.

“Freeboot said the same thing to me, in almost those same words,” Monks said. “The same number, twenty million outlaws. The riff about the army already being out there.”

He flipped to a different channel and this time caught the story as it was starting.

“…now we’ll hear how a shocking murder in an Illinois gated community has led to a near riot in a homeless camp,” another anchorwoman said. “Here’s Ted Derrick in Chicago. Ted?”

The screen flashed to a good-looking young man with a microphone, standing at the fringes of the same slum and crowd that the earlier newscast had shown.

“Kelly, events have taken a strange and even uglier turn here, since the murder yesterday of Walter Krieger and his wife,” he said. “This morning, items of Mrs. Krieger’s lingerie, believe it or not, started turning up in this urban homeless camp-very expensive stuff, Italian silk and what-have-you, not the kind of thing you’d expect to find here.”

Sara was watching now with dismay, holding a chopping knife in a posture that looked unconsciously defensive.

“They stole her underwear?” she murmured. “That’s creepy.”

“Police received an anonymous tip about the lingerie, is that right?” Kelly, the anchorwoman said.

“Correct. There’s speculation that the tip came from the killers themselves, wanting to link this to the previous Calamity Jane murders.”

“Why are they doing this?” she said, leaning forward suddenly and slapping her hand down on her desk, with the petulance of a teeange girl.

Not just petulance, Monks thought. Fear. It could happen to her.

“Nobody seems to have any answers yet, Kelly.”

She leaned back, regaining her composure. “And there are complaints of brutality when police searched the camp?”

“Yes. Residents say they ran amok, with violence, threats, and racial slurs. Here’s a video that was taken by a bystander.”

The screen changed again, this time to a scenario that looked like it could have been from a movie of a postapocalyptic world. Unsteady and amateurish, surreally lit by the garish flashing lights of squad cars, the footage showed a dozen policemen in full riot gear charging through an alley, tearing apart cardboard shelters, kicking men in bedrolls and clubbing those who tried to stand.

“There’s a sense that the police were taking out their frustrations on the homeless,” Ted’s voice cut in. “Blaming and punishing them for the murders.”

The screen switched to the same homeless spokesman who had been on the earlier broadcast, repeating his strident shout:

“It’s bad enough they don’t give a damn about us, but then to come in here and treat us like this-”

Monks felt Sara’s hand touch his arm. The concern was in her eyes again.

“How about we turn this off and get in the hot tub?” she said.

“There’s an army already out there, and it’s ready to fight back,” the angry face shouted.

Monks switched off the set. “Let me just clean up,” he said. He peeled the few remaining shrimp, put them in the refrigerator, and washed the counter.

Since the fire, he had checked out some of Freeboot’s claims and found them accurate. Official estimates put the homeless population at over three and a half million, more than a third of them children. That was probably on the conservative side, and didn’t take into account the many more who were marginal-one short step away.

More than three million jobs in industry had disappeared over the past couple of years. There was a pervasive perception of the homeless as lazy and irresponsible, but a whole lot of them were staunch, hardworking citizens who couldn’t pay their bills after the factory doors slammed shut. The few jobs that were “created” to replace those lost tended to be either high-end technical-beyond the reach of people without higher education-or minimum-wage. Thousands of soldiers were coming home from overseas deployment and finding that out.

And the big rock of poverty that dropped into the national pond spread other ugly ripples. The FBI estimated twenty-four thousand violent gangs. Prisons were overcrowded to the bursting point, their population over two million, with millions more ex-cons and parolees also on society’s fringes.

The total might not add up to twenty million, but it was a hell of a lot of people. How many more were that one short step away, who weren’t showing up on any economic-indicator charts? Outwardly doing all right-but in fear of losing their jobs, facing power bills that suddenly tripled and surging gasoline prices that hammered commuters and other escalating expenses, unable to afford health insurance and knowing that a sickness or injury would wipe them out. Literally a paycheck or two away from losing everything. If you went another rung down the socioeconomic ladder, you were talking people who worked for minimum wage, who would never own a house, who were condemned to a semi-desperate life with the talons of drugs and crime clawing at their children.

When Monks was growing up, the lucky kids had a chance at college. Others went into jobs in factories or the trades, not glamorous, but stable and adequately providing. If you were responsible, you could live decently, buy a home, and hope that your children would have it better-the American dream. His own father had been a laborer, and his mother, a grade school teacher. He had been one of those lucky kids.

Now that was pretty much gone. Lucky was more and more equivalent with affluent, and for the others, that stable life was edging closer to extinction all the time.

For all of Freeboot’s madness, he had pinpointed a major weakness that had crept into society over the past couple of decades-a huge mass of rage and desperation. Monks thought of it in terms of basic chemistry. If you put water in a pot and turned up the heat and pressure, the molecules got more and more agitated until they finally boiled over.

It had been eerie, watching Freeboot’s words come out of a stranger’s mouth. But the really surprising thing, Monks realized, was that he was not really surprised. The three months of constant worrying and looking over his shoulder had been building, not receding.

He had been waiting for something.

25

Sara’s antiquated hot tub dated back twenty-some years, to when she and her coke-dealer ex-boyfriend had first lived here. It was an indulgence, even a caricature of California decadence, but nice for chilly nights and watching the ocean, calm and starlit, or ominous under an incoming wall of fog, or wild with a storm.

“It’s just a word-of-mouth thing, don’t you think?” she said. She was leaning back, water up to her chin, calves draped across Monks’s thighs. Her hair was a damp, dark cloud. “What that homeless guy was saying, that sounded like Freeboot? Something that gets passed around between street people. Maybe Freeboot wasn’t even the first one who made it up.”

“You’re probably right.”

“I can understand why it upsets you, but-I think you’re seeing Indians behind every tree.”

Monks realized that she was working to soothe him, as she often did. He caressed the back of her knee appreciatively.

“You didn’t know you were taking on a full-time job, trying to keep me calm,” he said.

“Listen to you-finding something else to feel guilty about.”

“What do you mean, something else?”

“All kinds of things. Thinking Glenn inherited your bad side.”

“I don’t exactly think that,” Monks said. But it brought back the unhappy memory of his conversation with Shrinkwrap at the camp.

“But you’re afraid of it. Every parent is-the honest ones, anyway. You think I don’t worry that Lia grew up like me? Sex, drugs, hooking up with a guy who ran her life?”

“You turned it around,” he said. “So will she.”

This time it was Sara who looked distracted by her own thoughts. She had been a good girl, the pride of her blue-collar family, attending UC Berkeley on a full scholarship. Then, home for the summer before her senior year, she’d started living with the area’s ranking coke dealer, a man almost ten years older. She never went back to school. For a while, they’d lived the high life. But the drug business started changing, with rougher competition moving in and her boyfriend getting paranoid and erratic.

Then she got pregnant. Ostensibly, it was unplanned, but on some level she understood that it was a desperate move to ground herself. She had quit the drugs, leveraged her ex out of the house, and borne Lia-and then started to face the reality of paying for a child and a life. An uncle in the construction business had hired her to do book work. She had started cleaning job sites for extra cash, picked up skills quickly, and eventually parlayed them into the novelty of an all-female crew, backed by a reputation for quality work.

But she alluded to times, during those intervening years, of bad relationships, lapses back into drug use, and almost abandoning herself to the downhill crash of that earlier life that she had barely pulled out of.

“She’ll find her own way,” Sara finally agreed. “You ready for a refill?”

“Sure.” Monks drained the bit of vodka left in his glass and handed it to her.

She went to the kitchen and came back a minute later, carrying the full glasses like a waitress, except that she was naked and dripping wet. Monks watched her the entire time. He loved to look at her-her smooth olive skin, dark-nippled breasts soft and etched with the lines of mothering, lush black V disappearing between her thighs. Although he had witnessed many births, he would clasp her slim hips and touch the soft petals of her labia in near disbelief that a child could have passed through. The older he got, the more fascinated he became by the beauty and resilience of women.

She knew it, and took her time getting back into the tub.

“You feel guilty about us, too,” she said.

Monks started to deny it. But, like most of her insights, it bore truth.

“There’s a part of me that says I don’t deserve anything this good.”

“Maybe it’s an Irish-versus-Italian deal,” she said. “You brood about things forever. We just do them, then we scream at each other, or go to confession, and it’s over.”

“I don’t think it’s that cut and dried.”

“Okay, it never is. But-I don’t know exactly how to put this. You’re a tough guy in some ways, but you’ve never really gotten down.”

“Gotten down?”

“Compromised yourself, to get what you wanted.”

“I’ve done plenty I’m not proud of,” Monks said.

“I mean really down and dirty, hon. Like, there were a couple of times I blew guys for coke.” She watched his face. “Shocks you, huh?” she said.

“A little,” he admitted, annoyed with himself for his prudishness.

But she seemed amused. “It helps you learn to get over things. You realize it’s not the end of the world. So what about fucking in a hot tub? Does that slam you with extra guilt?”

Monks slid his hand up the inside of her thighs to their wet, furry juncture. She closed her eyes and scooted her rump forward, pressing into him.

“Sometimes guilt makes things sweeter,” he said. “Any mick can tell you that.”

It was the strangest apartment building that Monks had ever been in, an old brick tenement hung with laundry, but the front walls were missing, so he could see right into the rooms. He was talking with a pixie-ish young woman, standing where the doorway would have been. She was pretty, her skin very pale, her hair orange.

That will be fine, then, she said earnestly. Monks agreed, but her features started changing, becoming bearded and disheveled, and she was speaking angry, accusing words. Disturbed, Monks drifted on, through a vaginal labyrinth of deep purples and reds.

Now there was something behind him, following, that he didn’t like at all. A name was coming into his head, with an “F” sound. Federico. Francesco. Freefreefree-

He ran, but the world around him had thickened into an endless swamp. His legs were like chunks of lead, his steps agonizing. He clawed at the decayed cypress knees that thrust up around him, pulling himself along, but it was way too late, because whatever had been following was not really behind him at all, it was already in him-

Monks said, “Haaah,” and struggled to sit up. His eyes were open. He was in Sara’s bed, with her sleeping beside him. He put his hand on her flank. Her breathing was undisturbed. Glad that he hadn’t awakened her, he settled back again and closed his eyes.

But a page from Pilgrim’s Progress, its Gothic etchings forever seared into his childhood memory, opened in his mind.

…he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apol-lyon.

Monks got up quietly and carried his clothes to the living room to dress. There was no chance of getting back to sleep.

The green LED readout on the microwave read 3:13. He opened the liquor cabinet and looked at the vodka bottle. But he knew that if he started, he wouldn’t stop, and come dawn, he would be wide-awake drunk. He started heating water for coffee instead.

His own dream had fit a pattern that was common for him-images that had recently been in his mind, blended with elements of absurdity, and ending in a helpless attempt to escape. The young woman’s face, melting into an ugly blur that recalled the homeless man on TV. The comforting birthlike passage giving way to a world that was harsh and dangerous. Federico and Francesco, Italian names stemming from his earlier talk with Sara, his mind groping for the “F” that it linked to the threat.

Freeboot.

In the aftermath of the fire, law-enforcement authorities had quickly identified Freeboot. His real name was James Reese. He had grown up semiferal in the northern California backwoods, part of a loose clan of dope growers and outlaws. As he had claimed, he’d spent a lot of his later life in prison. It also seemed true that he had experienced some kind of conversion-not religious, but intellectual and political-that had turned him from a run-of-the-mill loser into a serious figure who won the respect of other inmates. He had cleaned up his act, even getting his prison tattoos filled in to symbolize his turnaround. With his last sentence in Folsom served without incident, he faded off the radar of the criminal-justice system.

But there was another factor in the equation-a psychologist with the all-American name of Mary Jane Wilson, and an unsavory past of her own. Twice, as a high school counselor-once in her home state of Ohio, and later in Missouri -she had been dismissed for seducing teenage boys.

Hard-pressed to find work, Mary Jane had ended up as a counselor in the California prison system. She had her own ax to grind against authorities now, and, like many of the convicts, she felt at heart that she had been perfectly within her rights to do what she had done, that it was the law that had wronged her.

One of her clients at Folsom was James Reese. It was during that time period that he had his “epiphany.” The two of them bonded, him taking the name Freeboot, and she Shrinkwrap. The details of what followed were unclear, but an overall picture emerged from what solid information was available, what Marguerite had contributed, and guesswork.

About four years ago, Shrinkwrap had moved to the North Coast, where she falsified her record, deleting the dismissals, and set up shop. Here in the heart of pot-growing country there were plenty of troubled kids. She quickly became popular with them, although this time there were no reported incidents of sexual misconduct. If she was at it again, she kept it well hidden. She bought an isolated rundown farm near Lake Pillsbury and turned it into an informal retreat for her young clientele. Using intuition and her skills as a psychologist, she determined their susceptibility.

When Freeboot got out of jail and joined her, he brought with him a rhetoric-charged agenda and a training program cobbled together from his superficial reading of history, folklore, and paramilitary creeds. The chosen candidates were carefully brought up through levels, their loyalty constantly tested, their personalities systematically broken down and rebuilt along fanatical lines, with the reward of belonging to a secret, super-powerful elite. Drug use was encouraged, especially of methamphetamine-which, Monks had learned, had been given to kamikaze pilots and Nazi soldiers to make them more alert and aggressive, enabling them to function up to ten days without sleep. A popular form of manufacturing the drug was even known as “the Nazi method.”

Freeboot also acquired Motherlode, who had the extra qualification of being a wealthy heiress. Besides a hefty trust fund and other investments, she happened to own the property up in the wilderness north of Lake Pillsbury. He married her and set up a second camp there-the place where Monks had been held.

Shrinkwrap’s farm served as both a cover operation and a base, providing physical needs and a closer link to civilization. The mountain camp was for the elite-the training place for the few who were selected to be maquis and brides. Everything was kept scrupulously legal on the surface-taxes paid, no obvious drug use or welfare fraud, or any other reason for authorities to come around. As the logging truck driver had told Monks, people in the area knew that the group was there and didn’t much like it, but everybody left everybody else alone.

Days of careful searching through the camp’s wreckage had revealed little. The fire had destroyed almost everything. Computers found in an underground bunker had been stripped of their hard drives, and explosives had turned what was left into a chaos of junk. Police had done their best to track down the fugitives, but the fugitives had vanished. The identities of some were traced, but with no results-they were drifters, runaways, throwaways. Others, like Taxman, remained wild cards, their legal names still unknown.

It seemed that Freeboot’s boastful intentions about righting social injustices and changing history had gone up with the smoke. Now he was a fallen idol, an ex-con on the run, wanted for a host of crimes that would put him back in prison for life. But even here, he had provided for himself with alarming foresight. He had acquired power of attorney over Motherlode’s inheritance, dismissing the outraged trustees that her parents had put in charge. Investigators had discovered that roughly twelve million dollars of that money then had been siphoned off, apparently into numbered overseas bank accounts.

Now Motherlode was dead and Freeboot was rich.

Much as Monks had tried to write him off, he had not been able to. Freeboot’s level of organization, together with his personal power, were too disturbing. Now he seemed to be turning up in Monks’s imagination-getting into his head, as Freeboot’s devotees claimed he could. All of Monks’s scientific training scorned any such notion. But he recalled uneasily two separate instances when he could almost have sworn that people had made psychic contact with him. Both of them had been trying to kill him at the time.

The coffee water was boiling. He ground up a cup’s worth of French roast, dumped it into a filter, and poured the steaming water slowly through, in stages. The result was strong and bitter, the way he liked it.

He was starting to think about making breakfast when he heard a car door slam outside. There was no reason for anyone to be coming here at this hour.

He stepped to a window away from the kitchen light just in time to see the vehicle’s taillights as it pulled away, leaving a thin white plume of exhaust in the chilly night. It looked like an older-model van, the kind that were popular in the 1970s. Someone was walking toward the house, shouldering a backpack.

Monks got a dizzying lurch in his gut, like when flying and the airliner dropped suddenly in rough weather.

It was Lia.

Sara hadn’t said anything about her coming home. He was quite sure that Sara didn’t know-and that this was a violation of Lia’s probation. He unlocked the door and opened it.

“I knew somebody that was coming up here and I caught a ride,” she said, stepping past him and unslinging her pack onto the floor. “We drove all night.” She seemed neither glad to see him nor surprised. She knew from phone talks with her mother that he had been staying here sometimes, and his Bronco was parked in the driveway. Her movements were jittery and her pupils seemed dilated. He wondered if she had been using meth-another probation offense.

“Welcome home,” he said. “I’ll get your mom.”

Sara was already hurrying down the hall, tying the belt of her robe. She must have heard the car, too. She gave Monks a quick, distraught look, but then put on a big smile as she came into the living room.

The two women embraced, with Sara murmuring, “Oh, baby, it’s so good to see you.” She stepped back, clasping Lia’s shoulders, still smiling but looking perplexed.

“But you’re not supposed to be here,” Sara said.

Lia pulled away. “Don’t start, okay, Mom?” she said sharply. “There’s just no way I can live in that straight world.”

“What are you telling me?” Sara said. “You’re not going back?”

“No way,” Lia repeated emphatically.

Monks stayed in the background, silent. Lia hadn’t been happy about going to Phoenix; but, then, she hadn’t been happy about anything. He waited, expecting Sara to remind her of her probation terms. Leaving Phoenix was not her decision to make.

Instead, Sara said, “Okay, we’ll work it out. What about Joe and Ellie?” Those were the relatives that Lia had been staying with.

“What about them?” Lia retorted.

“Do they know about this?”

“What do you think, they’d have let me go? I told them I was going to spend the weekend at a girlfriend’s.”

Sara sighed. “I’d better call them.”

Monks was taken aback by her swift acquiescence. He told himself that it was none of his business, but that wasn’t true. When he had lobbied to get Lia the deal, he had implicitly staked his word that she would stick to it. And allowing her to stay here would constitute something like harboring a fugitive, even if in a very small way.

But now was not the time to bring it up.

“I was about to make breakfast,” Monks said. “How about it, Lia? You hungry?”

She swung around to face him, with her edgy, defiant gaze.

“Call me Marguerite,” she said. “You know that’s my real name.”

26

Monks’s relationship with Gail, his ex-wife and Glenn’s mother, had become distant over the years, but it had intensified during the past three months-since their son had once again become a focus of their lives. In fact, they hadn’t had so much interaction since finalizing their divorce.

This afternoon, Monks had agreed to meet her for lunch. There was no news of Glenn, no aspect of the incident that they hadn’t already discussed dozens of times. But she needed to take her anxieties out on Monks, and while he usually received an emotional beating, in a twisted way he got some satisfaction, too. It was somewhat like giving blood.

Gail had a pleasant face and an athletic figure, a little on the big-boned side, like their daughter, Stephanie’s. Her hair was short and gingery, like Glenn’s. She kept herself trim by playing tennis and taking treks to remote places around the globe with her second husband, Sawyer, an environmental-sciences professor at UC Davis. She was intelligent, goodhearted, politically correct, and vaguely hostile to abstract thought.

“I think the police aren’t looking hard enough,” she said.

The fact was that Freeboot, with his illicit wealth, could be anywhere in the world. Monks answered with a noncommittal “Hmh,” chewing on a club sandwich. The restaurant was in Sonoma, at the corner of the old town square. It wasn’t the kind of place that he particularly cared for-it was small and cramped, with a sort of forced chichi ambience, and passers-by gaping into the big plate-glass windows made him feel like an animal in a zoo. But Gail had chosen it.

“Every time the phone rings, I jump,” she said. Her gaze was reproachful, as if he were to blame.

He nodded empathetically. Only since the fire had she confessed that before then, Glenn had been calling her regularly-and that she had frequently wired him money, to whatever bank he specified. She knew that he had moved from Seattle to northern California about two years ago, but he had refused to tell her exactly where. She kept sending money anyway. Monks had long since realized that the relationship between mother and son-especially an only son-was of a profundity beyond his grasp. And he suspected that Glenn’s emotional problems only made Gail’s attachment stronger.

“You don’t think those sheriffs know something they’re not telling us, do you?”

“I don’t see what good that would do them,” Monks said. “But I suppose it’s possible.”

“That’s comforting.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it, Gail. Nothing but wait.”

She picked at her salad and watched him eat his sandwich with a hint of disdain, like a well-bred lady forced to share her table with an ill-mannered serf. When they were courting, Gail had been a fun-loving free spirit. But in the course of their marriage, she had became caught up in the role of a doctor’s wife. By the end, she seemed more interested in their social standing and the square footage of their house than in her sometimes contentious husband.

He accepted the lion’s share of the blame. She had wanted a smooth, stable, affluent life. He had felt the much less reasonable need to rattle cages. He supposed it was a common situation-both partners waking up one day, after a number of years, to find that they no longer recognized the person they were married to, while probably unaware how much they themselves had changed.

“I know you had to leave him there,” she said, suddenly laying down her fork. “But I still can’t believe it.”

He exhaled. This was one of the conversations they had had many times before, Gail always understanding and agreeing with his reasons-above all, the need to save Mandrake-but finally not accepting them. And every time, his own anguish crashed back down on him.

“I’ll take care of the check,” he said, standing.

He had expected her to stay at the table, but she waited for him at the restaurant’s door. She wasn’t yet done with him. Outside, the afternoon was warm with spring sunshine, but he could see the graying line of a fog bank beyond the coastal mountains to the west.

“How are you and your new friend getting along?” Gail asked.

“Just fine.”

“How many is this now, since we split?”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said wearily, “are you keeping a scorecard?” In a dozen years he’d had two semiserious affairs and a few flings. He still wasn’t sure which category Sara would turn out to be in.

“Just wondering if you’re getting into a second adolescence, like so many men. Trying to prove your virility.”

“Second?” Monks said. “You’re the one who spent years telling me I never grew out of my first one.”

Her lips twitched in a quick, grudging smile. “You’ll call me if you hear anything?”

“You know I will,” he said.

They exchanged a dry, formal kiss and walked their separate ways.

Monks climbed into his Bronco and drove north on Highway 12, passing through the small settlements of Boyes and Fetters Hot Springs, on his way to Sara’s. He had spent the last three days at his own house in Marin, taking care of necessities and trying to appease three cats that were pissed off by his absences. He was distracted and had to remind himself to keep his accelerator foot light through Sonoma ’s long stretch of its twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit.

The hardest thing about dealing with Gail was the inevitable aftermath of Glenn coming to the forefront of his mind again, along with all the ways that Monks feared having failed him.

He had talked extensively with law-enforcement authorities about what would happen if Glenn did turn up. The issue of his criminal culpability was murky. At Monks’s urging, the courts would probably overlook Glenn’s role in the kidnaping, along with his drug use if he agreed to enter rehab. There was the troublesome possibility that he had used his computer skills to help drain off Motherlode’s inheritance, but at least that was white-collar crime.

Whatever anger Monks had felt toward him was gone, especially as he’d come to realize the extent of Freeboot’s influence. Mostly, Monks nursed the tormenting hope that Glenn would get shaken enough to come home and start turning his life around. But as the weeks had turned to months, it seemed more likely that he was still in deep with Freeboot.

Either that or he was dead.

27

Monks had been right about the incoming fog. It started to thicken when he turned off Highway 101 at Cloverdale and turned into dense gray gloom in the coastal mountains west of Booneville. Everything in sight was coated with a fine sheen of moisture-the trees, the road, the Bronco’s windshield. His sense was of driving through a rainstorm that was trembling on the edge of cracking wide open.

He arrived at Sara’s house a little before four P.M. Both of her vehicles were gone-the pickup truck that she drove to work, and the Nissan Altima that Marguerite had been using.

That reminded him unhappily of another situation that he wasn’t dealing with well. Marguerite had been home for almost two weeks now. He had talked to Sara privately about her probation issues. Sara had soothed him as usual, assuring him that she would work things out as soon as Marguerite calmed down. But that never happened, and it looked to Monks like Marguerite was settling in. She came and went as she pleased, apparently hanging out and partying with friends she had grown up with. Without doubt, she was drinking and using drugs. But no one else seemed concerned, so he had decided to let it ride. At the least, it was a major improvement over her being under Freeboot’s domination.

He poured himself a vodka in Sara’s kitchen, put on a jacket, and took the drink outside. Marguerite’s homecoming had deepened his sense of foreboding, and he had spent the past two weeks in a limbo of drifting from one inconsequential task to another, tense, irritable, and not getting much done.

The fog rolled in like a tide, advancing in swirling clouds and filling the deep ravines that converged down at the ocean. He liked watching it, liked this kind of weather; he supposed that it aroused something atavistic in his gloomy Celtic soul. He thought again about the canceled Ireland trip. Maybe that was what he needed to do-just get the hell out of here for a while and let people and events take care of themselves. Nothing he was doing was helping, that was for sure.

He was starting his second drink when he heard a vehicle pull into the driveway. He walked over to where he could see around the corner of the house. It was the Altima-Marguerite was home. He went back to his fog watching, a little uncomfortable with her presence.

She hadn’t done anything that troubled him directly. For the most part, she politely ignored him. But it was still a bizarre situation-sharing a house with a woman who had helped to abduct him, and sleeping with her mother. He was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have begun the affair if he had known that Marguerite would be around, and he didn’t know if he would be able to sustain it on those terms. That was another thing that he was on the fence about, waiting uneasily for a push one way or another.

The door to the kitchen opened and Marguerite stepped out onto the deck. Monks turned to her inquiringly, assuming that there was something she had to tell him. But then he saw that she was carrying a bottle of beer, one of his Kronenbourgs.

She raised it, as if saluting him. “You won’t turn me in for this, will you?” she said teasingly.

He was surprised. This was the first time that she had been anything like sociable.

“I don’t know,” he said with mock severity. “What’s the reward money up to now?”

She laughed and tipped the bottle up, taking a long drink. A little of the foamy liquid spilled from her lips. Then the bottle slipped from her fingers, bouncing on the deck and spraying beer.

“Shit,” she said. “Would you get me another one? I’ll clean this up.”

He hesitated, suspecting that she had already drunk quite a bit.

“Sure,” he said. “But how about only one more?”

She made a face, an exaggerated pout. That was unlike her, too.

He went into the kitchen and opened another one of the Kronenbourgs, not happy about his own judgment. But if he had refused, she would probably just go back out to the bars.

When he got outside again, she had disappeared. The beer bottle still lay where it had fallen. Then he saw that the styrofoam lid of the hot tub was off. Marguerite’s jeans and blouse were lying beside it in a tangle on the deck. She was in the tub, leaning back, arms spread luxuriantly along the rim behind her, toes just peeping over in front.

“Why don’t you come on in?” she said. “It’s fucking freezing out there.”

Monks stopped walking and tried to think of an appropriate response. Nothing came.

“Hey, why be shy?” she said. “We’ve seen each other’s skin before.” She pushed away from the hot tub’s wall and slid toward him through the water.

“Marguerite, what’s going on? This is-silly.”

“I think you’re sexy,” she said mischievously.

Monks was quite sure that whatever was prompting her-an attempt to establish control over him, or assauge her guilt, or wound her mother, or even a reversion to her time with Freeboot, when she had held the exalted status of temple prostitute and been the object of men’s desire-it had nothing to do with his being sexy.

“That’s flattering, but I doubt it,” he said.

“You’d love to fuck me, admit it,” she taunted. “Doesn’t every guy have a fantasy about a mother-daughter team?”

“I’ve got my wrinkles, honey, but that’s not one of them. No offense.”

She stood up suddenly, a long, dewy sheen of smooth skin and wet hair. But her smile was glassy, her eyes wide with false innocence, or maybe just dope.

He turned away hastily. “Here’s your beer,” he said, setting the bottle on the deck and retreating.

“If you bring me that, I’ll tell you something you want to know,” she called after him.

“Put your clothes on,” Monks said, pulling the kitchen door open. “Then tell me.”

“It’s about Coil.”

Monks wheeled back around. Her smile faded under his stare. She dropped down into the water again, sinking up to her chin.

He walked to the tub and knelt beside it. She backed away as far from him as she could get.

“If this is some kind of game, tell me now,” he said. “I’ll walk away and it’s over. But you’d better not lie about my son.”

“I’m not lying,” she said. Her voice was very small now and her eyes were scared.

“What is it you know?”

“He’s okay.”

Monks gripped the tub’s rim hard.

“How do you know?” he demanded.

“I can’t tell you yet.”

He bristled. “What the hell do you mean, you can’t tell me?”

But she had recovered some composure, knowing that she held the cards.

“You have to do things just right, and you can talk to him,” she said.

“Do what things just right?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“You’ll tell me now, goddamn it!” He lunged toward her and grabbed a fistful of her wet hair, twisting it hard.

“I don’t know yet. Let me go!”

Her yelping voice pierced the cloud of anger in his brain. He relaxed his hand and she jerked free.

Monks took a mental step back. The implications of what she was saying were sinking in.

More gently, he said, “Are you telling me you’ve been in touch with Freeboot?”

“He never left me, not for a second,” she whispered. “I could feel him around me all day, and in me all night.”

Monks was stunned. He had assumed naïvely that she had been getting over her obsession. Instead, it sounded like she was in deeper than ever.

“And you’ve talked to him?” he said. “Is that how you know about Glenn?”

She didn’t answer, and her gaze slid away from his.

“Marguerite,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “If you know where Freeboot is, you have to tell the police. This is very, very serious.”

“No cops,” she said emphatically. “Nobody else, period. He says it’s between you and him, that you’d understand that.”

“He sent you to tell me that? He wants to work out some kind of a deal?”

She nodded, her gaze still averted. And that, Monks thought, was the reason that she had tried to seduce him-on Freeboot’s orders. Monks would be unlikely to go to the police if he had just had sex with his lover’s daughter.

“Marguerite, you can’t be serious about trusting him again,” Monks said.

“He’s forgiven me. He needs me.”

“How can you believe that? Remember what everybody agreed on-you, the police, the counselors? Freeboot used you. That’s all it was. If he says he’s forgiven you, he just wants to use you again.”

She shook her head almost sadly, and repeated words that he had heard too many times: “You don’t know him.”

“What about him leaving Motherlode up there to die in the fire? Maybe on purpose?”

“Bullshit, man, that was an accident,” Marguerite said angrily. “She was passed out and nobody knew it until too late.”

Monks gave up trying to reason with her.

“Get dressed,” he said. “We’re going to the sheriffs.”

“No! I’ll deny it. I’ll say I was just goofing. And then you’re shit out of luck.”

He hesitated, afraid that she was right.

“I’ll let you know,” she said again. “Just stay cool.” Then, glaring at him, she slid one arm across her breasts and her other hand between her thighs, in the time-honored gesture of a nude woman covering herself from unwanted eyes.

“You better get out of here before my mom comes home and sees you hanging around me like this,” she said haughtily.

Monks stood up, reeling from the dizziness of blood rushing from his head, and made his way back into the house.

28

Monks stood in Sara’s kitchen, breathing deeply, trying to get a handle on what to do next. There didn’t seem to be any good choices. He decided to stay out of Marguerite’s way for the moment-give her privacy to come in and get dressed. Then he’d try to talk to her again. He walked into the living room, thinking hard for a line of reasoning that might make her listen, and waiting impatiently for the sounds of her coming inside.

Instead, he heard a car’s engine starting up.

He strode to the nearest window and looked out just in time to see her backing the Altima out of the driveway fast. Her right hand was pressed against her ear, as if she were talking on a cell phone.

More red flags went up in Monks’s brain. Marguerite must have pulled her clothes on still wet and gone straight to the car, in a hurry, intent on avoiding him. She didn’t have a cell phone, and Sara always took her own to work.

His immediate suspicion was that Freeboot had given her one, in order to communicate with him.

Monks trotted out to the Bronco and took off after her, west on the county road toward the little town of Elk. He left his headlights off, taking the risk in spite of the fog, and drove fast until he spotted her taillights ahead. He dropped back out of sight, accelerating every minute or so to make sure that she was still there ahead of him. From the glimpses he got, she was still talking on the phone, probably paying no attention to her surroundings.

It was just four miles to the intersection with Highway 1. Marguerite turned north, up the coast toward Fort Bragg. Monks let another vehicle get between them. He turned on his headlights now, trying to blend with the stream of traffic that would be in her rearview mirror, but pushing to stay close enough so that he would notice if she turned off.

Which she did almost immediately, into the parking lot of the state beach right there at Elk. The move was so fast and sudden that Monks almost missed it. He made the snap judgment to drive on past rather than pull in right behind her, then immediately started fretting that she already had spotted him-that she was turning around and would shake him before he could get back. He slammed on his brakes, skidding on the roadside dirt, and spun the Bronco in a U-turn.

But when he drove past the beach, he could see the Altima, a dim shape in the otherwise empty parking lot. He cut his lights and pulled over to the roadside again, in a spot where he didn’t think that she would see him even if she was looking. He yanked his binoculars from the glove box and stared at the car through the fog, willing her to do something that would signal her intentions. She might only have come here to get away from the house-make phone calls to friends, or calm herself down, or get high.

But she might be meeting someone, too, and that someone could be Freeboot.

Monks got out the 7.65-mm Beretta that he kept in the Bronco, locked in a hidden safe deposit box welded under the console, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

She had only been out of his sight for two minutes at most, but he was starting to worry that she might have jumped into a waiting car and sped away. Then the gray swirls of fog parted enough to give him a look at the beach.

He could just make out a dim shape close to the ocean’s edge. It might have been a rock, but it was human-sized, and he was pretty sure that it was moving. He shoved open the Bronco’s door and ran for the parking lot, staying low.

There was nobody inside the Altima. But something on the passenger seat caught his eye-a gold chain with a pendant, deep green against the car’s tan upholstery, lying there carelessly, as if it had fallen unnoticed. Monks leaned close. It was not the sort of inexpensive decoration that women sometimes hung from their rearview mirrors. The pendant was the size of a silver dollar, jade or some other green stone, beautifully carved in the shape of a dragon. It looked like a genuine Asian antique.

A memory flashed into his mind of the morning at the camp when he had seen Hammerhead give something like this to Marguerite. Monks had only gotten a glimpse of it then-had assumed that it was a trinket, and hadn’t thought about it again.

But he suspected that this was it, and it was no trinket. Where the hell had Hammerhead gotten it? Had Freeboot been that generous with Motherlode’s money? Did the maquis have a sideline of theft?

Something troublesome was stirring around in his head. Something about jade…

He tried the door, but the car was locked. He hesitated, trying to think of a way to get in, but Marguerite was getting farther away every second. He started running to catch her.

Visibility was down to less than a hundred yards. He wasn’t sure which way she had gone, and there were no clear footprints in the loose sand near the highway. But when he got to the water’s edge, he found a fresh trail heading north. The surf was high, crashing into shore in seething gray-green waves and spraying his face. His loafers filled with sand and slipped on slimy bunches of kelp, quickly tiring his legs.

Then, in the gloom ahead, he got a glimpse of a hurrying figure.

He cut inland to stay close to the cover of the dunes, watching her shape vanish and appear again through the gray clouds. He had the sudden eerie sense that he was following a specter through a dream. But to where? There was nothing ahead-only the bluffs at the beach’s end.

She kept on going when she reached them, quickly climbing a tight switchback trail up the cliff face. She was over the top and out of sight by the time he got to the base. He followed, slipping and sliding on the hard, pebbly soil, forcing his aching legs and lungs as hard as he could up the steep trail. Clutching at bunches of sea oats, he pulled himself up the last few feet-

Just in time to see her jump into a pickup truck that was waiting on the deserted headlands.

Monks ran forward, pulling out his pistol, but the truck was already moving away. Within a few seconds, it had faded from sight.

He strode on to where it had been parked, in the faint hope that some clue might remain. There was nothing, not even tire tracks. The spot was desolate, cut off from the highway by dunes, with only the ocean to the west, pounding against the huge ocher rocks, and more headlands to the fog-shrouded north. There was no road in, but the ground was flat, easy for a four-wheeler to manage. No doubt the locals knew how to get on and off the highway. He thought the truck was a Chevy or GMC, but it could have been a Ford or Dodge, or even one of the bigger Toyotas. It was relatively new, light gray or off white. There were thousands like it around.

The wind was much harsher up here than on the beach, rising from moan to howl as it tore at his clothes and hair. The fog had obscured the process of dusk, and now, suddenly, it was almost dark. He did not think that he had ever felt so alone.

Hands shoved into his pockets, bracing himself against the blasts of wind, he turned around and started trudging back.

Then he stopped.

Jade. Antique Chinese jewelry. Stolen from the victims of one of the Calamity Jane killings.

He searched his memory for details. He recalled clearly the uproar when the Calamity Jane golf clubs had been discovered, and he knew that the killers had tossed other valuable or personal items into Dumpsters. Like the Chicago woman’s lingerie-that seemed to be their signature. But he was less clear on the jewelry incident. He remembered that he’d been caught up in his own obsession with Freeboot at the time-that he hadn’t even heard about that particular murder until days after it had happened, and that he’d still been too concerned with the aftermath of the fire to worry about the rest of the world.

That placed it during the time when he had been Freeboot’s prisoner-just when he had seen Hammerhead give the pendant to Marguerite. The victims had lived in Atherton, south of San Francisco, a drive of several hours from the camp.

His gut took that queasy twist that it did when something in him started to grasp that an already bad situation was much worse than it seemed.

He started trotting again. He’d have to smash the Altima’s window-the Bronco’s jack would do it. He needed to get hold of that pendant.

But when he got to the parking lot, the car was gone.

29

Monks approached the Bronco warily, fearful of men lying in wait, or even a planted bomb. If it had been Freeboot or his people in the pickup truck, then they had been right here in this area-no telling for how long or how many times. While he’d been following Marguerite, they could have been following him.

The Beretta was back in his hand, held close to his thigh, a round chambered and ready. His gut and brain both told him that if Freeboot had wanted him taken or killed, it would have happened by now. Back there on the headlands would have been an ideal setup.

But when it came to Freeboot, Monks would never assume anything ever again.

Nothing moved except the brush, branch tips and leaves rippling in the wind. The Bronco looked untouched, but he hesitated, fearful of going up in an explosive swirl of flame and jagged metal. Then he clenched his teeth, yanked open the door, and swung himself in. The engine caught instantly and settled into its deep, comforting rumble. He turned up the fan and held his chilly hands over the warm air flooding up through the dash vents.

Seeing the angry homeless man on TV a couple of weeks ago, spouting rhetoric that sounded like Freeboot’s, had forced Monks to the uneasy conclusion that Freeboot’s plans to incite violence might be more than just talk.

But Freeboot’s possible involvement in the Calamity Jane murders was a different order of business.

They think they can hide in their gated communities and nobody can touch them. They’re gonna get spanked hard.

Marguerite knew that Monks had seen Hammerhead give her the pendant. Monks remembered her reluctant, even frightened response. Did she know where it had come from? Had she accidentally-on-purpose left it in the car for Monks to see? Subconsciously hoping that he would make the connection, and save her again from her helpless submission to Freeboot?

The police had to be contacted immediately. But something deep within Monks resisted, warning him to stay silent-

Because now he was slammed by the fear that Glenn might be involved in the murders.

The hypocrisy was terrible. If it had been someone else’s son, Monks would have blown the whistle without hesitation.

But it was not someone else’s son.

Whom did he owe more to-CEOs who reaped huge profits by gutting domestic industries, exploiting subsistence labor in Third World countries, even ripping off their own employees and investors, selling out the very real lives of working people-or his own flesh and blood?

He knuckled his eyes, trying to shake off this insane calculation. Maybe Freeboot was getting into his head.

A sudden chirping sounded nearby. He tensed, glancing around in bewilderment, thinking a tree frog or locust must have gotten into the vehicle. Then he recognized the coy summons of his cell phone. He kept it in the Bronco when he was traveling, in case of vehicle trouble or other emergencies, but he almost never got called except during investigations.

Certainly not at a time and place like this.

He reached into the glove box and got the phone.

“This is Monks,” he said.

“Marguerite told you we’d get in touch, man. What part of that don’t you understand?”

Monks closed his eyes at the sound of Freeboot’s sardonic voice.

“I wanted to find out what she knows,” Monks said. “For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about my son.”

“You want your son? You got him. Hey, Coil, it’s your old man.” The last words were a sharp summons, spoken away from the mouthpiece. There came a few seconds’ pause, and a fumbling sound as the phone changed hands.

“How’s it going, Rasp?” The voice was young, insolent-unquestionably Glenn’s.

Monks swallowed drily. “Glenn, are you all right?”

“Number nine,” Glenn crooned mockingly. “Number nine, Number nine-”

“Okay, get out of here,” Freeboot told Glenn, cutting back in. “Me and your dad got to talk in private.”

“Freeboot, I don’t hold any grudge,” Monks said. “I don’t have any desire to send you to jail.” Those were lies, but he was making the swift and frightening realization that he was willing to stay quiet about the pendant. “I’ll never tell anybody I heard from you. I just want my son safe.”

Freeboot answered conversationally, like one old friend catching up with another.

“You look like you recovered pretty good from your hike. Grew that patch of hair back. Put on a little weight.”

“All right, you’ve been watching me,” Monks said. “I figured that.”

“You’ve seen me, too. Within the last two weeks, fifty feet away. Looked right at me.”

Freeboot waited, letting the point sink in-he had altered his appearance to the point where Monks wouldn’t recognize him. It might not be true, but Monks’s gut told him that it was.

Freeboot was on the loose and invisible.

“Now let’s talk about my son,” Freeboot said. “He’s in Sacramento, at that Coulter Hospital, right?”

Warily, Monks said, “What makes you think that?”

“Marguerite told me that’s where he got took. Then we helped ourselves to their records. They didn’t exactly give their permission.” Freeboot sounded smug, throwing out another boast-hospital records security and computer firewalls tended to be top-notch.

Monks winced, wondering if Glenn was involved in this hacking, too. It was no big secret that Mandrake had been taken to Coulter. But then he had been officially discharged and placed in the long-term care ward under a changed name, precisely for fear that Freeboot might come looking for him. Probably the hospital had kept the same ID number or other telltale data, not dreaming that his father would be able to penetrate that far.

“I want to see him,” Freeboot said. “And they ain’t exactly going to give me visiting privileges, are they? So, being as how you’re the one that took him away, you’re going to give him back. We trade-your kid for mine.”

“What?”

“Let’s quit fucking around and get down to business.” Freeboot’s voice was steely now. “Coil’s doing fine. At least, that’s what he thinks. But the truth is, I’m sick of the little shit. He’s whiny and cocky, both-thinks we can’t get along without him because he’s so fucking smart. He’s wrong, dude.”

The threat was flat and matter-of-fact.

“He’ll stay fine,” Freeboot said. “Long as I get my own son back. Tonight.”

“That’s”-Monks started to say insane, but the memory of Freeboot’s explosive ego stopped him. “Impossible.”

“I don’t want you to have time to get yourself in trouble. Sacramento ’s not that far. You leave right now, you can be there by eight, nine P.M.”

“Whoa, hold on. I can’t just walk in and ask for him.”

“How you do it is your problem,” Freeboot said coldly. “You know your way around those hospitals. Figure something out. Then you and I are done. You’ll never hear from me again. Your kid stays safe, he never knows anything about this.”

“What about Mandrake?” Monks said. “He’s going to die if you treat him like you did before.”

“No, no, man, I’m going to take him someplace where he’ll have a great hospital and doctors.” Freeboot was earnest now, in his persuasive mode. “I got it all set up. See, I learned some things from you. I’m admitting you were right. But I want him with me, you know?”

“Freeboot, don’t do this,” Monks said, the words rushing out in a plea. “The police aren’t looking hard for you now. But if one of those kids dies, that changes everything.”

“Nobody’s going to get hurt unless you fuck up.”

Monks clamped his jaw tight, recognizing the psychopath’s logic at work again. If anything bad happened, it would be his fault.

“If I can get Mandrake, what am I supposed to do with him?”

“I’ll be calling you,” Freeboot said. “You better understand something real clear-you get this one chance. You try to pull anything, it’s all over.”

The connection ended.

Monks set down the phone with a shaking hand. His concerns that had seemed so earth-shaking a minute ago were ancient history now. All that mattered was being in the vise of sacrificing either Glenn or Mandrake.

Monk was sure that Freeboot was lying about continuing Mandrake’s medical care, and that crystallized his suspicions about Motherlode. Freeboot had murdered her, to wipe away the stain that she had brought to his imagined genetic superiority.

And he intended to do the same thing to his son.

“I should have killed you when I had the chance, you son of a bitch,” Monks whispered, and jammed the Bronco into gear.

30

He drove east toward the town of Philo, in the direction of Sacramento, moving as fast as he dared. It was night now, and the road through the coastal mountains narrowed down to one lane in places, with a lot of steep slopes and tight curves.

The impossible choices hammered his brain. On top of everything else, there was no reason to think that Freeboot would keep his word about Glenn. Monks thought again about trying to use the jade pendant as a bargaining chip-promising to stay quiet about it in return for having Glenn delivered safely to him. But threatening Freeboot was likely to get Glenn killed.

The only faint hope that Monks could see was to throw out a net and hope that Freeboot slipped up.

Monks picked up his cell phone, but hesitated. Freeboot knew that he had the phone and might call for help; he had to have planned for that possibility. The maquis would be watching him from moving vehicles or stationary ones posted along the way. They would vaporize at any sign of police. They might even have bugged the Bronco while he had been at the far end of the beach. He looked around helplessly. It was the size of a shortbed pickup truck, its rear compartment packed with the traveling gear he carried, its massive undercarriage thick with years of grease and mud. There were thousands of places to hide microphones that could be as small as pinheads. But stopping to use another phone would be a red flag to anyone who was watching.

He punched 0.

“Operator, this is an emergency. I need your help,” he said to the woman who answered.

“You can dial nine-one-one, sir.”

“No, I can’t,” Monks said quickly. “Listen to me, please. I need you to call the San Francisco office of the FBI, now. Tell them-”

“Sir, I’ll give you that number and you can make the call.”

“Ma’am, I’m driving fast on a mountain road, and I’m dealing with a serial killer who’s at large. This is a matter of national security, and if you don’t help me out here, you’re endangering that. Do you understand?”

There was a three-second pause. No doubt she was activating whatever alarm or recording device was used for lunatics.

“Look, I know how this sounds,” he said. “My name’s Dr. Carroll Monks. Ask for an agent named Duane Baskett. If he’s not there, tell them it’s about Freeboot, okay? Freeboot. I repeat, this has to happen very fast, and in absolute secrecy.”

“All right, sir,” she said, maybe with a trace more respect. “I’ll connect you. Stay on the line.”

The FBI had been aware of Freeboot’s group for a couple of years, but considered them relatively inconsequential-in a league with hundreds of other little enclaves that had paramilitary leanings. Monks’s kidnaping, the camp’s conflagration, and the possible murder of Motherlode had put them on the map in a much bigger way. Baskett was a Special Agent in Charge who had come up from San Francisco to investigate after the fire. Monks had spent a fair amount of time talking with him, and hadn’t much cared for him. He was good-looking, athletic, in his early thirties, with the condescending air of a cop who thought he knew far more about what was going on than anyone else. His youth made it a notch harder to take. But he seemed efficient, he knew who Monks was, and it was his case.

“This is Baskett,” a crisp voice said over the phone. “First off, Dr. Monks, are you in danger?”

“Not immediate. At least, I don’t think so.”

“This has something to do with Freeboot?”

“Yes. I have to assume he’s having me watched. I also may be bugged, but I don’t see any way around taking that chance.”

“Do you want police assistance?”

“No cops,” Monks said. “This has to stay invisible.”

“All right. What have you got?”

Monks took a breath. It wasn’t going to sound much better to Baskett than it had to the operator.

“That Calamity Jane murder in Atherton, a few months ago? Where the antique Chinese jewelry was thrown in the Dumpster?”

“Yeah?” Baskett said cautiously.

“I just saw a very expensive-looking jade pendant of that type. Freeboot’s girlfriend, Marguerite, had it. And I’m almost sure I saw one of the maquis give it to her, up at the camp, right about the same time as that murder.”

When Baskett spoke again, his voice was edged with skepticism, maybe even amusement. “Let’s run through all that again. You think Freeboot might be connected with the Calamity Jane killers? He might be watching you? And you’re basing this on seeing a piece of jewelry?”

“I’m basing it on a lot of things,” Monks said heatedly. “And right now there are lives at stake. For Christ’s sake, work with me.”

Baskett’s tone made it clear that he did not appreciate being given orders. “Let’s start with you describing this pendant.”

“Dark green jade, carved into a dragon, very fine workmanship. On a gold chain.”

“Hang on,” Baskett said. Monks heard him repeat the description to someone in the background.

The other man’s reply was muffled, but when Baskett spoke into the phone again, his tone had gone from skeptical back to cautious.

“One of the prize items in that collection fits that description,” he said. “Chinese, Ming dynasty. It’s still missing. But there’s probably a thousand others around that look like it.”

“Out there in the boonies, with a bunch of dopers and runaways? Turning up at exactly that time?”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me about it back when we were talking?” Baskett demanded.

“I didn’t get a good look at it the first time. I thought it was just junk. But when I saw it up close, the jade connection clicked. Look, I understand you don’t want a false alarm, but can I tell you why I’m on the run right now, and we’ll worry about the back story later?”

“Go ahead,” Baskett said.

Monks gave a terse explanation. When he finished, he could hear other voices in the background. It sounded like this was attracting attention.

“Give me your vehicle description and location,” Baskett said.

“Blue Ford Bronco, ’74. I’m on the Philo-Greenwood Road, south of Mendocino, a few miles east of Elk. I’ll be turning north to Ukiah at Booneville, then over to I-5 and south to Sacramento.”

“We’ll have a tail pick you up. Don’t worry, they won’t get spotted. Maybe we’ll get a break. But if not-you’re going to have to go through with this, Dr. Monks. Get the little boy and hand him over to Freeboot. That will be our chance to move in.”

Monks had seen this coming, but he still shook his head in denial, an absurd gesture over the telephone.

“We can’t risk getting Mandrake hurt,” he said.

“We can’t not risk it. Think about it. You believe Freeboot, don’t you, that he’ll kill your son?”

Monks hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

“So do I. And God knows how many others, if we don’t nail him now.”

Monks stayed silent. There was no way that he could think of to argue.

“Are you familiar with Coulter Hospital?” Baskett asked.

“I’ve been there.”

“Any suggestions on how to proceed? It’s got to look like you’re doing it for real, and trying not to get caught.”

“Can you get undercover people in place?”

“There’s a rapid response team already on the way. Tell us what you want.”

Hospitals differed physically, but the basic operations were similar, and Monks remembered Coulter’s layout reasonably well. He also remembered an incident that he had been involved in a few years earlier, when a prisoner had been smuggled out of a mental hospital in a laundry cart.

“Have Mandrake’s doctors sedate him lightly,” he said. “Something like half a milligram of Ativan, to keep him sleepy for ten or twelve hours. Get your own people on the wards so nobody stops me, and set up a laundry cart down in the service area. I’ll go in as a maintenance man and take him out in that.”

“All right, we’ll get right on it.”

“I might come up with something better. I’ll keep thinking.”

“Did Freeboot say anything about where he wants you to deliver the boy?”

“Nothing. Only that he’d let me know.”

“Okay, Doctor. I’ll check back with you.”

As Monks clicked off the phone, bile rose in his throat at the thought of putting Mandrake in the middle of what could turn out to be a violent confrontation.

He forced himself to concentrate on practicalities. He needed to check in quickly with Sara, to keep her from getting alarmed. She was probably home from work by now. He punched the house’s number.

When she answered, he said, “Honey, I hate like hell to do this to you. Emil just called-you know, the guy who watches my place? There’s a pipe leaking in the kitchen. I have to get back and take care of it before it floods.”

“Do you know where Lia is?” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. Her voice was fragile with worry. “Her stuff’s all gone.”

Monks bared his teeth in a grimace, hating himself for this deception. But it would be worse to tell her that Marguerite had gone back to Freeboot-and there was the chance that Sara would panic and do something that might compromise this.

“She probably just took off with her pals for a few days,” he said. “Maybe she met a guy. Let’s face it, she’s done it before.”

“She cleaned out everything. Like she’s not coming back.”

“She’ll work it out for herself, Sara. Just like you said.”

“I suppose. It’s just-different now.”

“I know it’s tough.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I know you do. Well, looks like I’m a bachelorette for a while.” Her voice lightened, in a brave attempt to sound coquettish. “Guess I’ll go out trolling the bars.”

He tried to think of some bit of banter to return, but came up empty.

“I won’t be long,” he said. “I’ve got to get off now, I’m getting into some bad curves. I’ll call you soon.”

The part about the curves was true, especially in the fog. He put the phone back on the seat and gripped the wheel at ten and three. The gas gauge read just over half-full, and the Bronco had an auxiliary twenty gallon tank that he kept topped off. That would get him easily to Sacramento, with another few hundred miles to spare. There was the issue of his bladder, but he always carried a couple of plastic containers of water. He could empty one out the window and use it as a trucker’s jug if he had to.

He returned his mind to searching for a way to lure Freeboot into view without exposing Mandrake. That was one thing about spending twenty-five years in the ER-he had learned to clamp down on his emotions and deal with the business at hand.

31

Mercifully, the fog lifted as he got inland. When it was bad, it could blanket the Central Valley in blindness, causing pileups of dozens, even hundreds, of vehicles on the freeways. Traffic thickened as he approached Sacramento, the drivers fast and aggressive and sure of where they were going, or at least acting like they were. He picked his way through them with tense caution, along with his unseen escorts-probably Freeboot’s men, and definitely FBI agents. It was eerie, sitting alone in the dark, rumbling Bronco, knowing that others were nearby, watching-that he was a minnow, being followed by piranhas, with alligators hunting for them.

There was still no sign of Freeboot, and neither Monks nor the FBI agents had come up with a better plan.

Sacramento was a big spread-out city, with grids of lights stretching as far as he could see, cut by the dark, winding paths of the rivers. The freeway interchanges were bewildering to an outsider. But he remembered how to find Coulter Hospital. It was a fairly straight shot, off I-880 near McClellan Air Force Base.

He was within three miles of there when his cell phone rang.

“It looks like a go,” Baskett said. “Any questions?”

“Not right now. I’ll think of plenty when it’s too late.”

“You came out on top last time, Dr. Monks. Hang in there, we’re with you.”

Monks muttered thanks, distantly aware that it was the first positive thing that Baskett had ever said to him. Maybe impending disaster brought out the agent’s inner child.

Monks knew that by now the hospital was under intense FBI surveillance, with agents inside disguised as personnel. Mandrake had been sedated. Then, in a macabre twist, he had been injected with a microtransmitter the size of a grain of sand, just under his skin. If Freeboot managed to get away with him, the agents would have a means of tracking him. Monks knew that it made sense, but using a four-year-old as bait was evil enough, without treating him like a piece of meat besides.

He saw the green freeway sign for his exit, Plumas Road, along with a blue HOSPITAL sign, and moved over into the far right lane. A stream of other vehicles took the same exit, lining up at the stoplight at the ramp’s end. Plumas was a busy four-lane strip, lined with stores, mini-malls, and gas stations. He turned left onto it and drove another mile and a half north, where the area changed to small office buildings and apartment complexes. He turned left again into the hospital’s parking lot. This time, no other vehicles followed him.

The players here, he knew, were already in place.

Sacramento ’s Coulter Hospital was a relatively new sprawling complex, three stories, and spread out like the city itself. The juvenile-diabetes ward was around the back, on the first floor of the northwest wing. The maintenance department where the laundry cart was waiting was in the basement at the east end, next to the receiving area where the hospital took in its supplies. A driveway led down to loading docks there. It was a busy area, with maintenance, repair, delivery, and other personnel coming and going at all hours. No one would pay attention to a man who looked like he knew what he was doing.

At night, this far from the hospital’s main entrance, the parking lot was almost empty. Monks picked a spot away from the argon lights. He rummaged through the gear in the back of the Bronco for jeans and a work shirt, then peeled off his dressier clothes and changed clumsily in the tight space of the front seat. He exchanged his loafers for running shoes. He took his keys from the ignition and hung them on his belt. It was not the multikeyed ring on a lanyard that maintenance men favored, but it gave that impression. He put on the Giants baseball cap he used on occasions when he didn’t want to be seen clearly, and pulled the brim low over his face.

Freeboot almost certainly had his own surveillance going. It was critical that Monks make this look real.

He got out and walked to the loading dock’s steel man door, trying to affect the look of a worker on his way to a job he didn’t particularly want to do. Inside, he met the familiar sultry warmth of the hospital’s physical plant, the sharp smells of disinfectant and cleaning fluids, and the less definable scent of human bodies, some decaying and some on the mend. The room was large and open, with concrete walls and floor. There was no one else around. He kept walking toward an area where several janitorial carts were lined up against a wall. One of them was piled with freshly folded bedding.

A sleeping little boy would easily fit in the bottom bin, draped with pillowcases and sheets.

He gripped the cart’s tubular steel handle and pushed it out into the hallway, keeping his head down and shielding his face with the cap’s brim.

A large black man came walking down the hall toward him, wearing a gray uniform with a name patch sewn on. He had the competent look of someone who belonged here, and would know who else did and didn’t. Monks tensed, fearing that this was a slip-up and he would be challenged.

But the man only raised a big hand in greeting as he passed, saying, “What’s happening, baby?”

Monks muttered, “How’s it going,” and walked on, feeling a little better-suspecting that he had just seen his first FBI agent of the night.

He took a service elevator to the first floor and trundled the cart toward Mandrake’s ward, passing several more people with a glance or nod, classifying them automatically-hospital attendants, a harried intern, a phlebotomist pushing a cart of blood samples, a middle-aged woman in a dress who might have been a visitor or an administrator. At least that was who they seemed to be.

When he got to the ward, the charge nurse was at her desk, making notes on charts. She gave him a smile and murmured “Hi,” then bent back to her work. Probably she was an agent, too.

The hallway from there on was empty, as it usually would be this time of evening. He knew from Baskett that he was looking for room 163. Still, he played his role, pushing doors open and glancing inside as if he was checking the laundry situation. When he got to 163, he glanced furtively up and down the hall, then pushed the cart inside. Mandrake was asleep on his belly, mouth slightly open-the picture of helpless innocence.

Monks’s hands shook and his teeth almost chattered as he lifted the limp, warm weight out of bed. Staged though this was, the guilt and shame of abducting a child burned through his veins with his hammering pulse.

This time, the charge nurse did not look up as he pushed the cart past her.

32

Monks buckled Mandrake in the Bronco’s passenger seat, quickly arranging pads to make him comfortable.

“Buddy, I feel like absolute shit,” he whispered to the sleeping child. “After all we’ve been through together, to do this to you-I just can’t tell you.”

His cell phone chirped. He grabbed for it, fumbling in his haste.

“All right, we seen him,” Freeboot said curtly. “You just drive back the way you came. Keep that phone handy. Oh, and tell my little boy he’s going to be with his daddy soon.” The connection went dead before Monks could speak.

Hope surged up in him. Freeboot’s men had been watching, but not overhearing. They didn’t know about the FBI agents.

There was still a chance.

Monks pulled out of the parking lot and drove back to the freeway, easing carefully into traffic. Driving along this mundane road on this ordinary March evening, surrounded by mothers in minivans anxious to get their children home, strings of truckers cutting swaths to make their schedules, complacent businessmen on their way to conferences or trysts, he found it hard to imagine all the human activity seething behind the scenes.

Monks had gleaned enough from Baskett and from his own previous experiences with the FBI to have a fair idea of it. The Critical Incident Response Group had hundreds of personnel on alert by now. Several vehicles were following him, leapfrogging, with drivers taking turns at dropping back, changing into different disguises, then catching up again. A microphone and tracking device had been planted on the Bronco, shot from a gun as one of the tailing cars passed him. Monks hadn’t even been aware of it. Hidden roadblocks were ready to slam shut, and helicopters were poised to drop SWAT and hostage-rescue teams. Probably, top-level officials across the U.S. and even worldwide had been informed that the Calamity Jane killers were in the crosshairs.

This was going to be very big news, very soon-however it turned out.

Monks and Baskett had agreed to talk as little as possible, and to try to keep it to moments when Freeboot’s men weren’t likely to be watching. Monks spent a couple of minutes maneuvering on the freeway, changing lanes and speeds, then punched the number that Baskett had given him.

“Freeboot just called,” Monks told him. “They know I got Mandrake. He told me to drive back the way I came, and keep the phone handy.”

“O-kay, we’re in this,” Baskett called out to the people around him. “Dr. Monks, we’ll assume the situation’s unchanged until we hear from you. When we do, we’re ready to move.”

Monks drove on, thinking about the next question:

Move where?

Just over two hours later, he was on Highway 20, passing the west end of Clear Lake. The road was two-lane with little traffic, making things tough for his FBI shadows. But headlights would appear in his rearview mirror and turn off after a few miles, then quickly be replaced by different ones. Probably some of the oncoming vehicles were also part of the team.

He hadn’t talked to anyone in the interim. With the little boy asleep beside him, driving back into the coastal fog, he had been lulled into a sense of unreality.

That was shattered by the chirp of his phone. He jerked so hard at the sound that his teeth clacked together.

“When you get to Upper Lake, turn right,” Freeboot’s steely voice said. “You know where you’re going from there?”

Monks realized, with an ugly jolt, that Freeboot knew exactly where he was.

Then, with another one, that that road led to Freeboot’s burned camp-his home turf, where he would be at maximum advantage.

“The camp?” Monks said.

“That’s right. Now, I got this feeling you might have talked to somebody.”

“I called Marguerite’s mother, that’s all. I had to give her a story about why I left.”

“Yeah, well, you better be all alone from here on. We got you covered all the way. If anything else twitches out there, this is history.” Freeboot paused, a silence filled with menace that Monks could feel over the phone.

“What do I do when I get there?” he said.

“Just come walking on in, and call my name out loud.” Freeboot gave a sudden little snort that sounded like laughter.

That was all.

33

The last fifteen miles of road to Freeboot’s camp were gravel and dirt, almost impassable in places, twisting and crossing in an unmarked labyrinth. Someone who didn’t know the way could drive around lost for days, but Monks had come up here enough times with the sheriffs to remember it. The earth was washboarded and rutted, still soggy from the winter rains, slick enough in places to make him spin his tires and drift sideways, even on slight inclines. After the first couple of miles, he locked the Bronco into four-wheel-drive and left it that way.

But for all that he could see, he might as well have been on another planet. The fog thinned into patches as he gained elevation, blanketing him one minute, then parting to reveal a nightbound landscape of rocky crags and forest lit by a gibbous moon, then closing in again. There were no FBI vehicles tailing now, no lights but the Bronco’s, no signs of human life.

Monks heard a sound, a plaintive little yowl like the plea of a trapped cat. His head swiveled toward it.

It was Mandrake, starting to cry.

“Christ,” he hissed, hitting the brakes. The sedative that the hospital had given Mandrake wasn’t strong enough-the jouncing ride had awakened him. He looked up fearfully into Monks’s face, a face he already associated with nightmare.

And now he was in a new one.

Monks unbuckled Mandrake’s seat belt and cradled him, doing his best to smile. “Everything’s okay, buddy,” he said soothingly. “You’re just having a little dream, but you’ll be back to sleep in no time.”

“Mommy!” Mandrake screamed, struggling and flailing with his tiny fists.

Monks sagged in despair, then crooned nonsense while he fumbled in the back for his medical kit. He flipped on the dash light, found a vial of Ativan and a syringe, and drew off a half-milligram dose, holding it above Mandrake’s head, out of his view.

Mandrake probably didn’t even feel the needle, but it hurt Monks plenty.

The crying stopped. Mandrake’s head rolled to the side.

Monks made up his mind. He cut the Bronco’s ignition and lights, and picked up the phone. The connection was weak and static-laden, just at the edge of fade-out range.

“Freeboot’s never going to let me get to the camp,” he told Baskett. “He’ll stop me along the way, grab Mandrake, and disappear.”

“We’ve anticipated that, Dr. Monks. Recon teams are moving in on foot right now. There are helicopters, and paratroopers ready to drop.”

“I’m not going to let him have Mandrake.”

“You have to. That’s our beacon on Freeboot.”

That was the contingency plan that Baskett had put into effect. Monks would hand Mandrake over to Freeboot. When he took off, FBI surveillance would recognize that the implanted microtransmitter was moving apart from the tracking device on the Bronco. That would be their signal to move in. But the transmitter’s range was limited, a maximum of a couple of miles even in open terrain. Once Freeboot was outside that, he was gone.

“There’s a thousand square miles of wilderness out there, and it’s his backyard,” Monks said.

“Our men are the best, Special Forces-trained.”

“You haven’t seen him in those woods. He’s like a cougar.”

There was a brief pause. Then Baskett said, a little too kindly, “You’ve been doing fine, Doctor, and you’ll be done very soon, which I think is good. Sounds like you’ve had enough.”

Monks’s eyes widened in outrage. “I know landing Freeboot would make your career, Agent Baskett. But you’re not going to risk that little boy’s life to do it.”

“You are going to follow orders, Monks,” Baskett said, with icy anger. “If you compromise this operation, you don’t know what trouble is.”

“I’m the one who’s out here with his ass on the line, while you’re sitting on yours in an office,” Monks snapped. “So spare me the tough-guy act.”

“You know he’ll kill you if you don’t have that kid.”

“He’s going to kill me anyway,” Monks said. “I’ll try to get some shots off-that will be your new signal to move in. I’m stopping right now to leave Mandrake in the woods. Have your men get him quick, there’s critters.”

He clicked off the phone. It chirped again instantly. He rolled down his window and threw it into the roadside brush, then tugged off Mandrake’s pajamas.

He wrapped Mandrake in a sleeping bag and put that inside a nylon duffel, making knife slits to let in air. Outside, he stayed still for half a minute, listening into the darkness. There was nothing moving, no sound but the prickly stillness of a vast forest at night. He trotted twenty yards into the woods and hung the duffel high on a sturdy pine stob. The agents would find him by means of the implanted microphone, probably within half an hour.

Back in the Bronco, Monks quickly stuffed the pajamas full of his own spare clothes, padding them into the shape of a little body, then pulling a wad out of the neckhole and covering it with a white T-shirt to simulate a face. He buckled the doll into the passenger seat and awkwardly patted it into shape to look like a sleeping child. At night, it might fool somebody for a few seconds.

Whatever happened, Mandrake was out of it now.

Monks hefted the cold, comforting weight of the Beretta, then tucked it under his right thigh. The round that he had chambered hours earlier at the beach was still in place, ready to fire.

He started driving again, expecting at every bend to find the road blocked and armed men moving in-praying that the stuffed pajama dummy would lure Freeboot close enough for a clear shot.

34

But no ambush came. When Monks got to the camp, a little more than an hour later, there was still no sign of a living soul.

He was shaking with dread.

He stopped the Bronco fifty yards short of the scorched clearing where the fire had been. He opened the door and stepped out onto the soft wet earth, holding the Beretta pressed against his thigh. He waited, watching, listening. The collapsed buildings were as desolate as ancient ruins. The night breeze still carried the faint smell of charred wood.

Just come walking on out and call my name out loud.

Monks walked slowly forward to the edge of the burn.

“Freeboot?” he said. The wind caught his voice, carrying it like an echo.

Call my name out loud.

“Freeboot!” he yelled, and this time something tiny changed in the periphery of his vision. He swiveled toward it, raising the pistol.

A light had come on-small, dim, on top of a pile of soot-crusted rock that had been part of a foundation.

Glenn’s cabin, Monks remembered. That was where Glenn’s cabin had stood.

He trotted toward it, stumbling through the soggy foot-deep ash that still covered the earth.

As he got close, he saw that it was a small scalloped bulb, sitting in an open guitar case, like a candle illuminating a shrine.

But Glenn’s guitar was not inside. Monks slid to his knees, staring at what was:

A human ear, with dark blood congealing along its severed edge.

The lobe was pierced by the skull-shaped earring that Glenn had worn.

Monks looked up to the sky, his face streaking with the first tears that he had wept since watching young soldiers die under his helpless hands thirty years ago.