South of Nowhere

50

“If you were wondering,” she said.

Shaw was just floating out of sleep. The time, he noted, was 6 a.m.

Coyne, it seemed, was as wide awake as she had been before.

She had pulled up the gold chenille comforter, it just covering her breasts.

Shaw tugged it down.

Only an inch.

Made all the difference.

He kissed her once more. She kissed him back but it was of a different species. And he knew the moment last night — which had been about as perfect as moments like that could be — wouldn’t repeat itself. Not at this moment.

There was an agenda.

The “wondering” part.

He looked at her quizzically and opted for the comforter too. Nothing to do with modesty. The house was old and drafty.

She pointed to the corner of the room.

There sat two gym bags and a wheely suitcase. A man’s suit in a dry-cleaning wrapper was draped over the bags. And two pairs of shoes — running and oxfords, in a man’s size.

“I wasn’t wondering. I am now.”

“Danny and I were together a year. He works in Fort Pleasant. Teaches environmental science. Not a thing in the world wrong with him. Not. A. Hair. So I didn’t have a damn reason in the world to sit him down, take both his hands and tell him it wasn’t working.”

“And his reaction?”

She thought for a moment. “Perplexed first. Then hurt. Then problem-solving. His solutions didn’t take.”

Obviously. Given where she and Shaw presently were.

“His last stage of grief was gallantly backing away. If I ever need a friend... that playbook.”

Shaw was thinking of Fiona Lavelle, whose personal life he had also come to learn about. This was not uncommon in his job. There’s a certain intimacy in the act of posting a reward: offerors’ guards come down and they confess to failings and limitations and mistakes.

And express — sometimes desperately — hopes.

Coyne rolled toward him. Her hand was on his chest and she twirled a bit of his hair. He liked it that each of her nails was a different color. Her toes too? That was one of the few parts of her physique that he had not paid any attention to last night.

She repeated, “Not a flaw about him. But you know my real love?”

“Dirt.”

“Acres and acres of dirt.” She kissed his shoulder. “With him I was facing a life of faculty dinners, small talk, movie dates, playing charades.” She squinted. “You don’t strike me as a charade player, Colter.”

“Never tried.”

“You draw a card and act it out, see if your partner can guess it. I drew one that said ‘SpaceX.’ Didn’t even know what it was.” A brief nod. “Then... there was the baby thing, but that’s a whole ’nother issue.”

“And yet...”

She noted he was looking at the clothing. “I’d say he’s eighty percent out.”

Shaw had to smile to himself at her choosing the numerical analysis. That was his forte.

“He said he’s coming back to collect them. But it’s been a month.”

Shaw looked over the pile. “Hm. Second-tier fashion. He doesn’t need them. Left them accidentally on purpose. An excuse to come back.”

“You think so?”

“Though maybe he’s just lazy or forgetful.”

She laughed. Another kiss.

“So what’s the story with you? A different damsel in every town you visit, Colter?”

“A lot of towns, not so many damsels.”

He thought instantly of Margot, though she resided in a past that, if it were a verb tense, would be called permanent perfect. Had he been forced to pick one soul whose path crossed his it would be Victoria Lessner. Their first interaction was a knife fight, and they’d grown close immediately after, though whether the relationship between the steel blade and their romance was causal or merely a coincidence, Shaw could not begin to say. They still saw each other some — though only if their respective jobs — she was a security consultant — happened to be contiguous. Neither had ever boarded an airplane for a visit and Shaw suspected they never would.

Coyne broke the ensuing silence with: “You know you can read the body language of crops?”

He didn’t. “So corn has been lying to me all along, and I don’t know it.”

“They still tell you what they hate and what they like and what they need — growing toward the sun, drooping from thirst or lack of nitrogen. I can read them better than people. Men, at least.”

“I’m an open book.” He moved to kiss her but stopped suddenly.

“What?”

“Vehicle.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

She probably had, on the periphery, but hadn’t paid attention to the subtle stimulus.

Colter Shaw was unable not to focus the senses.

“You expecting anyone?”

“No.”

Bear?

He rolled out of bed and dressed quickly. She did too. Her eyes grew wide as she saw him checking his gun — dropping the mag to make sure all six rounds remained and tugging the slide to confirm the chambered round.

No reason for the weapon not to be in order but you did this anyway. Always.

“Colter,” she whispered. “The bomber?”

“Don’t know. You have any weapons in the house?”

She nodded to a shadowy spot behind the bedroom door, where he saw a pump shotgun, twelve gauge. Short — an eighteen-inch barrel. The perfect home-defense weapon. Often all you needed to do to scare off a home invader was to work the pump. The metallic chuck-chuck was enough of a warning that an unwanted visitor was about to die a particularly unpleasant death to motivate them to flee.

“Should I get it?”

“Not yet.”

Staying low, he moved into the living room, and avoiding the lace curtained windows, he picked one with an opaque pull-down shade and peered through the crack between it and the frame.

Nothing.

But he now definitely heard an engine and tires on gravel behind the house.

“Colter!” Coyne pointed to the kitchen. A shadow was moving past the curtain.

He was gesturing for her to join him in the corner of the living room — her office, which had the fewest windows and was the most defensible spot in the room. He did consider having her get the scattergun, but he didn’t know her level of skill. Some farmers are good shots — those who raise livestock mostly, and have a need to kill predators — but others, crop farmers, rarely shoot as part of the job.

Just as she joined him, he got a text.

He read the screen.

It was from Debi Starr.

He knew she wasn’t going to answer and so he didn’t bother to type the obvious query that came to mind.

“What is it?” Coyne asked, seeing his face.

He shook his head, hearing the crunch of gravel.

She looked toward the shotgun.

“No. Keep your hands out. In plain sight.”

“What are you—?”

The front and rear doors burst open simultaneously — Starr coming in through the kitchen, and Tolifson and TC McGuire from the front. Their guns were drawn. Shaw noticed that Tolifson held his awkwardly but that his finger was nowhere near the trigger.

It was a solid tactical assault, and Shaw wondered where they’d learned it. He suspected the choreography might have come from one of Starr’s podcasts.

The officer holstered her weapon and drew cuffs in a smooth gesture that told him she rehearsed often.

Then, in a voice laced with true regret, she said, “I’m sorry about this, Annie, but we’re placing you under arrest for the murder of Gerard Redding. And we’ve got some other charges we’re going to have to add too. But we can get to them later. Could I ask you to turn around please?”

51

Coyne was now less farmer and more rough-riding cowhand, of the bar-brawl variety.

“The fuck are you talking about?” Her eyes were narrow. Predatory.

Tolifson said, “I’ve got to tell you your rights.”

He started Miranda — he had tried hard to memorize the legally required warning but stumbled. Starr took over. Shaw knew it too. While he’d never been convicted of a crime, getting arrested was not that unusual in the reward-seeking business. At least the way he pursued the art.

“Do you wish to waive your right to an attorney?”

“No, she doesn’t.”

The three law enforcers and Coyne looked toward Shaw.

Tolifson said, “Mr. Shaw, Colter... I’m doing this by the book.”

“And so is she. She’s not saying anything... unless you agree that whatever she says won’t be used against her. Because there’s obviously a lot of questions here that need to be answered and I have a feeling she can help you get to the truth. Which, whatever you think, this is not.”

Tolifson handed off to Starr, who was debating. “Okay, Annie. I’ll tell you what we’ve got. You help us fill in the blanks and that’ll go a long way with the prosecutor.”

Coyne just lifted a go-ahead palm.

Tolifson was taking over again. “Officer Starr found a video of you with him.”

“With who?” Coyne snapped.

“The bomber. The man with the beard. Who shot Ms. Shaw’s associate.”

Coyne with Bear? Shaw said nothing. He waited.

“Oh, bullshit,” she muttered.

Tolifson said, “Two days ago you were downtown. The post office.”

“I go every day. So?”

Tolifson looked to Starr, who said, “At three-ten the suspect walks to your Jeep. He stops, looks around and then opens the driver’s door, reaches under the front seat and takes out an envelope and pockets it. A thick one, like it had cash in it. He closes the door and walks away.”

“I... I don’t understand. I didn’t leave anything under the seat. Somebody’s setting me up!”

Shaw was trying to puzzle it out. “You said there was a video of them together.”

Tolifson said, “Like they were together.”

Starr said, “It’s called constructive contact. It can be inferred. Under the law. And Mr. Shaw found that his car was parked on your property when he assembled or armed the bomb.”

“It’s fake — the money. He had it in his jacket. Or planted it under the seat earlier.”

Shaw could see where this was going. “That was enough for a warrant?”

Starr said, “Yes. And an hour ago, I searched your outbuildings. I found samples of lithium from a chemical supply company. They were shipped to you here.”

“No, no, no...”

“Annie, they matched the others around town, the ones in the assay reports that Gerard Redding supposedly ordered, making it look like he’d come up with this plot to open a mine.”

Shaw was thinking: Nowadays, with deliveries made down to the minute, all the perp would have to do was wait for a text message that the samples were about to be delivered and get to Annie’s mailbox just before the truck. But he tucked that thought away and continued to listen.

Tolifson said, “The same time Bear planted the bomb in Redding’s workshop, he hid the assay reports in the file cabinet to implicate him — on your orders.”

“And what,” Coyne spat out, “was the fucking motive — other than we didn’t see eye to eye.”

Starr said, “The north four hundred, the land your father thought Redding stole.”

Annie Coyne stiffened.

“Redding dies, the levee comes down and ruins the mine. His estate inherits property it’ll take millions to get in shape again while having to pay taxes on the land. You sue to get the four hundred back and they settle. And you can negotiate more water from the Never Summer, to boot.”

“And ruin my farm too?”

“You’ve got those trenches.” Starr nodded toward the front of the property. “Looks to me like you’d have some flooding but most of the water’d go south into the marsh.”

Shaw said, “And how does Annie supposedly know Bear?”

“Your military days. You were overseas. Combat deployed.”

A look of disgust crossed her face.

“Now, Annie,” Tolifson said, “work with us. Where can we find him? Bear? And how can we disarm the other bombs?”

The woman seemed to shiver in anger.

“I’m not saying anything more.”

Starr sighed. “That’s your right. Now we’re back to invoking the Fifth again?”

“Yes.”

“We called the magistrate in Olechu. We can get you arraigned later. The county lockup’s been evacuated because of the flooding. We’ve got a van we use for transporting prisoners to county. We’ll keep you in there for the time being. It’s air-conditioned. We’ll get you to a restroom if you need it. And there’s water in there too.”

“Come on, Debi. Are you thinking this through? You really think I’d believe I could get away with a crazy idea like this?”

“Fact is, Annie,” Starr said, “you almost did. Except for two things.” She glanced at Shaw. “Colter here. And a half dozen honeybees.”

52

TC McGuire had put out a BOLO, a be-on-the-lookout-for bulletin, describing Bear, including screenshots from the mine security footage.

Sitting across from him in the command post, Debi Starr asked, “Did you say he’s wanted in connection to a capital murder case?”

McGuire said he had not but would revise the announcement.

California still had the death penalty for certain homicides — like this, committing murder-for-hire, though the state had not in fact executed anyone in years.

But the designation was an attention-getter.

Starr said to Tamara Olsen, “You ever do demolition?”

“Some.”

“Mind looking at some tough pictures?”

“I guess not.”

The officer displayed what Shaw could see were images of the deadly workshop she’d taken with the digital camera. With the flash, it was as if she had used a vivid setting; the blood was particularly bright, the scorch particularly black.

“Hm. The head...” The sergeant was clearly taken aback. As Shaw had guessed, she had little, if any, combat experience.

Starr asked, “How much C-four would you think could cause that?”

“Half kilo. Maybe little more.”

Shaw would have thought the amount would be less, but his knowledge of explosives was largely theoretical. He’d set dynamite charges to blow snowbanks for controlled avalanches. And he’d disarmed a bomb once. It had been fake — used as a diversion — but he hadn’t known at the time it wasn’t real.

“And how much was used on the top of the levee this morning?”

Olsen now looked over the waterfall. “Two ki’s.”

Starr said, “Assuming that this was part of the batch stolen from the armory, that leaves more than two kilos for the lower part. Would that be enough to bring it all down?”

It was Dorion who spoke now. “It could. But remember, it doesn’t have to blow the whole thing. One big V-shaped notch would still produce the same level of flooding.”

Olsen said she agreed. Her phone hummed and she took a call. After a brief conversation, she disconnected. “The first chopper’ll be here in about forty minutes, with the bomb curtains. I’m going back to the motel to pick up the rest of the gear we’ll need.”

Starr asked, “Anything we should do?”

As she walked away, she gave a faint laugh. “Pray for no short circuits in the detonators.”

Just after she cruised down the hill in her SUV, a dark gray pickup made its way to the command post and stopped.

“She’s here,” Dorion whispered to Colter.

It was Mary Dove. The vehicle rocked to a stop. The lean woman, with the same silver braid as yesterday, climbed out. Usually dressed in a long skirt, today she wore jeans and a work shirt under a black leather jacket. Cowboy boots. The F-150 featured a rifle rack in the back window and Shaw noted that her favorite weapon, a Winchester .308 — the same as Bear’s gun — sat beneath a Ruger cylinder-fed .22 carbine, silver and black.

There was no greeting other than nods among the Shaw family. They had, after all, breakfasted together just yesterday. Shaw made introductions, and Mary Dove took in the names of those present. Shaw knew she would be memorizing them and making minute observations about each one.

She would also be noting in particular her son’s own grim expression, its genesis: Annie Coyne’s arrest.

Absurd.

And yet Debi Starr presented sufficient probable cause to the difficult magistrate to justify the warrant.

He recalled too the blaze in Coyne’s eyes when the subject of Redding and his father, and the old man’s “theft” of the farmland years ago at a poker table, was brought up.

He chose not to play the percentage game as to her innocence or guilt.

Mary Dove was regarding the levee. “My. It looks fragile. What’s the prognosis?”

The word came to her naturally. She was, after all, a medical doctor.

Dorion said, “We just don’t know.”

Tolifson offered, “And there could be another IED inside.”

Colter said, “We’re getting bomb curtains to drape over the top. Army Corps of Engineers. The woman you passed on the way up here. Forty minutes.”

“And what’s our percentage that’ll work?” she asked her son.

Everyone in the family knew his numeric approach to decision making (even his nieces, who recently estimated the odds that he could be talked into buying ice cream on any particular visit at eighty-two percent).

“Have to keep that one blank for the time being. Not enough data.”

The woman looked down at the village. “And your remainer is still there? Mrs. Petaluma.”

Dorion nodded and pointed to the house and the garden.

Starr grimaced. “And just so you know. She’s armed.”

“Has she shot anybody?”

“Not in recent memory,” the policewoman said

“And you speak the same language?” Starr asked.

“I speak Ohlone and some Miwok. And I would think, her being from around here, she speaks mostly Miwok. But they’re related languages. She’ll understand me well enough.”

Tolifson said, “As long as we can make her appreciate the danger. But I was thinking you could appeal to her heart. Say the town thinks of her as a valuable resident. We’d be devastated if anything happened to her. And — to be frank — if the levee does go, we’re going to have our hands full...” His voice faded, as often happened, when Mary Dove turned her gaze toward someone.

“With all respect, Mayor. I’m not asking about language for accurate translation. She understood everything you’ve said to her and everything she heard on the TV. This is something different.” She eyed the man closely. “There’s an expression allinik liwwap. It means ‘white people talking.’ ”

“Not trusting what we’re telling her.”

“Partly that. Also, you’re not getting where she’s coming from. Now, I’ll see what I can do.” Mary Dove walked to the truck.

“No,” Dorion and Shaw said simultaneously.

She looked back.

“You’ll have to do it by phone.”

“I’ve already tried her,” their mother pointed out. “She didn’t return the calls.”

“You can’t go down there,” Colter said. “Because of the levee.”

Dorion said, “Water like that, you can’t outrun.”

She debated. Then pulled her mobile out of her back pocket and hit a redial button.

A tilt of her head. “Voicemail.” After a moment she said into the unit, “Kučí hiéma. Hópopi kan Mary Dove Shaw.”

She left a brief message in both Indigenous and English and then her number.

Slipping her phone back, she said, “We’ll see.”

“Any other remainers?” Mary Dove asked.

McGuire said, “A couple of families we think have some meth or opioids they don’t want to lose. Then a couple of crazy survivalists. Those people. Wacky, you know.”

The Shaw family regarded each other with varying degrees of smiles on their faces.

Then Colter noted the transport van, in which Annie Coyne was being held, drive up the hill and park about a hundred yards south of the CP.

Colter’s phone hummed and he glanced at the text. After reading it, he gazed out of the town for a moment and then asked, “TC?”

“Yessir?” McGuire responded.

“You know computers pretty well, I’ve been noticing.”

“Some. For an old guy like me.”

“I’ve got a job for you.” Shaw turned the man’s laptop his way.

53

Waylon Foley watched her SUV — the black Expedition with government plates — squeal to a stop in the River View Motel outside of Fort Pleasant.

It was a weathered, non-chain place, dressed drown in peeling paint, sporting greasy windows and serviced by vending machines whose contents he would never even think about consuming.

The motel, however, lived up to its name at least. Every room offered a kick-ass view of the Never Summer River, presently raging past at what he guessed was about forty miles an hour. It would slow soon as it continued south, to Fort Pleasant itself, where it flushed into a floodplain.

He watched the woman park and climb from the SUV, pushing back her thick red-black hair, zero attention paid to the surroundings. Foley glanced at the olive drab uniform and the Army Corps of Engineers patch on the shoulder. The name on the ample breast: T. Olsen. The uniform and insignia had an effect on him. Foley killed the engine of his pickup and, more careful than her, looked around slowly. He had to be cautious. He’d been seen in person and on tape. And though his appearance now was not what his appearance would soon become, enough people were looking for someone of his general description that prudence was vital.

The River View nestled up against a defunct service station on one side and a self-storage operation on the other. One cat, three buzzards, a dead squirrel and zero humans were present. No police patrols cruising by either. The authorities had their job — finding the leg-shooting sniper and mine-owner bomber — but they also had a hundred-foot levee that as far as they knew was about to detonate into a flood. They were, in other words, preoccupied.

The parking lot was gritty and decorated with trash that couldn’t melt even in today’s torrential rains — like beer bottles — and trash that could: paper and cardboard and food, now piles of mush. A thoroughly unappealing place. The smell of rot and the smell of garlic from a Chinese restaurant fifty feet away and the smell of crap — dog or human. He strode across the asphalt now, moving silently on his rubber-soled boots, following her route from the Expedition to the rooms. She stopped at 188 and fished for the key, undid the lock and stepped in.

He got to the door just as she was swinging it shut.

“Hey, there, Soldier Girl,” he whispered.

She gasped. “Jesus.”

A moment passed between them, their eyes locked.

Then Alisette Lark — aka Sergeant Tamara Olsen, her fake name in this operation — gave a coy smile as she looked down at the telltale bulge in the front of his slacks.

Her voice was amused as she said, “Don’t tell me, Waylon. Not the uniform?”

Foley grinned then nodded toward the bed. “Leave it on. Well, just the top. Not the rest of it. Obviously.”

54

The center of his universe was alive.

John Millwood’s heart was thudding — and not from the effort of trooping through the woods like an Eagle Scout in pursuit of a merit badge.

Fiona was alive.

He was about two miles south of Hinowah, and a half mile west of where he’d parked on Route 13 a half hour earlier, when he began pushing through viny and dense woods. He paused and gazed about him in a slow circle.

Green and brown, green and brown...

Then he kept trooping along, secure in the knowledge that she was safe.

He would soon find her!

In fact, he didn’t mind a brief delay.

It would give him time to refine her punishment. Something appropriate, to assure that she would never, ever pull a stunt like this again.

Millwood had taken the advice of that man Shaw for as long as he could: shower, warm up in the motel room. He’d sat at the cheap desk, reading emails and making some work-related calls. He’d gotten some sleep, but then wakened, agitated. And finally the impatience and antsiness got to be too much.

He had to get out of the room and hunt for her himself. And so he had driven back toward Hinowah to the spot where he and Shaw had found her car. Below the highway, down the steep hillside, he could see flashing lights. The workers were probably trying to get the car out of the water.

Damn her. Responsible for losing a fifty-thousand-dollar car? True, Fiona had bought it and she had made the payments, but every penny in a family belonged to the man — the head of the household. That was just the natural order of things.

And so it was in effect his car that she’d destroyed.

He was going to ask the emergency workers if they’d seen her but he first ran into a man in a battered pickup, parked on the shoulder of Route 13, two hundred yards from the dissolving levee. Wearing coveralls and a safety vest, he was, it turned out, part of a sandbag-filling group of volunteers that had been told to stand down and keep way back from the levee for some safety reason.

Had he, by any chance, seen a young blond woman in the woods?

The man had turned down the volume of a country-western station and said, “Well, yesterday, yessir. There was a woman. She was wearing a stocking cap, so I don’t know what color hair, but yessir.”

He’d pointed to a ridge of rocks to the south of that miniature mountain Millwood had learned was named Copper Peak. Where he’d gone for his goddamn swim. (Her frigging fault too, of course!)

And then the bombshell: She had been carrying a couple of heavy gym bags, the worker had told him.

Millwood felt the emotion unleashed within him.

First, elation that she was alive.

Second, undiluted rage. The sneaky little whore had some plan. She’d taken her luggage from the car before it went into the water. And that meant she’d planned it all out. She’d driven the car into the river on purpose.

The video was to trick him.

God, the sense of betrayal had been almost overwhelming.

Now, he pushed along the overgrown mining trail, looking for any sign that she’d passed this way.

He paused and took a hit of whisky from his leather and silver flask. Bushmills. His favorite. Fiona hadn’t liked Irish whisky at first but then he kept pushing her. (One time she’d said, “Don’t be a nag,” and he’d given her his “hurt” look — he really perfected it — and she could see he felt bad about it. She’d taken one sip, shivered, then another, as he kept insisting. Finally, she said yes, he was right. She did like it.)

If only she’d listen to him the way she should!

More slogging through the leaves and the mud. His poor Ferragamos would never be the same.

Thank you so very much, Fiona. You’ll clean them. You’ll make them shine like new.

Looking at the ground, doing his own tracking, like Shaw. No prints yet. But he’d find them.

As he trudged, he considered various scenarios about what might have happened.

Most likely this was a trick so she could run off with someone, get to a motel and...

He shivered in rage at how that sentence would end.

It occurred to him that Shaw found the car pretty fast. Maybe he was a good tracker but then again maybe the two of them engineered the whole thing.

That’s why he’d sent Millwood to a motel — to get him out of the way so the two of them could shack up in a room of their own.

He was a good-looking guy, and younger than Millwood.

A thought that made him want to scream.

Then, though, the holes in that conspiracy began to emerge. For one thing, Shaw had seemed genuinely concerned about her.

And how could they have met previously?

It would have to be somebody else.

But who?

Months ago he’d gone to the dark web and found a hacker, whom he gave five hundred dollars by way of a gift card number for instructions on constructing a keylogger — malware to record her passcodes.

The instructions were:

At which point, Millwood had thought: Screw this. And simply hid a tiny spy camera in the vent over her desk, videoing her typing in her passwords.

A lot easier.

Last night, at the motel, the emails he read were not about his work; they were hers. And there was nothing suspicious about them — though they could have contained a code. The word recipe might mean “motel room.” The word groceries might mean “condoms.”

But even if not, she still had to be punished for putting him through all this.

And he suddenly had a thought.

What if the punishment had a second purpose? Something that brought them closer, tied them together forever?

Ah, yes... He liked that.

It centered, of course, on dependency.

The end result of the punishment was that she would have to depend on him completely.

Say, she lost her hearing.

Or went blind.

He liked the last one best. If she was deaf, she couldn’t hear his orders or his corrections.

How could one become blinded?

Acid in her eyes? No that pain was too much. But more important, he couldn’t disfigure her. It was her angelic appearance that made him obsessed.

Maybe there were blinding poisons. Or, wait... There’d been something on the news about a man who went blind because a baseball had hit him in the back of the head. The occipital portion of the brain. He would do some research into it. Yes, he liked that idea.

He could control a blind woman completely.

Then John Millwood froze.

There, in a patch of muddy earth were her prints. They were her shoe size — 6½, which he knew because he’d bought her a dozen pairs of sexy high heels (which she rarely wore, bitch).

He followed them for a short distance but then they disappeared. As if she’d tried to obscure them.

Or someone had.

A lover...

Fury surged through him, then it dissipated.

He needed to focus.

And studying the ground carefully, he started forward once more after the love of his life.

55

Waylon Foley was the first to admit he led a good life.

When he wasn’t running jobs like the one he was currently in the midst of, or hunting in Montana or Utah or, well, name your state, he spent much of his time in Key West, not far from Ernest Hemingway’s home, ever populated with tourists and six-toed cats.

He had a small villa looking in the direction of Cuba, which he’d been to — undercover — several times on assignments. Lots of palm trees, lots of rocks decorated his full acre — good sized for the neighborhood. Security was good. Electronics, of course, and a minder he hired from Miami. Rodrigo was a man of loyalty that went beyond compensation for the significant money Foley paid him. He would do little things like stop when on an errand and bring Foley a Cuban coffee and a guava pastry. All on his own.

The little things mattered in his life.

His Savage rifle.

Guava.

The blouses of military uniforms worn by former porn stars doing a damn fine job in a new role.

Beside him, Alisette Lark stirred.

Their liaison had been a mere twenty minutes but that was enough for him.

He had seen her in the uniform. He had thought of her thin, taut legs and round chest, and he had wanted her. Immediately.

But the instant it was over, like when he was married (well, often before it was over) he found himself thinking of the fields, the smell of gunpowder.

The blood.

His rifle.

Lark stretched. He smelled her. All the smells. Had she been satisfied?

It had seemed so. And Lark was not a woman to fake anything — unless it was a role she was playing, in a porn flick or for one of his jobs.

She lit a cigarette, despite the motel’s prohibition — a two-hundred-dollar fine — and she said, “I did what you asked. About coming on to her.”

“The disaster response girl.”

“Her, yeah. Dorion. But I didn’t ask her. I asked her brother about her. Colter. If she was seeing somebody. You were right — from the beginning. He’s the one we have to worry about.”

Which turned his attention to his aching shoulder and nose.

Prick...

Her coming on to the woman, through her brother, was yet another element of the plan, a way to misdirect them. To humanize the woman they thought was Sergeant Tam and to put any suspicions to bed — so to speak.

“I would’ve done it.”

He knew. She did everything he asked. She was making a lot of money. And, besides, he knew she was a switch-hitter. You had to be in the adult film industry.

At the thought of the Shaws — Colter in particular — he felt a sting of anger.

Would there be time to get even?

Maybe. More people would die today. If Shaw was one of them, fine, but Foley was too professional to deviate from one of his plans simply for revenge.

He took the cigarette from her long fingers and drew hard, then handed it back. “Update?”

“The cute little officer thinks that the farmer’s guilty. Her boss, the one playing police chief—”

“The mayor, right?”

“Yeah, Tolifson. He’s a bozo, but it’ll look good for him to get a collar — I think he wants to be chief when this is over with — so he’s drinking the Kool-Aid that Annie’s guilty. Shaw? No, he doesn’t believe it. He’s fucking smart. He might as well be a gold shield. He thinks she’s being set up.”

“Hm.”

When he took on the job, Foley had bolted together a plot that he was pretty sure would work, with a lot of moving parts. But damn elegant, he’d thought. They’d use two explosive charges — first to take the top off the levee and scare the asshole inhabitants out of town. Then Alisette and the fake corporals — from a criminal crew in Oakland — would show up to monitor everything. If it was going according to plan, the second charge would destroy the levee completely, and unleash the flood.

But there had to be a contingent plan — in case the responders learned the levee collapse was not natural.

Which they had.

Thanks to gold-shield Motorcycle Man...

And, apparently, a bunch of fucking honeybees.

The contingent plan was that the mine owner, Gerard Redding, had orchestrated the sabotage to destroy the town to mine lithium. But then the authorities would discover that that was bogus, and Annie Coyne was the real guilty party. She had wanted to ruin Redding and his mine because of some feud between them and because she wanted his allocation of water.

He watched Alisette Lark stub out the cigarette on the top of a soda can and drop the butt in. She stretched and walked into the bathroom. She was completely nude but it was an unselfconscious walk, not surprising for someone who had had sex with probably a thousand men and women over the past decade.

They had met under odd circumstances. She herself had been running a scam to defraud a Boston businessman — some neat plot, involving crypto — when Foley had been on-site coincidentally to shoot the man in the head for some other infraction. He’d waited to kill him until she got her money. Professional courtesy. They started talking and he noted her intelligence and grit and blasé attitude about blood, and unquenchable lust for cash.

He hired her two, three times a year for front work. Sexy and smart. She did her homework. In her gym bag now were a half dozen books she’d devoured for the job, including Flood Plain Management by the University of Minnesota, the U.S. Army Manual of Dams and Waterways and the data sheet on Hydroseal by the manufacturer. The last she’d discovered on her own. That the goo was used on hard surfaces, not dirt like the levee, was a question that woman Dorion Shaw had raised. But, damn, Lark had finessed it, without raising any suspicions.

Now, in this unfortunate motel room, Foley too rose and, not bothering with the shower, dressed fast, reflecting that only two aspects of the job remained.

Destroying the levee with the remaining set of charges.

And the other, his immediate goal: to kill the farmer girl.

She would protest to the police firmly that she wasn’t guilty and she’d probably do a credible job. People might start to believe her, and do some serious investigating.

But if she was killed by the “mercenary” she’d hired, so she couldn’t dime him out?

Well, case closed.

56

She had been smart.

But not smart enough.

John Millwood was looking at the soupy ground in front of the huge formation of rocks to the south of Copper Peak, about four or five football fields’ length from where the worker had spotted Fiona.

No footsteps, but curious marks in the mud, as if someone had taken a crude broom — made of branches and leaves — and obscured them. Did she do it?

Or her goddamn lover?

Millwood continued in the same direction.

He was enjoying the Blind Fiona scenario.

Probably unlikely. What if he killed her or damaged her brain, and he had to take care of her in that injured state?

Well, it was a fun fantasy.

Ah, there!

Definitely footsteps!

Then they stopped, where a rocky trail led upward into the hills. It was mostly stone but there were some muddy patches, which too had been brushed to obscure the prints left in them.

But not completely.

And the tracks did not return down.

She was up there still.

Gazing into the hills, he got the impression this was an old mine.

She might have found it online. Or maybe her lover had told her about it.

He started to climb.

Panting against the effort — another reason to punish her — he made his way higher yet. At about fifty feet above the ground, the path leveled out. Yes, it was the opening to a mine. Someone had made a half-hearted attempt to board the place up. But the sheets of plywood had been pulled down — long ago. They were covered with mud and rock. Two large warning signs had been graffitied to near obscurity.

He walked to the entrance and froze, looking down.

Two used condoms.

His skin seemed to boil with jealousy at the sight.

Were they her lover’s?

Slow down, he told himself. The condoms were covered with mud and sat near a variety of cigarette butts. This would be a place for local teens to sneak off to.

Keep your head about you.

Quietly, he started inside.

Yes! She was here! He could smell her perfume. He knew because it was the same as his mother wore. He’d given her a bottle for her birthday. It had taken a few passive-aggressive reminders for her to wear it but finally she’d given in.

The name of the scent was Passion.

Another ten feet, twenty.

Then he eased silently into the large space. Yes, it was what he’d thought: the entrance to an old mine, the shaft, in the back, covered with chain-link.

There she was!

And what the hell was this? It looked like she was on a goddamn camping trip!

At the far end, she sat bundled up and writing in one of those stupid notebooks of hers. A small LED reading light plugged into a battery illuminated the area.

Instantly, the rage vanished. His heart swelled with unrestrained love. She was so beautiful!

“Want some company?”

A scream burst from her lips. “John! No!” Scattering cans and bottles of water and the notebook, she leapt to her feet. She charged for the cave entrance, trying to dodge around him.

But he was faster.

He stepped in front and, with a hard shove to her chest, pushed her back to her little nest. She fell but didn’t hit her head.

Her oc-cip-i-tal.

Maybe the vision idea was not such a bad one after all.

Meet my wife, Fiona. She’s blind. But what a trouper...

“John, for God’s sake. Leave me alone!” She started to cry.

She was upset? Look at everything she’d put him through over the past two days!

“Look, I’m begging you! Just leave me alone...”

“Why are you wearing that stupid hat? You know I don’t like it.”

“Please! I don’t love you.”

Millwood clicked his tongue. “Oh, you’ll get there, honey. You just have to try a little harder...”

57

John Millwood felt so relieved that he’d found her — and found her alone, not in flagrante — that he forgave her.

Typical of how generous he was toward her.

Running from him, destroying his car, his shoes, his Armani jacket...

It was a sign of his wondrous kindness, forgiving her.

“Isn’t it funny — I don’t mean ha-ha funny — I mean confluential. That’s a word I made up. ‘Confluence’ like things coming together and ‘coincidental.’ ”

She was staring with an odd expression. Dismay, he believed.

He forgave her for that too. He found his lust expanding and he remembered the first time they’d made love. It was so beautiful... After, he’d just sat and stared at her, while she slept. Every inch of her body, from the pores of her hair to the freckles on her thighs. He didn’t get a minute’s sleep that night.

He was tempted to re-create that now — on the blankets she’d brought in her effort to escape from him. There would be some justice in that.

But no.

There was a time and a place for everything.

“Confluential... I don’t want to say we’re soulmates. That’s a cliché that cheapens the concept of what we have. We transcend that.”

Fiona’s voice choked. “Please, just leave!”

As if he hadn’t heard a word. “You went a little crazy in the head. That’s all. Let’s get all this stuff packed up. We’ll take the spa off the table, why don’t we?”

He’d work on her weight himself back in Reno.

And for now, he’d reward her: “We can stop at Denny’s on the way.”

“John. Listen to you! I just want to be left alone.”

“Ah, you don’t really mean that. You’re just upset. Writer’s block, maybe.”

Her shoulders slumped, but her eyes blazed. “You’re troubled! There’s something wrong with you.”

Ooo. That wasn’t good. He bristled.

She continued, “Don’t you think that if I went to all this trouble, hiding from you? That’s a message!”

“A message,” he mocked. “Message... I think it’s a message that maybe you’re the one who isn’t quite right.”

“I’ve had it. No more.”

“There are ten million women in this world who’d give their eyeteeth to be loved the way I love you.” He moved closer. “You must be cold. Denny’s. Hot cocoa.” She’d ordered it once at another chain restaurant, where they had a Saturday lunch. She had seemed unhappy — among the first indications that she was confused about her love for him. She hardly said a word for the entire hour he’d made her sit at the booth. But he remembered she liked the cocoa.

He took a look over her things. There was a lot to carry. But he didn’t want to leave anything behind.

“You’re not going to hurt me again, are you? You’re always hurting me.”

He felt indignant. “That only happens for a reason. I don’t do it because I enjoy hurting you. But there are times...”

Times she disobeyed, times she looked at other men, times she didn’t reply “I love you too” fast enough.

“John, you’re a good-looking man. You have a fine job. Find somebody else.”

“I don’t want anybody else. We’ve been through this a million times. It’s you I love.”

“You don’t love me. I know you’ve been sleeping with Sophie in your accounting department.”

He laughed triumphantly. “See, you are jealous! You do love me. And Soph? That’s nothing. Physical gratification. It’s just what I saw you doing by yourself in the shower.”

She gasped.

He’d drilled a hole into the bathroom wall.

“All right, pack up. Let’s get out of here. We’ll hit that Denny’s. Cocoa and burgers. There’s one with a motel nearby I passed on the way here. We’ll have some food. You could use a shower.”

Then disaster struck.

“Fiona!” a man called from the tunnel entrance. “It’s me, Colter.”

A flashlight beam swept the floor.

Millwood turned to Fiona, making a fist with his right hand and touching a finger to his lips with his left.

She looked horrified but nodded.

Shaw continued, “John’s SUV’s parked on the highway. He’s somewhere near—”

As he stepped into the space, Millwood turned the flashlight of his phone on and shone it into Shaw’s face. The man blinked and froze. He quickly switched the flashlight to his left hand. And started to draw a gun.

But Millwood lunged forward and slammed into Shaw, who stumbled to the ground, dropping the pistol. Millwood grabbed it.

He didn’t know much about weapons. There didn’t seem to be a safety latch. Apparently, all you did was point and shoot. Shaw’s reaction bore this out. “Wait, Millwood. Careful...” He climbed to his feet and, palms forward, walked to Fiona, asking, “You all right?”

She whispered that she was.

The nightmare had become real. He raged, “I knew it! Knew it all along! You’ve been fucking her. You were part of the whole thing! Did you help her crash the car? Help her put together this little love nest?”

“Millwood, put the weapon down. You don’t want to get into more trouble.”

“John, please—”

“Don’t be a fool.” Shaw hesitated. “Everybody knows she’s here.”

A lie. Millwood could tell — he could read people like books. One of his special talents. And the truth was no one knew she was here. Of course Shaw wouldn’t say anything. He wanted her all to himself.

“Quiet!” he raged. And shoved the gun her way.

“Millwood! It’s got a hair trigger!”

“Shut up,” he muttered. But he did take his finger off the trigger — and was relieved to know that if he did shoot, there’d be nothing complicated about it.

Millwood was looking at the mine. The chain-link covering the shaft, in the dim back, was not complete. There was room to push a body through and down into the shaft. In the shadows he believed he saw an ancient pulley, which meant that the shaft was a vertical drop. He could simply shoot Shaw and shove the body into the darkness. Then—

No, wait...

That wouldn’t work. The sandbag man in the pickup truck had seen Fiona, and Millwood had asked about her. If Shaw went missing around here, Millwood could be linked to the death.

Then an idea: Shaw attacked him, and he fought back, getting the gun away. But Shaw grabbed a rock and kept coming. He was forced to shoot him.

Self-defense.

Fiona wouldn’t dare contradict him. If she did, he would explain, the first stop he’d make after getting out on bail would be to her mother or sister-in-law.

“Whatever you’re thinking, Millwood, it’s wrong.”

“Wrong? Fiona’s in the mine. You’re in the mine. You knew she was here. The facts speak for themselves.”

“I was helping her get away from you. She’s afraid of you. You’ve hurt her.”

That again.

“Only when she deserved it. People are fine when parents spank their children. Why shouldn’t a man be able to do the same with his woman? It’s only logical.”

“You cut yourself — fake defensive wounds. And lied to the police about it.”

Millwood shot a cold smile to Fiona. “Oh, sharing our secrets now, are you? That’s not very nice.”

Fiona whispered, “John, what are you going to do?”

A stunningly beautiful woman... but slow sometimes.

Millwood lifted the gun to Shaw’s chest and pulled the trigger.

In the dimness of the cave the flash from the muzzle was nearly blinding.

58

For a moment no one moved.

Then Colter Shaw stepped forward. A nod at the gun. “I’ll take it.”

The man’s eyes went wide.

He pulled the trigger again.

Now, nothing. Not even a click.

Before he’d ascended into the mine entrance, knowing Millwood was here, Shaw had pried the Hornady Defender slugs out of the shells — liked he’d done on the bee project — but left the primer caps in, so that if Millwood knew guns and pulled the slide back to look at the chamber, he’d see brass and believe it was loaded with live rounds.

Shaw shook his head. “That was not wise.” He pulled the gun from Millwood’s hand, hoping he’d make a move.

It was unprofessional. But Shaw wanted badly to take him down, plant the man firmly on his back, knock the breath out of him. Have pain radiate the way pain did in a moment like that. Efficient and unstoppable.

But sadly, John Millwood was in gaping mode. Frozen.

Shaw swapped the fake mag for a real one, and worked the slide, ejecting the brass in the chamber and loading a live round. The gun went back into his holster.

“Now, turn around.”

“You can’t do this! You’re not a cop.”

Shaw removed zip ties from his right rear pocket.

“Bullshit. That’s illegal.”

Not true. Citizen arrests were authorized under California Penal Code Section 837, if someone saw a felony committed in their presence.

“Turn around.”

Millwood gave a cold smile and his hands curled into fists. He stepped forward.

Ah, thank you, Colter Shaw thought.

It didn’t turn out to be as much fun as he would have liked.

Millwood was probably a very good domestic abuser but when it came to somebody who fought back, well, he didn’t do so great.

After his first swing, Shaw simply ducked, stepped in and performed a variation of the takedown he’d been thinking of just a moment earlier: left forearm against Millwood’s chest, right sweeping into the back of his knee. Then a swift push and lift.

Down he went.

The fun was over all too fast, but there was a delightfully hard landing.

Wheezing and gasping, the man clawed at his chest.

Fiona Lavelle looked on with some pleasure.

Shaw rolled the debilitated man over and zip-tied him.

“Too tight?”

“Ah, ah...”

But that wasn’t in response to the ties. Shaw assessed they were fine.

He walked to a pile of rocks near where Fiona had set up her little home. He lifted his burner phone from where he’d set it earlier, before Millwood’s arrival. The unit was in live-stream selfie mode so he was looking at himself. In the lower right-hand corner was a miniature TC McGuire.

“How’d it work out?” Shaw asked.

“Hollywood,” the man offered. “As they say, it’s in the can.”

The text Shaw had received forty minutes earlier, as he’d stood in the command post, was from the desk clerk at the motel where Millwood was staying. Shaw had given him a hundred dollars to text if the man left his room and drove off.

Then Shaw had slipped two hundred to one of the town sandbag volunteers to hang out in his pickup truck on Route 13. If someone matching Millwood’s description in a white Lexus SUV had showed up near the scene of the Camaro accident, inquiring about a young woman, he was to direct him toward the cliffs.

Shaw said to Lavelle, “They got it all. Hi-def.”

Millwood muttered, “You are in so much trouble...” His voice faded as he struggled to take in air.

“You’re insane.” Lavelle’s voice was a cold whisper.

His mood flipped instantly. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry... Really. I am. I was only doing it for you! Maybe I pushed a little too hard. Please forgive me!” It was eerie how quickly he jumped from one state to the other.

“Shhh,” Shaw said. He turned to Lavelle. “Bring the important things with you. We can come back for the rest.”

She gathered up notebooks and her electronics, placing everything in a big yellow backpack.

They walked outside, Shaw leading Millwood by the arm.

“I’m going to sue you.” Millwood was gasping, wincing at the pain too. The limp was impressive. And gratifying.

Shaw said, “Save your breath. I mean that literally. You’ll feel better if you don’t talk.”

They walked — and shuffled — down the mining trail. At the bottom, Debi Starr was standing beside her Public Safety Office pickup. Squinting, she examined Millwood’s zip ties. They passed muster and she led him to the backseat and helped him in.

“I was watching the stream,” she said. “We’ve got battery, menacing, brandishing. And attempted murder. That’s the ace in the hole.”

In California firing a weapon at someone, even a toy, is attempted homicide if you believe it’s real and loaded.

Starr turned to Fiona. “You all right, miss?”

“I’m fine.”

The deputy said, “You know every domestic I’ve answered, it’s always: he said/she said and we’ve gotta figure out which wound came first, the iron burn or the serving fork. Now, we’ve got evidence that’s pure gold. And may I add, Ms. Lavelle, you are a fine actor.”

“Thank you. I told Mr. Shaw the situation and he said me hiding out from him wouldn’t do it. People like him, sociopaths, you have to put them away.”

Through the partly opened rear window of Starr’s cruiser came the words: “This is entrapment, you assholes!”

Without even turning her head, Starr called, “No, it’s not. All right I’ll read him Miranda, and hand him off to the sheriff’s office. The stinker can cool his heels there until county intake opens up again. I’ll need statements from you both but they can wait. We’ve still got a levee that’s debating whether or not to come down.”

59

“It’s Colter. I’m here with Dorion.”

The siblings stood outside the lockup transport van. There were no windows, but in the back was a plate with louvers, for ventilation. The boxy vehicle was parked down the hill from the command post. Whoever had situated it here had courteously parked it under a thick oak, so the machine-gun rattle of rain would not drive the occupant crazy.

“This is goddamn insane,” Annie Coyne muttered.

Shaw said, “I’ve called a lawyer I used to work for in San Francisco. He’ll get somebody to Fort Pleasant as soon as he can.”

Dorion added, “I know him. He’s one of the best criminal attorneys in the state.”

“I didn’t do any of this. I was set up.”

“We know. What we don’t know is why and who did it. We need your help.”

From Dorion: “Day before yesterday, when Bear got into your Wrangler to pretend to get the payoff money, did you see a vehicle behind you?”

There was silence while she thought. “No. But who thinks they’re being followed?”

Colter said, “This whole thing’s been carefully planned. And fast. And it would have to have started as soon as reports about the record snowmelt came in and it was predicted the Never Summer would flood. Make that, what? Three days. They’d need time to fake the lithium documents and find samples to plant in your barn.”

Dorion asked, “Did you see anybody parked near the farm?”

Shaw added, “A pickup. Like the tire treads we found on your property near Redding’s.”

“Maybe. But it’s planting time for some crops, and then trenching in case the levee came down. That’s all I was focused on. He could have strolled right past me and had a cup of coffee in my kitchen and I wouldn’t have noticed.”

Disappointing they didn’t have the truck’s tag; Shaw really wanted a car registration. They were better than fingerprints because prints weren’t always in the system. Cars were ninety-nine percent of the time.

“Can I use your phone? Is that all right?”

Shaw didn’t care whether it was all right or not. He slid his through the small gap.

She placed a call and Shaw heard her speak in Spanish. “Manuel, it’s me. I need help. Can you ask everyone on the crew if they saw a pickup truck parked near the property in the past few days? A truck you didn’t recognize. It’s important. Call this number. Thank you.”

She slid the phone back.

Shaw asked, “You want to call Bedroom-Clothes Guy?”

“No.” A pause, then, “Look, Colter, last night—”

“Annie, don’t think I formally introduced you to Dorion. She’s my sister.”

Coyne fell silent, though Shaw believed she might have chuckled, even under these circumstances.

He was also aware that Dorion was regarding him with a look that could be described only as wry. She’d been after him for years to settle down. She knew perfectly well that he was the Restless One in the family, though she also would be thinking: People change.

He asked, “You have the money for bail?”

“No. And the property’s mortgaged to the hilt.”

“I can loan it to you.”

“Colter, no.”

“I know you’re good for it. What’re you going to do, take your dirt and skip town?”

Waylon Foley drove through the deserted village of Hinowah.

No, not quite empty. A few people remained. He noted several faces peering at him as he made his way to the woods on the north slope of the valley. Reluctant to leave their homes, suspicious of the government telling them what to do, he guessed. They tended to live in houses that needed painting and repair, lawn art in the form of broken auto parts.

And there were still some stragglers evacuating, taking their precious possessions with them. Their faces were dark with concern. A couple of these looked his way warily. Were they wondering: Is he crazy, not getting the hell out of town? Isn’t he worried about the flood?

And of course the answer to that was: There won’t be a flood until I decide to blow the second set of charges.

He drove partway up the hill at the top of which was the command post, but turned off before he got near it. He edged into the woods, parked and climbed out. He was behind a tall cluster of gray rocks, out of sight of the CP and anyone nearby.

Crouching, he scanned the area and spotted his target: a white transport van. At the moment, two people were outside, at the back. Colter Shaw and his sister.

He had a brief fantasy of Alisette Lark and Dorion together.

Military uniforms were involved.

Then, back to business.

A few minutes later Colter and Dorion left the van, and started walking uphill toward the command post, talking between themselves.

Which left the van, with farmer girl inside, unguarded.

He assessed. The battered white vehicle was big enough for about eight or nine people. No windows. Just vent louvers at the back, pointed downward. He couldn’t see in.

Was somebody else inside with her?

He just wondered this in passing; collateral damage, again, was not Foley’s problem.

Okay, get to it.

He needed to move on her now, fast, and get back into hiding on the south hillside above town, where Lark and the Oakland gangbangers waited.

Given who he was — a gun man, through and through — Foley was disappointed that he couldn’t shoot Annie Coyne.

No windows.

Besides, the vehicle was surely bulletproof.

But, he reflected as he returned to his truck for the three-gallon container of gasoline, it definitely wasn’t fireproof.

60

Colter Shaw and Dorion walked up to the command post and sat across from Fiona Lavelle and Mayor Tolifson.

Lavelle was on the phone with her sister-in-law, who was driving over from Nevada to pick her up and collect the rest of her possessions from her hideaway cave. She was relaxed and there was a light in her eyes, and Shaw couldn’t help but think of one word: survival. It comes in all forms. There was surviving by avoiding avalanches and standing tall and aggressive to scare off mountain lions, and there was surviving by tipping a sports car into a flooded gulley and making a hidey-hole in an old mine shaft to escape abuse.

The woman disconnected. And looked his way. “You know, Mr. Shaw...”

He tilted his head with a smile.

“Colter... I’ve never heard of this reward-business thing. But I have an idea. You should open a subsidiary: helping people hide. You might make more money doing that.”

Dorion gave a smile too.

In fact, it was not a bad idea.

Looking over the levee, the woman added, “It looks a lot thinner than when I drove over it this morning.”

Dorion replied, “It is. The water’s eating away at both sides. Like planing a board.”

“Has it crested yet?” Lavelle asked.

“No. There’s continued high temperatures predicted up north,” Dorion said with a grimace. “More snowmelt. If somebody doesn’t believe in climate change, have them come to Hinowah and start stacking sandbags.”

The woman was looking through her notebook. Shaw noted that unlike his naturally small and precise handwriting, hers was loopy and bold and, well, sloppy. But, it got the job done. She’d filled scores of notebooks, first page to last.

“What’s your book about?”

“Fantasy. My hero’s a woman spell-caster in this mythical world. She’s been kidnapped by an evil king. Thamann Hotaks... ‘The man who takes.’ Get it? Based on guess who?” She shook her head. “It’s a simple story. And it’s like hundreds of other novels in the genre. But why write something different? There’s a reason they sell. People want stories where good wins out over evil. That never gets old.”

And Colter Shaw — a fan of Tolkien — could hardly disagree.

He noted the corporals were pacing back and forth at the opposite end of the levee. The second SUV pulled up and Tamara Olsen got out. They were looking at the river and having a discussion. He guessed the helicopter with the bomb curtains was nearby.

Debi Starr pulled up in her cruiser. She parked and joined them. “Eduardo? Have you talked to him?”

Dorion said, “He’s doing all right. His wife’s flying in. They’re going to get him up walking today.”

Tolifson asked, “That soon after getting shot? Maybe they want to make sure they have hospital beds if...” A nod toward the levee.

Shaw might have told him that a full jacketed round — not hollow point — piercing only muscle tissue was not a very big deal, if it missed the important highways of blood vessels.

He glanced around, and realized his mother was not present. “Did Mary Dove step away?”

“Last I heard she finally got a call back from Mrs. Petaluma. She’d talked her into packing a bag and leaving. I was on a call to Sacramento and when I hung up I noticed she was gone.”

Shaw glanced toward Mrs. Petaluma’s house down in the valley. “Look.”

“No!” Dorion whispered.

Their mother’s gray pickup truck was speeding through downtown toward Mrs. Petaluma’s home.

Shaw grabbed his phone and hit speed dial.

He saw Mary Dove’s head turn sideways momentarily but she ignored the call as she skidded to a stop, climbed out and strode to the woman’s doorway. Even in a hurry, she maintained her upright posture and elegance.

Brother and sister regarded each other, both understanding that there was nothing to be done. Mary Dove was aware of the risk. She too had learned the art of survival from her husband and analyzed dangers in the same way Ashton had. She had probably calculated the odds were low that the levee would collapse in the twenty minutes it would take her to collect the woman and get her to safety.

The flaw, however, was that calculations were only as good as the objective facts you fed into the computer. And no one, not even an experienced engineer like Dorion, had those facts and figures at hand.

The levee’s fate was closer to the spells and magic of Fiona Lavelle’s hero.

Dorion offered, “Well, she’s not going to stop and have tea. They’ll get away as fast as they can.”

“Come on,” Shaw whispered to her. “Come on.”

Fiona Lavelle distracted Shaw from those thoughts with a scoff. “Glad he’s not there.”

Shaw glanced her way to see the young woman looking at Olsen and the corporals, standing beside one of the SUVs across the valley.

“Who’s that?” Shaw asked.

“This gross dude. When I made it off the levee yesterday morning and stopped? The driver in one of those SUVs didn’t even ask if I was okay. He looked me over and was sort of licking his lips. Reminded me of John.”

Shaw nodded sympathetically. But only for an instant. The understanding hit Shaw like a blow. He cut his gaze to Lavelle. “That SUV was there while the levee was coming down?”

“Yeah. Another one too, a black one just like it. They were parked on the shoulder. That’s why I wasn’t worried about calling nine-one-one. I knew they would report it, so I could escape down the trail.”

Colter asked Tolifson and Starr abruptly, “The army engineers? Did you call them?”

The two regarded each other. “No,” Tolifson said. “Marissa Fell? In the office? She said they’d called and said they were on their way.”

Starr understood. “Damn. They’re fake! We let a fox into the henhouse.”

Tolifson blinked. “What’s all this?”

Starr said, “They were here before the bomb. Which means they’re the ones who set it. Who the heck are they?”

Colter asked, “Describe the guy you just mentioned.”

“I just saw his head and shoulders. Big, round face, red hair and beard.”

Colter leaned into the computer, typing fast, to load the screen grabs of Bear. He swung the screen toward her.

She squinted. “Yeah, that’s him.”

“Stolen SUVs and fake government plates. Which they could have made in ten minutes.”

You could buy surplus uniforms for a song online. Corps of Engineer patches too.

Olsen — or whoever she really might be — was working with Bear.

Colter said, “There’s no bomb curtain coming. In fact, they’re getting ready to blow the rest of the levee. And it’s going to happen any minute.”

“You’re sure?” Tolifson asked.

Dorion answered, “She told us the curtains would be here in forty minutes or so. We’ll start to ask questions when they don’t show up, so they have to blow it before that happens.”

Debi Starr blurted, “We need backup!” She grabbed her mobile.

Colter was studying the trio across the valley, trying to see sidearms. The phony corporals wore Colt 1911.45s. Powerful and accurate, and because they were so heavy, they offered little recoil, which meant that you could fire fast with good aim.

He could assume that Olsen had a concealed weapon of some kind.

“Now!” The voice was Debi Starr’s, speaking into the phone. “I want Prescott Moore on the line now. We’ve got lives at risk in Hinowah... Well, let me tell you, miss, I am sick and tired of hearing excuses about Fort Pleasant. Get his butt on the phone this minute.”

“Debi!” Tolifson whispered.

She ignored him. “Well, I wouldn’t need that tone if you’d unclog your ears and listen to me. Moore. Now.” She sighed. “Then connect me to Sheriff Barrett.” A brief pause. “Sheriff. It’s Debi Starr, Hinowah Public Safety. We’ve got three people in our sights, armed, and they planted the bombs here in Hinowah. They killed one person and shot up another. We need a full county and highway patrol response immediately... SWAT and bomb squad. I mean now. And no more ‘poor Fort Pleasant’ crapola.”

“Geeze, Debi,” Tolifson muttered.

Colter called, “Tell him we have an active shooter. That always gets attention.”

“Active shooter?” Tolifson asked. “But there isn’t one.”

Colter Shaw said, “There will be. In about sixty seconds.”

61

Another thought landed hard in Colter Shaw’s mind.

If Annie Coyne was the fall person, which he knew was true, she had to be eliminated.

It was the only way the plot would work. Alive, she would deliver credible alibis, counter evidence and witnesses to prove she wasn’t behind the levee explosion or the planting of lithium samples.

But if she were to die, the authorities would be inclined to follow the path of least resistance in the investigation: assign the guilt to her and close the case.

He drew his weapon.

“Colter,” Starr began, “what...”

“Bring the keys to the van.”

“Heck. Of course!” Nodding, she clearly understood.

She started after him, fishing in her pocket, as the items on her service belt bounced sideways and up and down. The woman was getting quite a spoonful of law enforcement today, the sort that had surely never been seen in a small town before.

More activity in a single day than any true crime podcast could offer up in a month.

He sprinted through brush down the hill toward the van. Just as he broke from the bushes he saw Bear, holding a gas can in both hands. Their eyes met and Colter aimed in his direction. Bear was strong but a three-gallon container weighs about twenty-five pounds. He was straining to hold it. The cap was off.

“Down. Careful.” Colter didn’t want it to tip over and spill. The engine of the van was running and the hot tailpipe might set off a blaze.

The man nodded. And began to crouch and do as told. “Okay, Mr. Shovel. We’re all good here.”

Starr ran up and targeted him too. The big gun was held steady in her hand.

“Have to ask: You know how to use that thing?” Colter whispered.

“I plink pennies with my twenty-two on the range. Make souvenirs for the twins and their friends. Twenty-five and fifty feet.”

Hitting coins at that distance? Hell, she could outshoot him.

“Lie face down on the ground!” she called.

Bear was crouching, the can now resting on the grass. His hand rested atop it, and he wasn’t doing as she instructed.

Starr said, “I’m considering that a deadly weapon and you should understand that that authorizes me to use force to stop you.”

Nothing.

“Sir, that translates into I am about to shoot you in the face.”

“All right!” He released his grip on the can.

A breeze blew it over.

No!

He’d been faking the weight. The gas was already under the van. And in his left hand was a cigarette lighter.

Without a word, Starr fired but just as she did, Bear dropped fully to the ground and touched the lighter to the pool of gas.

It erupted in a huge tower of orange and blue flames and a cloud of smoke. The man probably lost hairs on his forearm and maybe some skin but the tactic worked. He had put up an effective smoke screen. They heard two shots from the other side as the man fired, but he had no better target of them than they did of him. Glancing back to the command post, Colter saw that Tolifson, Dorion and Lavelle were crouching but none had been hit.

He and Starr didn’t return fire.

Never fire a weapon without a clear view of your target and what’s behind it.

The two ran forward to the van, and he skirted the flames to the left, Starr to the right, both staying low. But the man was gone.

Starr could get nowhere near the rear door, the only one accessing the prisoner compartment. Colter glanced into the driver’s seat; there was a small grille-covered window between the driver’s and the prisoner’s areas. It was, however, only eight inches high.

Annie Coyne’s screams cut through the air — piercing even from inside the enclosed space.

Starr tried again but had to back away. “Colter, what should I do? I can’t get close! Can we shoot the lock out? She’s dying in there. Jesus!”

“No. Locks don’t shoot out.”

“Henry and the fire truck, they’re at the evac station. I don’t know—”

Colter squinted at the van and the surroundings. He said calmly, “Drive it away.”

“What?”

“Just get in and drive away from the flames. Fifteen feet, twenty.” He pointed uphill toward the CP.

“Oh.” A why-didn’t-I-think-of-that grimace. She ran to the driver’s side, leapt in and started the engine, then sped forward.

Colter looked underneath. The flames hadn’t spread far or enthusiastically, because of the soaked terrain, and the vehicle had not caught fire.

Starr stopped abruptly, slammed the transmission into park and jumped out, running to the back door.

Covering her as she opened the lock, looking for Bear, Colter called over of the roar and crackle of the flames, “You understand she’s innocent.”

“Yeah, yeah, Colter. All good. We’ll get it taken care of.”

She flung the door open.

Choking, Annie Coyne stumbled out.

Colter called to her, “Stay low and get to the command post.”

Coyne oriented herself and began to stagger there.

The officer started in that direction too.

“No,” Colter said. “Stay with me, Starr. Better shooting vantage.”

He was watching Bear’s F-150 pickup skid into downtown and race for the bridge over the spillway. It was a tough shot for their pistols and there was a risk they’d hit one of the houses that Bear sped past — houses that might be occupied by remainers.

He and Starr stood down from firing.

Then the man was over the bridge and disappearing into the forest on the road that led up to Route 13.

As soon as that happened, the corporals started firing toward the southern hilltop, basically covering shots to keep Colter and Starr down and stop them from hitting Bear’s truck when it emerged. Clearly, their operation had gone to hell and they needed to escape.

Colter and Starr crouched, though the slugs came nowhere close.

She placed a call — sheriff’s department again — and told whoever answered that the shoot-out was ongoing and they needed to get a roadblock on the south end of Route 13.

Colter didn’t disagree but he believed that would probably not be their escape route. He told her, “I think their plan is to head down one of the mining trails to a clearing, a chopper’ll pick them up. We have to stop them here, now.”

“You think they have a... Never mind. Whoever they’re working for has money. Of course there’s a helicopter.” She squinted at the Expeditions. “Okay, grilles and tires. Here we go.”

Colter nodded at his small pistol. “Not much good at this range. Shoot some pennies for us.”

The officer grinned, then did something that he’d never seen. She stepped back a few yards, walked behind a tree and rested her left hand on a branch, palm up, and placed her right, holding the pistol on it. You always fired a long gun on a rest, a pistol rarely.

There followed a stunning fusillade of shots from the big weapon. A pause between each one to reacquire, but no more than a second. Soon the slide locked back and she reloaded. He noted four extra mags. Twice what most cops carry.

“Glad I’m not a coin downrange from you,” he said, shouting since they were both partially deafened.

The grille of one vehicle was perforated and steaming, and two tires of the other were flattened.

Bear’s pickup — their escape vehicle — remained hidden in the brush; Starr had no target toward it.

Olsen and the fake corporals were now trapped on the east side of the highway, hunkered down behind the SUVs, which were nothing more than bullet-resistant barricades at this point. One of the men started across, shooting as he went but Starr fired his way — Colter let go a couple of rounds too — and the fake corporal dropped. He probably didn’t get hit, but his mind had been changed. He crawled back under cover.

Tolifson shouted, “CHP called me. They’re on the way. But they’re saying thirty minutes.”

A puff of smoke appeared from a tangle of brush behind which Bear’s truck was hidden. A big slug — a hunting-rifle bullet — suddenly snapped over Colter’s head.

He and Starr dropped.

Dirt kicked up behind them.

It would be the rifle Bear had used to shoot Ed Gutiérrez. And he clearly knew what he was about when it came to weapons.

Two more rounds followed the first. A pause.

Olsen and the corporals started across the highway but Starr rose quickly and fired, driving them back.

She dropped just as one of Bear’s slugs slammed into a tree very close to them, and two more followed, digging up dirt a few yards from them.

Another pause. Another trio of shots. They were getting closer.

“Internal mag,” Colter shouted.

She nodded.

Bear had a hunting rifle, which unlike an assault weapon had a fixed magazine that held only three rounds. After every third shot he would have to reload, which took maybe four or five seconds.

Colter said, “Count the rounds. We’ve got to get out of here. No cover.”

“I’ll draw him out,” Starr said. She rose fast, fired a few shots at the lead SUV, and when she dropped, they counted three rounds from Bear. The boom of the last shot had not subsided when she and Colter started sprinting to the command post.

Just as Bear reloaded and let go with another three, they tumbled to the ground, where Tolifson, Dorion and Fiona lay behind a berm of earth in front of the tents. McGuire was behind the department pickup.

“A standoff,” Colter said, still shouting.

Starr said, “There’s one way they can change that.”

Colter Shaw had figured this out too. “They’re going to blow the levee, so we’ll have to break cover and try to save the remainers.”

Colter glanced quickly into the valley and saw Mary Dove crouching with Mrs. Petaluma behind an open doorway. No more than fifty yards from the black bulwark of earth that was soon to unleash a tide in their direction.

Rotund bombsmith Hire Denton was sitting in his Jeep, a quarter mile from the levee, listening absently to the gunshots. Wasn’t his problem.

He was on a website, shopping for more Bob, good old-time black powder.

He was squinting at the price — a little high — for something you could buy in gun stores for reloading ammo, but your average clerk at, say, Frederick’s Gun Shop, might not be inclined to step into the back and wheel out a hundred-pound keg.

He decided to go ahead and make the purchase, of which the payment was the easy part. Delivery of even low explosives like Bob took some logistics. He was about to send the info when—

Ding...

Ah, it was the Go message from the boss.

He’d been wondering if he’d ever hear, and if his efforts in the cold water to plant Charlie at the Never Summer would have been a waste of time — though he would of course be paid whether Charlie met his fate or not.

Here was the answer.

And so it was goodbye, my friend, enjoy your last few seconds on earth.

Charlie, an exceedingly high explosive, was meager on smoke but big on destruction.

He took his other phone, the one he would use to call the two numbers. First, the arming circuit, then the detonation circuit. The phone was passcode protected, and ten digits — so it could virtually never be guessed.

Hire Denton, however, had no trouble remembering it. The string of digits was the phone number of his local Wendy’s, where he placed an order at least three times a week, the 20 Nuggs Combo being his favorite.

62

The gunshots had started three or four minutes ago.

Mary Dove Shaw instinctively knew they were at first coming from small arms, being traded back and forth over her head and that of Mrs. Petaluma.

Some rounds were from the hill to her left, where the command post, her daughter and younger son were. And some from the right where she could just see the tops of a few black SUVs. Then longer rolling booms from a hunting rifle, the shooter on the SUV side, hidden somewhere in the trees.

“Stay low,” she said to Mrs. Petaluma, who nodded. Her eyes revealed not panic but concern. A bit of anger too. She was the sort of woman, Mary Dove assessed, who did not like her life to stray far from where she had tucked it into a high-fence corral.

They crouched behind the open driver’s side door of Mary Dove’s pickup.

A lull in the gunfire.

Broken by an altogether different — and more horrifying — sound.

Her eyes, and her companion’s, cut fast to the Hinowah levee.

Whose midsection blew outward under the force of powerful explosives.

A huge U-shaped portion from the top to the river bottom gave way, sluicing downward, tumbling into town, an avalanche of black mud and rock and water.

“Shit,” Mrs. Petaluma muttered.

Mary Dove looked for cover, and finding none, turned her eyes back to the earthwork. She couldn’t help it — she marveled as the huge thing collapsed, dissolving, a mythical animal dying.

And at the wall of water that cascaded out directly for them.

There was nothing to do.

Nowhere to hide.

The flood would strike them in fifteen seconds.

Snap their necks probably, so powerful would be the force.

Certainly, if that was not their fate, it would slam them into any number of the blunt objects that sat behind them.

She had a fast memory of Ashton Shaw lecturing the children on surviving shark attacks. “It was simple,” he said. “Never go in the ocean.”

Ah, as troubled as the man was, he certainly had a sparkle from time to time.

How she missed him...

She glanced toward where Dorion and Colter were, hoping for a last look at her children.

No. she couldn’t see them.

Ah, well.

She braced for the impact.

Then something odd happened.

The wall of water deflated.

As it surged into town, the depth dropped fast, from ten feet to five to three to one.

The flood became an inch-deep pool, the sort that might ease into your backyard after an ordinary rainstorm.

They regarded each other, and then Mary Dove scanned the scene in front of them.

She understood what had happened.

There had been two sets of explosions. The first had destroyed the levee and started the flood. But almost simultaneously another explosion had brought down a wall of rock upstream, filling the narrow notch the Never Summer flowed through just north of Hinowah. It effectively created an impromptu dam, cutting off the current entirely before it even got to the levee.

No time for elation, though. After only a moment, the gunfire began again.

63

From cover near the command post, Colter Shaw nodded to his sister.

Dorion’s plan had worked.

Earlier in the day she had hired her own demo expert, a quirky guy named Hire Denton to get to Hinowah as fast as he could. He’d arrived several hours ago, along with a sizable inventory of various explosives.

Dorion had sized up the notch the Never Summer flowed through and the canyon just north — upstream — of it. Denton would plant five kilos of C-4 in strategic places where she had determined an avalanche would dam up the river almost entirely before the water got to the Hinowah levee. He was to be ready to detonate the packages the minute she texted him.

When they had concluded a few minutes ago that it was likely Bear and the fake soldiers were going to blow the levee to help their escape, Dorion had signaled Denton that it was time to detonate the charges he’d set.

The resulting dam meant the land to the north would fill up quickly but the lake would cover only abandoned fields and a swamp. There was enough empty space to contain the water until the county or state — or the real Corps of Engineers — got a new levee in place. Then Dorion’s dam would be slowly dismantled and the Never Summer would begin to flow again.

But the aquatic state of Hinowah and its surroundings were not foremost on Colter’s mind.

Bear, Olsen and the corporals had lost their leverage and — whatever they felt about the failure of the levee’s destruction — all that was left for them was to escape the traditional way: in a getaway vehicle, notably Bear’s pickup, still hidden in the woods.

That meant that the crew’s earlier problem persisted: crossing Route 13 under fire from Colter and Starr and others at the command post.

Olsen was the first to start, but Starr forced her back with a half dozen shots.

“Damn,” the officer muttered. Presumably because of her dismay at missing the woman, but even getting slugs close enough to drive her back to cover was an accomplishment. That was a hell of a range for a sidearm.

Then too she could rise to a firing position only very briefly; Bear had zeroed in with his telescopic sight and was placing rifle shots exactly where he wished them to go.

Colter too returned fire but his gun — with a barrel length a half of Starr’s and a tenth of Bear’s — was pretty useless for distance shooting like this.

Mayor Tolifson, who had been huddling under cover, terrified, inhaled deeply a half dozen times and, his face filled with resolve, rose fast and lifted his own Glock. Before the mayor could pull the trigger, though, Bear parked a slug right beside him, spattering rocks and dirt. The slim man whimpered and dropped to the ground.

Starr called, “Mayor. Gimme your mag.”

He stared.

“Bullets. I need your bullets!”

He wasn’t quite sure how to get the magazine out of the gun. Colter scrabbled to him, and grabbed the weapon.

Starr shook her head. “No, you keep it, Colter.”

A nod. He checked the weapon.

It was unloaded.

Grimacing, Colter called, “Tolifson, ammo? You have any ammo?”

He blinked, stared at the gun, then closed his eyes in dismay. “The office. I... I forgot to check.”

His weapon was now a paperweight.

It was then that Bear laid down covering fire for the two corporals, one of his slugs striking the gas tank of the Public Safety pickup directly behind Dorion and Lavelle. The women rose to get out of the path of the streaming liquid. Lavelle made it to cover, but Dorion slipped and slid about ten feet down the hillside, completely exposed to Bear’s weapon.

Starr called, “I’m out, Colter.” He saw the slide of her Glock was locked back.

Colter was too.

Then Bear stepped out from cover, looking toward the CP tent, understanding that his enemies were out of ammunition. He’d looked through a spotter scope and seen the locked-back receivers. He worked the bolt and aimed toward Dorion, who climbed onto one knee and drew her own pistol, a small Glock like her brother’s own. She aimed carefully at Bear, who paused.

He actually seemed amused.

She fired six fast shots the big man’s way, emptying the weapon.

They all missed.

Colter sprinted to her and helped her to her feet.

Bear aimed slowly.

Who would he target, the brother or sister?

His and Dorion’s eyes met. He squeezed her hand.

“Damn it, Colter. Remember the rule: Never get sentimental. Ashton told us—”

Her words were cut off by the huge rolling boom of a hunting rifle.

Dorion gasped.

Colter froze.

Neither had been hit.

She said, “Look.”

Pointing to the hillside where Bear was standing.

The big man was wincing in pain — and dismay. His rifle had been shot out of his hands. A slug had slammed into his receiver and splinted the stock, sending it flying. His hand appeared broken.

His face was eerie. He looked as if a friend had just been shot. He stared at the corpse of the rifle, shattered, on the ground near his feet.

“Who?” Dorion called.

Mary Dove. That was who. Her shot — from her .308 — had hit the stock of the big man’s rifle.

She was shaking her head — a message to the man.

Bear was frozen in position, staring down at the woman.

A moment passed during which neither of them moved.

No, Colter thought to Bear. Don’t.

He crouched, drew his Colt pistol and began to lift it.

He didn’t even get ten degrees to target before his mother’s rifle bucked again.

The bullet struck Bear in the middle of the chest.

The man looked confused. Betrayed. He dropped to his knees and picked up his own wounded rifle... He didn’t lift it in an attempt to fire the gun. He clutched it to his chest and then fell forward. He went still.

“No! Don’t shoot.” A woman’s voice. Olsen — or whoever she really was — had shouted.

Apparently, Mary Dove’s shooting had convinced her and the corporals that more police would arrive.

“Don’t shoot!” she called again. “We’re surrendering.”

Apparently she had no idea that the reinforcements did not involve a phalanx of SWAT officers but a woman in her sixties, who weighed at most one hundred and ten pounds.

Mary Dove replaced her Winchester in the rack, thinking of the hundreds of times she’d used it to put food on the table in the Compound.

In all her forays into the autumn fields over the years, she had never felt the least emotional about bringing down a buck, merely concentrating on aim to make sure the creature didn’t suffer.

And she had not felt any emotion now. From the glove compartment, she retrieved her pistol, resting in a ruddy holster she herself had tanned, cut, and stitched. She’d stitched the gun belt too, which she now strapped on.

No one was more devoted to the concept of gender equality than Mary Dove Shaw. She nonetheless felt there was something unladylike about semiautomatic pistols, especially the profoundly ugly black Glocks.

No, a woman should pack a revolver. In addition to the aesthetics, she believed that six shots were plenty if you knew what you were doing. (And the one she wore was a Ruger .44 Magnum, firing a slug so powerful that it would go straight through an assailant on its way to disabling the engine block of his getaway vehicle.)

“Those were good shots.” Mrs. Petaluma nodded approvingly as she replaced her own gun, the old cap-and-ball Colt Dragoon.

The women shared a smile and they climbed into the pickup.

Mary Dove fired up the engine and motored along the street in the direction of the levee. As they passed the mudslide, she noted three trout flopping on the ground in a shallow puddle.

She stopped and climbed out. Knowing how slippery such creatures could be, she took out a pair of canvas work gloves from the toolbox affixed to the back bed, and collected the fish one at a time, depositing them in a cooler in the back of her truck and covering them with water from several bottles.

After police statements, and helping in any other way she could, she would ask to borrow Mrs. Petaluma’s kitchen to fry up the trout for the woman, Colter, Dorion and herself.

Mary Dove had her own Never Rules. And one of the most important was:

Never miss a chance to have a meal with friends and family.

64

“We’re good. Six feet of stone and gravel.”

This pronouncement was from Ordell Balboa, who was a real sergeant in the real Army Corps of Engineers. The man and his team of eight had helicoptered in from a base near Sacramento. (He’d reported, with a confused frown, that, no, there had been no aviation groundings yesterday anywhere in the area. That was yet another fiction spun by the mercenaries.)

Colter stood with him and Dorion on the north side of Route 13. They were examining the dam.

He asked, “Who did the demo? Good work.”

“Man I use from time to time. Hire Denton.”

“That’s not a name.”

Dorion chuckled. “He’s a private explosives consultant and facilitator.”

Colter decided that would be an attention-getter if he had the job description written on his business card. He’d met Denton a few times. He was amused that the only way he referred to his sister was his “boss.”

Balboa was nodding as he examined the rockwork again. He glanced back to Dorion. “How’d you get the authorization to do the blasting so fast?”

“I didn’t,” Dorion said. “I just ordered it. Paid for it myself.”

She offered nothing more.

There was a pause as he digested this.

Colter knew that any demolition work involving explosive materials needed local and state approval. The feds too, since the levee, as small as it was, still fell under the purview of the army engineers.

“I guess I don’t need to put in my report anything other than a rockslide being the cause of the damming obstruction.”

“Appreciate it.”

“But give me that man’s number. I could use him from time to time.”

Colter wondered how the U.S. military would respond to a man who named his explosives.

And apparently also had conversations with them.

The soldier shot a look at the remnants of the levee. “We can have a temporary one up in a week and a permanent one in a month. Then blast out Denton’s work, start the river up again.”

Colter glanced at his Winnebago.

Hell.

A slug from the phony soldiers had smacked into the windshield, spidering it, and ended up in the passenger seat headrest.

Expensive to fix. And he’d have to have it done soon. If police were inclined to write you up for a mere crack in a windshield, which they were, they would definitely do so if the damage was caused by a .45 projectile.

Dorion and Shaw left Balboa to his engineering work and walked down the hill to her SUV.

The case was not, of course, over. Bear and the phony engineers were merely hired guns. The latter had been arrested, but their boss was still at large, ID unknown.

And it was time to find out who that was.

The two skirted the command post, which had been hermetically sealed off by Officer Debi Starr, who had strung more yellow tape in the past six hours than had been used in the hamlet of Hinowah in the past six years, he guessed. Starr had also used the metal detector that had found the slug traversing Eduardo Gutiérrez’s calf to discover the burial sites for scores of bullets fired by the mercenaries. These were marked with plasticized playing cards. Clever idea if your small-town police station didn’t have enough yellow numbered evidence sandwich boards in its inventory to go around.

It had taken two bombs and a lethal shootout, but the Olechu County Sheriff’s Office had finally decided Hinowah was not crying wolf. They had a crime scene team running the workshop at the Redding mine and they would soon tackle the levee, the command post and the black Expeditions. The FBI’s experts also were en route.

Colter and Dorion walked past the prisoner transport van that had very nearly been Annie Coyne’s crematorium. It too was festooned in yellow.

They joined Han Tolifson at the bottom of the road where it curved left and descended into the town proper. He looked their way with raised eyebrows.

“So it’s solid?” he asked.

Deadpan, Dorion replied, “You could call it a ‘boulder’ dam.”

Though stern in her disaster response work, Dorion probably had the best humor of all the siblings.

It took a beat, then Tolifson smiled.

“We’ll convene at the office.” He gave directions.

Colter got into Dorion’s SUV and they drove into the village center.

As they approached the modest one-story Public Safety building, which had government architecture written all over it, Colter spotted on the sidewalk beside the front door his mother, Annie Coyne, Mrs. Petaluma and a gray-haired woman in a purple dress — a friend of the Indigenous woman, Colter guessed.

Their mother noticed the siblings and waved. The foursome on the sidewalk hugged one another, then split up, Mrs. Petaluma and her friend walking away toward the town square, and his mother and Coyne heading toward the front steps of the PSO, where they waited.

Dorion parked and she and Colter, along with the two women, walked inside.

The office was part of a government complex, not a stand-alone building, so you couldn’t judge the size from the outside, but Colter was surprised to see how small the law enforcement operation was.

It was clear somebody loved houseplants.

Immediately inside the front door was a reception desk, presided over by Marissa Fell, a large brunette in her mid-thirties. Her heart-shaped face, light olive in complexion, and mass of curly hair gave her an alluring air. Had she been on duty throughout the day, even during the worst of the flood scare? Colter guessed she had been. Her eyes and expression told him she was that sort of person.

Tolifson poked his head through a door in the back, gesturing them to follow. As they walked down a short corridor, he said to Colter, in a low voice, “I tell her it’s unprofessional, the place looking like the Garden Center at Home Depot, but her position is that we’re in charge and we shouldn’t pay any mind to the opinions of others. She’s not wrong there.”

Colter noted a particular tone in the mayor’s voice. He had seen too the absence of wedding rings on his and Fell’s hands. The percentage they had more than a working relationship?

Sixty plus percent. Part of the proof: she’d won the houseplant dispute.

They now entered an office pen of six desks, only three of which showed signs of habitation. One belonged to the town’s third patrol person, currently on vacation, L. Brown. The second was TC McGuire’s, who was at the moment sitting in front of a large computer screen, keyboarding in a clattery blur, his big head looking straight forward instead of where his fingertips were striking. On the screen was the reality-show tape of John Millwood pointing the Glock 42 in Colter’s direction at the Good Luck and Fortune Mine.

The other occupied desk was Debi Starr’s, the name plate reported. He noted a number of framed pictures, the subjects primarily a handsome blond man about her age and twin boys, presumably around ten, with blond crewcuts.

Windows into another world.

On the wall was a bulletin board featuring mug shots and security cam images of fugitives and suspects. As most wanted notices were digital, these printouts seemed from a different era, almost decorations, though the dates were recent. He couldn’t help but note a reward for one suspect in particular, a mean-looking man with a broad, flat face and narrow eyes, resembling a predatory whale. The reward was for $25K, and as the crime was domestic kidnapping, Colter was tempted to pursue it. Maybe he would come back here after all was said and done.

He wouldn’t mind an excuse to stay in the area a bit longer; Colter Shaw was very aware that Annie Coyne was three feet behind him.

Tolifson directed them into a conference room, big enough for just about as many people as their party made up. They found seats in mismatched chairs. On the floor were dusty boxes of file folders and stacks of documents without cardboard homes. In the corner was an ancient minifridge, whose hum suggested it still worked, and on a counter a coffee maker that had clearly surrendered long ago.

Debi Starr smiled a greeting, though it was a harried offering. She’d been poring over notes in scrawly handwriting and making tick marks next to some entries.

Tolifson sat at the head of the table and said to Dorion, “Maybe your associate could join us.”

“Of course.” She pulled out her phone and dialed a number. A moment later the screen morphed into a FaceTime call.

Eduardo Gutiérrez, in a blue robe, was peering into the camera from a green-and-beige hospital corridor.

“Ed. We’re with Colter and a few others, including the entire police force of Hinowah.” She slowly panned the camera.

“How are you, sir?” Tolifson asked.

“They’re making me walk. Asking nicely, but still.”

“Your shooter’s gone,” Dorion said. “He’s probably in the same hospital you are. But in the basement. In a bag. Want to meet the SWAT officer who took him out?”

“You bet I do.”

She swung the phone to her mother.

Gutiérrez gave a laugh. “Mary Dove!”

“Eduardo.”

“You’re the one who...”

She nodded.

“Well, thank you for serving the writ of habeas corpus.”

The term literally meant “producing the body,” though it referred to a living one, pursuant to a legal proceeding.

Tolifson opened a file and skimmed it, nodding. Then he looked up. “I need to brief the CHP and County Sheriff Barrett. He’ll be taking over. So...” He put his hands flat on the table. “First of all, I’ll need AB Fifteen oh sixes from everybody who fired a weapon today.”

Colter noted Starr hesitating. She frowned and pressed her lips together, about to speak. He sensed something delicate was coming. She cleared her throat and said, “Actually, Mayor, that form applies only to law enforcement. So TC and I are the only ones who need to file one.”

A blink. “That’s what I meant. I’ll need statements from the civilians.”

Dorion said, “We’ll get those done, Mayor.”

He lifted a pen over a yellow pad. “Now, any leads on who hired them?”

Colter said, “Only that they’re probably local.”

A frown. “How’d you figure that out?”

Without looking up from her notes, Starr said, “I’m just thinking: Because the feud between Annie Coyne and Gerard Redding was part of the scenario they concocted. Doubt anybody outside Olechu County would know a thing about it.”

“Sure. Makes sense. But local... who?”

Marissa Fell stepped into the room, then handed out sheets of paper. “Their IDs. From prints and facial rec in NCIC, Sacramento, San Francisco and Oakland.”

She had done a comprehensive summary of each perp.

If Tolifson ended up police chief, she’d be key in helping save his ass when it needed saving.

Which Colter suspected would be frequently, at least during the first year.

Through the phone, Gutiérrez asked if he could get one too.

Dorion took a photo of hers and sent it to him.

Colter looked over the sheet.

Bear was Waylon Foley, forty-three.

Impressive plan indeed, Colter reflected. Two layers of misdirection. He led everyone to think that the levee sabotage was put together by Redding, who wanted to destroy the town for lithium. But in case the team tipped to that, he had a backup: setting up Annie Coyne.

The memo added:

Interesting metaphor under the present circumstances.

“Tamara Olsen” was in reality Alisette Lark, thirty-four. She was a former adult film performer, a profession not known for fine acting skills, though she was clearly an exception.

Colter read:

Fell’s report also disclosed the IDs of the two corporals. Lawrence Williams was really Devon Smith, who worked in a gym in Oakland and ran with the Fifth Street Bloods. Robert McPherson was Trey Coughlin, a small-time drug dealer suspected of two hired killings, also in an East Bay crew.

Tolifson said, “If the profiles’re accurate, the watertight thing, none of them know who’s the boss.” He added absently, “Too bad Foley’s dead. He’s the only one who could finger the ultimate perp.”

Mary Dove smiled pleasantly. “He was trying to shoot my children.”

Gutiérrez spoke from the phone. “I have a thought.”

“The floor is yours,” Tolifson said.

“Dorion was telling me about that guy who came to see us, Howie Katz. From the chip company.”

Colter explained to those in the room who weren’t aware. “Community relations, GraphSet Chips in Fort Pleasant. Offered anyone displaced from town by the flood a payment or interest-free loan to rebuild. I see where you’re going, Ed.”

Gutiérrez nodded. “Blowing the levee and diverting the river could mean less flooding in Fort Pleasant, less risk of damage to the company.”

Annie Coyne said, “But destroying the town just to save your inventory?”

Tolifson said, “An inventory that’s probably worth a billion dollars.”

Colter: “So Katz comes to Hinowah, talking about helping the town out after the levee goes, but it’s just an excuse to check out the progress of the erosion firsthand. If it wasn’t enough he’d order Foley and the others to blow the second set of charges.”

Then another thought occurred. He said, “Water.”

Those in the room looked his way. He said to Coyne, “You were telling me about the bottled water company in Fort Pleasant. One of the biggest in the country?”

“Olechu Springs,” Tolifson said. “Three dollars a bottle retail, and that’s one hell of a markup when you don’t pay for your raw materials.”

Dorion asked, “Would they have an interest in diverting the river? Was it polluting the source?”

Gutiérrez said, “Or maybe flooding would damage their processing plant and wells. A water company destroyed by water.”

Annie Coyne said, “There was a big controversy when they were looking for a place to build their plant.”

Tolifson added, “That’s right. Remember it well.”

“The company made a pitch to everybody in Fort Pleasant about selling the town’s water rights. Half didn’t want to, the other half did. And the way the town charter was set up, the county board was the sole decision maker. I remember Prescott Moore, the supervisor, did a full-court press and it got approved. Checks went to everybody who had well water in town. From the get-go, they regretted it. The checks were a lot smaller than they’d expected — and they lost all control over their water — there were guarantees that personal supplies would be protected, but the lakes and rivers vanished. And then sediments started to appear in the town tap water.”

Annie Coyne said, “You know, water transit works the other way too. You take it out of aquifers, but you can also add it back.”

Those in the room — and Gutiérrez from afar — were looking her way. She continued, “During a rainy season farmers pump water underground to save it for dry ones. Here, the Never Summer’s ninety-nine percent pure. But as it moves south of Nowhere it starts flowing past residential areas and companies. It picks up pollution. By the time the water gets to Fort Pleasant it’ll fill up the aquifers with all kinds of crap.”

Tolifson said, “You’re saying they need to divert the flow so it doesn’t pollute their product.”

“A possibility.”

Starr said, “We’ll put them both on the suspect list. The water company and GraphSet.” She frowned as she doodled a daisy on the yellow pad. Then she looked up at Colter. “This reward business of yours. You do interrogations, right?”

“I call them interviews. But yes.”

She said, “I know those kids from Oakland, the muscle, don’t know diddly. They’re willing to squeal like whatever animal squeals — some pigs do and some pigs don’t. But that Lark woman, she’s not talking either, but seeing her reaction to Foley getting killed, I got this feeling we could call her Mama Bear.”

Dorion asked, “Sleeping together?”

“Dollars to donuts. Which means she could’ve picked up something about who the client is. She shut down completely with me and the mayor. Want to have a go at it, Colter?”

He nodded.

Starr and Colter rose and left the conference room. They walked to a security door, and she punched in the code to get into the lockup, which consisted of four cells and an interrogation room.

The metal doors had small head-high windows and Colter caught a glimpse of two Oakland thugs sitting sullenly on beds. They continued to the room at the end, where a weapon lockbox was mounted by the door — you never met with a suspect armed. But Starr couldn’t find the key. She shrugged. “She’s shackled.”

“If I can get out of shackles, she can get out of shackles.” He handed her his Glock.

“You can do that, really? The shackle thing?”

“I’ll teach you how if you want.”

“ ’Deed I do.”

Starr opened the door and he stepped inside.

65

Alisette Lark.

As Colter Shaw sat across from her, she looked at him with narrow eyes.

It was a gaze very, very different from the ones she’d shot his way earlier in the day.

“So, reward seeker.” Her voice was husky. She’d apparently been softening it earlier. “There many of you around the country?”

“Not enough to make a union.”

“You don’t take over a Hyatt for your annual convention, hm? Sessions and keynotes and boxed lunches?”

He set his pen and paper in front of him. Sometimes the people he was interviewing balked at his recording their conversation on his phone, even the offerors — whose side he was on, of course. But no one ever had a problem with taking notes.

“You were never military, Alisette.”

Always let the subject know right off that you’ve done your homework.

“But you get the chain-of-command concept, obviously, considering this job.”

She regarded him with eyes that now reflected boredom.

Shaw continued, “Waylon was the general in charge. You’re, well, a sergeant. Or captain, if you like.”

“And you want the commander in chief.”

“Of course we do.”

“As I told Barbie out there—”

He frowned.

“The officer.”

“Officer Starr’s name is Debi.”

She sighed. “Barbie’s a doll.”

He shook his head.

“A toy?... Where did you grow up, Mars?”

Might as well have.

“As I told her, Waylon believed in insulation. I never met the person who hired us. Him or her. I never heard a name. A location, a make of car. A size of shoe. A preference of food or wine. Nothing. It was for everybody’s safety. His — or hers. And ours. You’re not going to torture me, but there’re people who would. When they know the ground rules, that I’m completely ignorant, they’ll realize that there’s no reason to proceed with the pliers or blowtorch. We go our separate ways. Or they shoot me in the head. Either way, painless.”

Encouraging that she was talking. Getting the first word out of a suspect’s mouth was often the hardest part.

“No dead drops?”

A shake of her head. “Not that I heard of.”

He’d seen her behavior when she was being deceptive — which had been nearly every minute they’d been in each other’s company. That was her untruthful kinesic — body language — baseline, how she behaved when lying. The tilt of her head, the pauses when selecting a response, the tap of foot, the squint of eye, a gesture, a verbal tic — or the absence of a verbal tic.

Now the behavior was different. Not drastically so, but evidence to Shaw. He believed it was ninety percent the case that she was being honest.

“How did they communicate?”

“Like everybody else in this business. Burners.”

“What did Waylon do with them?”

“I repeat my comment. He broke them in half and threw them out. You didn’t see the Barbie movie. I suppose you haven’t seen Breaking Bad either?”

No clue.

“Where did he toss them?”

“Sewers, lakes, dumpsters, garbage cans. Half the world’s cold cases could be solved with enough people to go through every inch of the local sewage systems and trash dumps.”

He gave no reaction, but he’d had the same thought on more than one occasion.

“The most recent phone Waylon used? Where did it end up?”

Her eyes were now back to flint. “There’s nothing in it for me, Colter. The sentence’s mandatory. Conspiracy to commit murder, special circumstances. I may not get the death penalty. But I’m definitely never getting out. I tell you anything at all, whoever the client is, I’m dead. They’ll have unlimited funds. And that means a long reach — even into Q.”

San Quentin, one of the most secure prisons in the country.

“Point us in the right direction. We could recover a phone on our own. Crime scene. Nobody’d know the lead came from you.”

“Again, why? Nothing’s in it for me.”

He studied her for a moment.

Shaw rose and walked to the video camera sitting on a tripod near the door. He shut it off.

Which engendered a frown.

He returned and sat. “What if there was something else we could offer you... I could offer you.”

Now she looked curious.

“You’ll be in prison. Granted. That’s your future. But what about your past?”

She shrugged.

Shaw said slowly, “The past... It’s never erased. Is there anything I could do to... clear up some questions you might have? Something you’ve been wondering about over the years?”

Her eyes widened momentarily, then grew inscrutable once more.

He leaned forward, smelling her sweat and perfume — and, he was pretty sure, a scent of Waylon Foley’s expensive aftershave. “I find things, you know. I find people. It’s what I do. And I’m good at it.”

This time the crack in the stone was wider.

“Would there be anyone in your past you might want to know about?”

She inhaled and exhaled an unsteady breath. Licked her lips.

Shaw had read in the brief bio Marissa Fell had prepared about Alisette Lark that, at nineteen, she had gotten married. And, two years later, divorced.

Shaw was thinking of several rewards he’d pursued under circumstances with some parallels. Rewards posted by women in their thirties or forties, who had married young and then divorced after several years and moved on to very different lives.

Women like Alisette Lark, though without the criminal angle.

As a general rule Colter Shaw did not pursue rewards to find birth mothers or adopted children. Most often, each in their own way wished to remain anonymous. But there was one exception: when the birth mother had been diagnosed with a genetic illness later in life and she felt her child should be made aware of it.

Shaw had then tracked down the adoptive parents and delivered the information on the medical condition.

Lark breathed deeply and lowered her head to wipe a tear away with fingers of her shackled hand.

Shaw said softly, “I’ll find your son or daughter, tell you about them. What they’re studying, the family they’re part of now. I won’t tell you where they live or give you enough information to find them on your own. That’s set in stone. But you’ll know something.”

He pushed his notebook and offered the fountain pen. “Draw a map of where you think Foley might’ve pitched the phone.”

She stared at the implement for a long moment, then picked it up and started to draw with a steady hand. She was talented. As she sketched, she said, “Even if you find it, remember, Waylon broke it in half.”

“Let us worry about that,” Shaw said. “Keep going. You’re doing great.”

66

Outside the Public Safety Office, Colter Shaw and his mother were walking toward the parking lot. Annie Coyne was with them. Dorion had gone to visit Ed Gutiérrez and his wife, Martina, who had landed in Sacramento about an hour earlier.

Shaw involuntarily looked at the fallen levee. Clearly his sister’s odd demolition man, Hire Denton — how had he come by that name? — had calculated correctly as the dam was holding. A half dozen army engineers, armed with surveying equipment and tablets, were walking around in the muck of the riverbed where the gap was.

They seemed to think all was secure, but it never hurt to keep an eye out for oneself, and Shaw looked casually for possible escape routes, just in case.

Very few risks in life clock in at zero percent.

Foremost in his thought was the conversation he and Dorion were about to have with Mary Dove at the hotel the woman had checked in to between Fort Pleasant and Hinowah. Nice and private.

How would his mother react?

She was a scientist, which suggested an absence of emotion, or at least the willpower to master dismay. She had always had a stoic quality about her.

Yet in his reward-seeking jobs, Shaw had witnessed any number of offerors who were men and women of steel in their professional lives but who became inconsolable, sobbing and frantic, when confronted with hard personal truths.

Shaw had already been rehearsing.

I found something in Ashton’s papers. It’s tough, but you need to know...

Or possibly:

You know toward the end, Ashton wasn’t really in his right mind...

This looming conversation dominated his thoughts, but it was not the only thing on his mind.

He was also thinking about Annie Coyne. His sister and mother would stay in the motel that night.

But Shaw?

The Winnebago was one possibility.

The other was a cozy bedroom in a certain farmhouse, filled with lace and stained glass, a bit gaudy for his taste. But he would gladly cope.

A firm voice from behind them disturbed his thoughts.

“Ms. Anne Rachel Coyne?”

The three stopped and turned.

“That’s me, yes.”

The pudgy man wore a three-piece suit, a rarity in general and hardly the sort of garb one would see in Hinowah. The natty jacket, brown, was tight and the white shirt a size small. Neck flesh bulged. The red-and-gray-striped tie was broad and shiny. His cuff links might or might not have been real gold doubloons.

“My name is Myron Nash, I am an attorney representing the Redding Mining Company. Mr. Redding’s brother and his wife are flying in to take over operations, at least temporarily. They’re the primary beneficiaries of his will.”

“Okay.” Annie was squinting her cowgirl look at him, as if to say, It’s been a long day. Please get to the point.

“I’m here to inform you that the police searched the workshop where Mr. Redding died. They found some documents in one of the walls that was blown open in the explosion. Probably left for safekeeping ages ago and forgotten about and sealed up during renovations. They’re relevant to the dispute between you and Mr. Redding over water rights to the Never Summer. Here’s a copy. The original document will be tested but I have every reason to believe it’s authentic.”

Frowning, she took the sheet. Over her shoulder, Shaw read:

The yellow, crisp document was signed and dated.

“No!” Annie’s eyes closed briefly.

The lawyer asked, “Your ancestors first use was when?”

She whispered, “After that. In March of 1848, they hadn’t even staked a claim here. They’d wintered near where Grand Junction, Colorado, is now. They didn’t get to Hinowah until June.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve seen the original deed of trust. Yes.”

“I’m sorry to have to deliver this news then.” He didn’t seem particularly sorry but neither was he triumphant. “Here’s my card if you or your attorney have any questions.”

She slipped the copy of the territorial order and the card into an inside pocket of her jacket.

The man turned and walked back toward the parking lot, his gait nearly, though not quite, a waddle.

Looking from Shaw to Mary Dove, she said, “After the snowmelt flooding’s gone, the drought’ll be back. I’ll lose all the water. And that’ll be it.”

“Annie...” Shaw began.

“You two go on,” she said. “I think I’d like to be alone.”

67

An hour later, Shaw and Debi Starr were behind the shabby River View Motel, just outside Fort Pleasant, with TC McGuire, all wearing crime scene booties and latex gloves.

This was where Waylon Foley, Alisette Lark and the two fake corporals had stayed — their base of operation.

The three were walking back and forth. Shaw and Starr were searching visually, with McGuire manning the metal detector. The hunt was difficult; the scruffy field — soaking wet but still drought-yellow — was home to hundreds of items: beer and soda cans, broken toys, auto parts, melting cardboard containers, a huge belt buckle that seemed fairly new and had been found — tellingly — beside three large used condoms and bagged trash, much of it around a No Dumping sign.

Lark’s map had indicated where she recalled Foley had been standing when he broke and tossed away his phone. But the big man presumably had a good pitching arm and they were having no luck spotting it.

The woman’s concern about Bear breaking the phone was, as Shaw had suggested, not a problem. The gesture, apparently a technique in a popular show on TV, might have rendered the screen useless but it had no effect on the guts: the circuits and chips. Provided, of course, Foley had not wiped all the data first.

Kicking at a clump of muddy weeds, below which were more muddy weeds, Debi Starr said slowly, “Had another thought. The hoopla about the town selling water rights to the company? Ick.” She was looking down at more condoms. “What do you think about this: Some anti-bottled water group is behind it. They want to drive the company out of business. There were plenty of protesters against them too, just like the anti-frackers. Maybe they assume that Olechu Springs is getting the water from the river, but they don’t know it’s tapping into the aquifer.”

Interesting idea.

He asked her, “Does the Never Summer flow near the bottling company?”

“I don’t know. You have a map?”

Shaw reached into his backpack and removed his tablet. Pulling off the latex gloves, he called up a map of Fort Pleasant and the surrounding area.

“That’s the water company. There.” She tapped the screen. “And the Never Summer...” She traced the blue line as it meandered past several restaurants, a school and the county government buildings. But it wasn’t close to Olechu Springs bottling. No, protesters would likely not think the water came from the river — certainly they would not risk murder on the unlikely possibility they would disrupt the evil corporation.

“Kaput, I’d say. My theory.”

Shaw was then frowning, staring at the screen. With two fingers he zoomed out.

“Debi! Hey. I found it!” McGuire was holding the body of a flip phone in a gloved hand.

“All right!” she said, smiling.

Shaw continued to study the map then looked up.

Starr offered, “Now, we have to talk our way into the county lab without the sheriff knowing about it.”

McGuire had joined them. “Why’s that?”

She said, “Barrett’s good, no argument there. But we need to move fast. He’ll think he needs to run the op through the system. He won’t like it that we cut him out, but as long as we get results he’ll live with it. Especially if we let him take some of the credit.”

Officer Starr was not only a talented investigator but she was a pretty decent practitioner in the art of interagency politics, which was often trickier than solving crimes.

Did podcasts deal with that topic?

Shaw asked, “Where’s the technical services operation?”

“On Delroy Street,” Starr said. “Not far.” She then asked McGuire: “How long will it take to get inside the phone?”

Slipping the discoveries into a plastic bag, he replied, “Depends — if he used the default password, about ten seconds. If he made up one, it’ll take longer. With six or eight random digits, it could be a hundred thousand years. Give or take.”

Apparently, this was not a joke.

68

“You’re really hungry?”

“Hungry? Yes.”

“It’s not part of the act?”

“No.”

Several hours after the scavenger hunt behind the motel, Shaw and Starr were at Maureen’s, a bar and grill in Fort Pleasant. The inconsequential remains of what had been a fine hamburger sat in front of Colter Shaw.

“I thought you were just ordering to, you know, look normal.”

“Hm.”

Yes, he was hungry. When the waitress had come by, Shaw had suddenly realized he had eaten nothing that day.

An iced tea sat before Starr, with no food. And she wasn’t sipping.

Under other circumstances customers here would have been treated to a view of the Never Summer as it coursed past, across the street, but presently it was a tepid stream.

He offered Starr his plate. “Fries?”

She glanced at them as if they were insects in a collection jar. “Don’t see how you can eat at a time like this.”

He didn’t recite his father’s words:

Never forego sustenance or restroom breaks when you have the chance.

He ate a half dozen fries. He’d salted liberally.

Starr asked, “Are there a lot of people like them?”

“Them?”

“Waylon Foley, Alisette Lark? What would you call them? Hit people but more than that. Like hit strategists.”

A good expression. He’d hold on to it.

“No. Most killers for hire are dim. They advertise on Craigslist.”

“You’re kidding.”

“And they’re genuinely surprised when the wife hiring them to kill her husband turns out to be FBI. But who we were dealing with? Targeted demo work, fall guys, misdirection, costumes, stolen government plates. That’s rare.”

She grimaced. “And there’s collateral damage too. Redding, Ed Gutiérrez. Anybody in the path of the flood.”

“All still good?” He was facing the window, his preferred location in any public establishment. That revenge-minded enemy thing.

Starr scanned the interior of the restaurant. “Yep.” Then she ventured some tea. She said reflectively, “I always figured my first homicide case would’ve been one of those stupid ones. Mr. X takes out Mrs. X for nagging, or Mrs. X takes him out because he belted her one too many times after his second six-pack. Professionals? In Hinowah?” She clicked her tongue.

“You called it,” Shaw pointed out. “The shovel man with the empty pockets and nice aftershave. When all is said and done, you should do a podcast about it.”

“I listen to pods. I don’t do pods. You think this is going to work?”

“No way of knowing. You can only run numbers if you have all the facts.”

“You want to take a guess?”

“I don’t guess.”

Starr was looking past him at the suited man. “At last. The woman he was with? She’s gone to the john.”

Shaw took a last hit of coffee and wiped his face. “TC?”

“He saw her too. He’s looking our way.”

Shaw, Starr and McGuire rose. The two cops met in the middle of the bar. Shaw hung back. He was here mostly as what Starr had described as a “strategizing consultant.”

Starr hit a button on her phone.

She was dialing the number that a self-described “geek” in the Olechu County Sheriff’s Department Technical Services Division had managed to extract from Foley’s broken burner. It had been one of the “right away” passcode situations, not the six-figures-of-years one.

For a moment nothing happened, as the signal went from Starr’s hand to the stratosphere or beyond and back down to earth.

Then it landed — in another phone, one that sat in the suit jacket pocket of the large man who was hunched over the table Starr and McGuire stood near. He hesitated a moment, put down his fork and pulled the mobile out. He flipped it open, barking, “It’s about time you—”

Starr drew her pistol and stepped quickly toward the table, aiming toward the man’s chest, while McGuire, who was wearing blue latex gloves, lunged and ripped the phone from the man’s hand.

Patrons froze, patrons scattered.

Starr took center stage. “Theodore Gabris, you’re under arrest for homicide and conspiracy to commit homicide. We have a warrant to seize all electronic devices in your possession.”

The man gaped. “What?”

“Please stand up and put your hands behind your back.”

“This is bullshit! I didn’t do anything. Nothing at all!”

“Stand up. Hands behind your back.”

The real estate developer rose fast, his chair falling backward. His reaction changed from shocked to huffy. Disgust filled in at the edges. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

He was one of those people for whom misfortune was always someone else’s fault.

“I’m suing you. You’ll lose your job.” Then he gasped when he saw Shaw, realizing the Mr. Stone from Silicon Valley interested in a Windermere home was not who he’d seemed to be.

While TC McGuire went into the phone and disabled the lock to keep it open, Starr nodded to Shaw. “Do the honors with my cuffs. I want to keep him covered.”

He did as asked, and it was a good, efficient job, which included a double lock. In the reward-seeking business, he mostly zip-tied people. But he had experience with cuffs too.

Mostly on the receiving end.

But a skill is a skill, however you learned it.

69

That Debi Starr and TC McGuire had acted alone in Theo Gabris’s takedown had indeed ruffled some feathers, just as she’d predicted.

Colter Shaw, Starr and Han Tolifson were in the office of Olechu County Sheriff James Barrett, who looked to be around forty-five.

Also present was County Supervisor Prescott Moore. Dorion had described him as “pudgy,” but that had been based on a video call, and Shaw knew the camera fattened you up some. He didn’t look too bad in person.

As for Barrett, he was as stiff and scrubbed as his uniform.

This was not a criticism. Law enforcers who were part robot were among the most efficient. Shaw tended to be suspicious of the absent-minded, the grinners, the backslappers and the whiners who wore badges.

“You were a bit huffy earlier, Officer Starr.” Prescott now fixed her with a look.

“And I apologize. But we were under fire.”

“Understood. I suppose.”

The sheriff took over. “And regarding your takedown of Gabris, we could have liaised.” His back was perfectly perpendicular to the floor.

She said, “Thought about everything and decided we needed to move fast. Only had minutes to act.”

Tolifson added, “It was with my okay.” The man was full-on police chief now. Two nine-millimeter magazines on his left hip, both loaded. Forest green uniform, Sam Browne belt and all the accessories one would need to arrest a vehicle full of uncooperatives.

Moore asked, “What was the big hurry?”

Starr said firmly, “We had a reasonable belief that the person behind the Hinowah levee collapse and the related murder of Gerard Redding was in possession of a burner phone he used to communicate with the deceased suspect, Waylon Foley.”

For a law enforcement newbie, Debi Starr had certainly mastered formal cop-speak.

She continued, as if testifying in court, “We kept Foley’s death out of the press, and so it was likely Gabris hadn’t yet disposed of the burner he used to communicate with Foley. We planned to call the last outgoing number on Foley’s phone; whoever answered was probably the boss who’d masterminded the plan. Mr. Shaw’s theory was that Gabris was the most likely candidate. We followed him to a restaurant, called the number, and it paid off. His phone rang.”

Barrett had only four items on his desk. A laptop. A pad of yellow paper. A mechanical pencil. And a mug of coffee printed with a slogan: World’s Greatest Dad on one side; World’s Greatest Sheriff on the other.

“You had other suspects?”

“GraphSet Chips and Olechu Springs.”

“Never liked anybody connected with them,” Barrett muttered. “Outsiders. And exploiters.”

Starr looked at Moore. “To be honest, sir, we did have a few suspicions about you.”

“Me?”

“Mr. Shaw’s sister found somebody had been in your house recently. We wondered if there was a reason you might want it destroyed, after your wife’s passing. My sympathies, by the way.”

“Thank you,” he said dubiously. “You thought I might... have had something to do with her death.”

“Not really.”

Hardly a phrase to take the sting out of being offended by the tacit accusation.

“Who was in the house, do you know?”

“Josh, our teenage son. It’s the reason I haven’t sold the place. He can’t let go of his mother. Someday he’ll move on.” The supervisor gave a faint laugh. “And if I was a suspect, I’m surprised you didn’t wonder about my business — I wanted to destroy the records in my mortgage brokerage company because I’d been, I don’t know, laundering money or skimming clients’ funds.”

Starr said, “Oh, that was part of it too, sir.” A nod to Shaw.

He said, “But I had my private eye in Washington, D.C., do a deep dive into your business. It was legit.”

There was very little that the beautiful and stern Mack McKenzie could not find when she put her mind to it.

The supervisor’s laugh this time was of astonishment.

Now Barrett picked up the pencil and in precise handwriting recorded the details of the takedown, as Starr recited them. Finally he finished.

“All right, Officer Starr, and Mayor or Chief. And you...” He looked at Shaw briefly then continued, “How’d you end up with Gabris?”

It was Shaw who answered. “Officer Starr and I were looking at the map of where the river was in relation to the bottling plant, and we noticed something else. Railroad tracks. I had driven my dirt bike here to meet with Gabris yesterday. I rode over some tracks — you steer a bike differently when you cross rails, so I was aware of them. The only railroad around here — running straight to his development from Hinowah. On the map, I followed the line north. They were the same tracks I’d seen beside a pond at the foot of Copper Peak, filling up with the runoff from the levee spillway. There was a freight train stopped there. The tanker cars had an oil company logo on the side but—”

Barrett squinted as he took in the ingenuity of the idea. “The cars were empty, and the crews were pumping the water into them.”

“That’s right. I remembered seeing well-drilling crews in Gabris’s development. And a farmer in Hinowah had just told me about the difficulty of finding groundwater around here. The drilling was going deeper and deeper and a lot of times coming up short. Gabris could hardly sell houses without inspectors reporting a good water supply. And the farmer? She told me you can pump surplus water into the aquifers to store it for dry seasons.”

Prescott Moore said, “Gabris hired Foley to blow the levee and divert the water to the pond. The tankers would suck it up and then pump it into the ground underneath the development.”

Shaw nodded.

Starr added, “Explains why the sand for the sandbagging got to Hinowah so fast. Gabris had it sitting in his construction site, ready to go.”

The sheriff asked, “Wouldn’t he know there wasn’t enough water on the land before he decided to put a development there?”

Debi Starr said, “Sure he would. That’s why he could buy the land so cheap. He built multimillion-dollar houses, and when they sold he’d take the profits and skip the country before the water dried up. His companies’ve built other developments in California and Arizona. All in arid locations.”

Barrett jotted. “I’ll have my counterparts down there look at the situation. Maybe he’s stealing water in other places too to fill up those aquifers.”

When the meeting concluded, hands were shaken and cards exchanged. Shaw, Starr and Tolifson left the sheriff’s office.

As Starr continued to the Public Safety pickup and Tolifson started for his private SUV, Shaw stopped him. “Can I talk to you for a minute.”

“Sure.”

Shaw asked, “You’re in the process of filling the police chief’s job, right?”

“Oh.” The non sequitur surprised him. “Well, correct. But I’ll tell you, I’ve decided to pin this old thing on permanently.” He tapped his chest, where the badge sat on the uniform blouse under his jacket. “I had some doubts at first. But, you know, sir. It feels good. And the six-gun isn’t bad either. After what happened at the command post, I learned my lesson. Won’t ever forget those bullets again. And no more fiddling. I know I have to bone up on the law some too, but I’m a whiz at Roberts Rules of Order and the Hinowah Muni Code. I’m sure it’s a pretty short jump from there to the California Penal Code.”

Shaw was looking at the low soupy bed of the Never Summer. And damn if he didn’t spot a side-by-side refrigerator-freezer half buried in the muck.

He turned to Tolifson. “Don’t.”

The man blinked.

“Don’t take the job.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I’ve worked with law all over the country. Police chiefs, detectives, patrol. It’s not you, Mayor.”

He looked indignant. “I can learn.”

“The technical aspects, sure. But there’s instinct and intuition. Things I can’t really describe, but you know it when you see it.”

“I might disagree with that, sir.”

Shaw steamed ahead. “You’ve got somebody in the department right now’s perfect for the job.”

A knowing smile. “Debi. I get it. You’ve enjoyed working with her. She’s cute, she’s funny, she’s a whiz with the coffee. And a hard worker. You want to help her out.”

His words riled. The inappropriate cute and coffee, of course. But it was also the man’s utter misunderstanding that Debi Starr was not a woman who needed any helping out whatsoever.

“She’s a natural.”

“And you can tell.”

“That’s right.”

Tolifson muttered, “She’s a third-grade teacher who’s taking a joyride at wearing a badge.”

“She’s a cop who happened to spend a little time teaching grade school.”

No smiles now. “We could debate this forever.”

Shaw gazed at him levelly. “Han, I’ve been attacked with a shovel, been shot at and nearly drowned. My sister’s associate got shot. She was nearly killed too. And she and I saved Nowhere from Noah’s flood. Her fee and my reward? Those normally would cost a quarter million dollars and you’re not being charged one penny. You’re a good mayor, I can see that. People like you and respect you, and you stood up today when the town needed you. Stick with what you’re good at.”

His eyes on the trickling river.

Shaw could read his face. The debate.

Finally, a sigh.

“All right, Mr. Shaw. All right...”

He unenthusiastically reached out and shook Shaw’s hand.

The men parted ways. As Shaw walked to the bike, his phone chimed. A text from Dorion:

He replied.

70

Colter parked the Yamaha outside Mrs. Petaluma’s house.

Mary Dove’s pickup was nearby, as was Dorion’s SUV.

There was another vehicle too. Annie Coyne’s Jeep Wrangler, back to its topless state. The forecast was in. No rain was predicted. One weatherman said that the recent inundation would have virtually no effect on California’s drought.

Colter walked to the front door and rang a bell.

“Come in.” It was his mother’s voice.

He slipped off his shoes — protocol, it was clear — and stepped inside. He studied the cozy place, filled with mismatched furniture, in many different styles, from mission to JCPenney house brand to contempo black leather. Family pictures and Indigenous decorations and paintings and drawings. Comfortable in the way that Annie Coyne’s house was, and in a way that his house — he actually owned one, in Florida — decidedly was not.

He smelled cooking fish and upon entering the kitchen he found Mary Dove in charge of the stove, and Dorion, Mrs. Petaluma and Annie at a round table that dominated the space. Mrs. Petaluma was shelling peas. It wasn’t harvest season, but Colter had seen a hothouse on the south side of the property. Crops all year round.

Annie looked his way. She was pleased to see him, as he was her, but there was a pall in her eyes. He recalled the slim piece of paper that foretold the likely end of her generations-old farm.

He whispered to Dorion, “Tony’s text.”

She nodded. “I saw it. We’ll have to warn her before we go outside again. At least she’s got her weapon.”

Colter noted the big Ruger on their mother’s hip.

He wondered again. What was their half-sister’s mission?

Mary Dove took the colander holding the peas and boiled them, then drained the pan, and added butter and some herbs from a small window garden. Mrs. Petaluma removed a potato casserole from the oven. Colter asked about the location of the china and utensils, as he, Coyne and Dorion set the table.

The plates were handed out and each person filled theirs to near the breaking point.

“Need a levee to keep the sauce in,” Dorion remarked.

Laughter.

Mary Dove occasionally said a type of grace in the Colter household before meals. It was not spiritual, but simply a recognition that the family was together. It often ended with “And another day has passed, and we’ve survived.”

This often drew a smile from everyone, even — until his last months — Ashton.

Today, though, the meal was ceremony free, and they dug in. The hamburger had dented but not derailed Colter’s appetite.

“The fish is great,” Coyne said to Mary Dove.

“Fresh as can be,” the woman responded.

And Colter wondered when on earth his mother had found the time to go shopping.

They talked about the cases against the suspects and how Colter and Debi Starr had deduced that the real estate developer was the ultimate perp.

“He was stupid. His triggerman, Waylon Foley, went through burner phones every six hours or so. Gabris kept the same one he’d had for days. The call log has dozens of other numbers the police are checking out. Mostly untraceable burners, but there’s a landline in Calexico.”

Annie Coyne gave him a questioning look.

“Town on the, yes, California-Mexico border. Small place, not much happening there. The only thing of note is that it’s near the All-American Canal. That’s the only source of water for all of Imperial County, east of San Diego and L.A. Runs from the Colorado River to the Salton Sea. Eighty-two miles. Longest irrigation canal in the world. If that canal’s sabotaged, or the Colorado runs dry, a billion tons of agricultural products disappear. FBI and Homeland are very interested in what Gabris’s connection is to the place.”

“Water,” Annie Coyne whispered, as if the word were an obscenity. She had eaten the least of all of them.

After they had finished and were clearing the dishes, Mary Dove’s phone lit up with a text. She looked at Mrs. Petaluma and asked, “Can I use your computer again?”

“Of course.”

Mary Dove said to the others, “Come with me.” A curious tone in her voice. Mysterious and important.

Dorion and Colter shared a glance.

They all walked into the den, which was even more jam-packed than the rest of the house with memorabilia and art, most of it involving Native people and sites. Mrs. Petaluma sat at her crowded but orderly desk and turned on a computer. A large flat-screen monitor came to life. She began typing quickly.

The woman glanced up at Colter, who stood nearby. She said, “I see that expression, Mr. Shaw. Is this where you tread into a minefield, thinking, oh, an elderly Indigenous woman using the internet?”

“No,” he said, gently pushing back. “What I’m thinking is, you don’t often see anyone running Linux as an operating system.”

A shrug. “Open source. So much better than Windows or Apple. Mary Dove? What’s the URL?”

Their mother held up her phone, displaying the text she’d just received.

It turned out to be a Zoom invitation. Mrs. Petaluma typed in the URL and then rose, giving her seat to Mary Dove, who sat and, seeing herself in the camera, smoothed an errant strand of hair.

A moment later they were looking at a man wearing a pale shirt with the top button undone and the collar spread wide, a loosened gold and black tie hanging low. His hair was the opposite of Mary Dove’s — frizzy and disordered.

“Mrs. Shaw.”

“Mr. Grossman. I have some other attendees.” She gave the names of those present.

“Hello, everyone.”

The office was that of a lawyer, Colter could see. The back wall was lined with case reporters — in their distinctive beige and red hue that every law student and lawyer in the country would recognize instantly. He could see too that the man was in San Francisco; Colter caught the Bay out one of the man’s windows. The view featured a sliver of the Rock — Alcatraz.

Mary Dove said, “Barry handles many of my legal matters. Now.” Nodding to his digital form. “Your text said you have some information for us.”

“I do. Now, no lawyer on earth is going to give you a one hundred percent answer to a legal issue, but I think we’re in the ninety-fifth percentile on this one.”

Again, Shaw and Dorion shared a questioning glance. She lifted her palms, as if to say, “I have no idea.”

Their mother said to the lawyer, “I haven’t said anything to my friends and family. Perhaps you could fill everyone in.”

“Of course. Mrs. Shaw became aware of a potential legal situation today, and she asked me to look into it. Now, you mentioned Ms. Coyne’s presence. Where are you hiding, Ms. Coyne?”

The woman frowned in curiosity and stepped in front of the camera.

“Hello.” Her voice was uncertain.

“Greetings. Now, have a seat. If there’s a seat to have.”

Mrs. Petaluma pushed one forward and Annie sat.

“Mrs. Shaw was explaining that until today your farm and Redding Mining Company had an informal arrangement to divide the water in the Never Summer River fifty-fifty since neither of you could prove superior rights.”

She sighed as she repeated, “Until today.”

“Mrs. Shaw told me a lawyer for the mine found a certificate of first use that predates your family’s arrival in Olechu County.”

“That’s right. And it looks authentic.”

“It probably is. The water board records don’t go back that far, but those certificates were not uncommon and the board and local authorities have upheld them unless there had been an obvious forgery.”

“It didn’t look forged.” Her voice was filled with discouragement.

Grossman absently brushed his crazy hair, making it all the crazier. “Now, a little history about Hinowah. It was originally populated by a settlement of Native Americans from the Miwok Nation. By the way, I have to thank my paralegal for this. Rashid is a miracle worker. He dove into records going back hundreds of years. Found a treaty between tribal elders and the army. The tribe would supply fruits and vegetables for the soldiers, and the army would protect them from warring tribes.

“And do you know what else Rashid found? Maps of irrigation ditches from the Never Summer to the Miwok farmland, as part of that treaty. Dated 1841. I understand from Mrs. Shaw that you’re Miwok, Mrs. Petaluma.”

“Yes. And my family has been on the land here since 1837.”

The exact date seemed curious to Shaw, until she continued with an edge to her voice. “The year our family ancestors fled — after the Amador Massacre. Mexican colonists attacked their village and executed two hundred of our people.”

Colter, Dorion and Russell had been homeschooled, and as part of the history “track,” Ashton had taught how, throughout the 1800s, the California government, as well as white settlers, engaged in systematic genocide and ethnic cleansing, forced labor and child separation. The Indigenous population was 150,000 in the 1830s. In 1900, it was around 15,000.

The woman scoffed bitterly. “Fort Pleasant... it was anything but.”

Grossman grew somber. “I am very sorry for that, Mrs. Petaluma. Now, to the matter at hand. According to the Law of the River, the Hinowah Miwok tribe can claim first use of the Never Summer. And since you appear to be the sole successor in interest, Mrs. Petaluma, that water’s yours. Every drop. One hundred percent.”

The woman took this news without any emotion. After the briefest moment of hesitation, she tilted her head toward Annie Coyne. “So if I want, I can give her as much as she needs.”

Coyne gasped. Her mouth was agape.

Grossman nodded and said, “It’s yours to do with what you want.”

“Can we get a ruling on that?”

“I’ll draft the petition today.”

“And also a codicil in my will to make sure my heirs do what I direct with the water.”

“Of course. Just send me a copy of your original will. Mrs. Shaw will give you my email.”

“Mi’we’lu takmu, sir. Thank you.”

The call ended.

Then Annie Coyne was on her feet and throwing her arms around Mrs. Petaluma, who — Shaw was not surprised — endured the gesture awkwardly. Mary Dove received the next embrace.

Then, instantly, it was back to business. Mrs. Petaluma rose and headed for the kitchen, saying, “We have peach pie and rhubarb. I commend them both.”

As if anyone who dined in her house would be committing a sin to forego dessert.

71

Shaw was on his Yamaha, returning to the Winnebago.

His sister and mother were now safely in their new motel, miles from the one Mary Dove had mentioned in the note taped to the front door. Dorion had checked into the new place using a fake name, no ID and paid cash. This was not exactly according to the rules but she paid $200 for a room that went for $49.99 with the story that she was escaping an abusive husband and had her elderly mother in tow.

The clerk had reached under the counter and lifted a baseball bat in her substantial fist and said, “If he comes by, just let me know.”

Shaw now powered his Yamaha up the hill where the infamous gun battle had occurred earlier, crested it, and then continued up the shallower incline to the shoulder where the camper was parked. He mounted the bike on the back and walked to the front to see if the bullet hole spidering had gotten worse.

It hadn’t.

But there was a wrinkle.

A traffic ticket sat beneath a windshield wiper.

For real?

He snatched it off and read.

Then he looked at the bottom of the ticket.

He turned it over.

Shaw sent the message and Debi Starr replied.

This would be about thanking him for his role in getting her the chief’s job. Shaw hadn’t intended that she find out about his involvement, the pressure on Han Tolifson, but had forgotten to tell him to keep mum.

Starr would be a few minutes so he made another call, gazing at the canyon that was now the rocky, largely water-free bed of the Never Summer, brilliantly illuminated by high-power work lights set up by the army engineers as they were going about their methodical efforts in preparing the ground for the new levee.

A click on the line.

“Colter!” Annie Coyne’s breezy voice flowed through the phone.

“Hey.”

She choked. “My God, I can’t thank you enough for what you did. You, your mother, your sister. For everything.”

He could only think of flippant quips. Like: all in a day’s work.

Never banter.

He got right to the reason he’d called. “Just wondering. I know it’s late, but if you’re interested in another beer, I could go for one.”

The pause was brief, but it was like a zipped computer file. Compressed but filled with mega data.

“Actually, I’m having someone over.” Another pause. “It’s sort of about the clothes... that got left.”

He noted the structure of the sentence, the word choice. Passive voice was always a tell — a way to communicate when you didn’t want to say something directly.

Coyne might have been offering that her professor friend was picking them up and taking them back to his place.

Or she might have meant that she was going to help him hang the items in one of the spacious closets in her bedroom, slipping both the running and dress shoes under the bed.

Not much doubt about which.

“No worries,” he said lightly.

“But, Colter, really, I hope we can all get together at some point. That’d be real nice.”

“It would be,” Shaw said. “Take care now.”

“You too. And really, I mean it. Thanks.”

“ ’Night.”

He hit disconnect, knowing without a vapor of doubt that those would be the last words the two would ever share.

A moment later the Public Safety pickup arrived, and Debi Starr got out.

She shook Shaw’s hand warmly.

“Like your ticket?”

“Funny.”

“We’ll have statements for you and your sister to read and sign. Your mother too. She is one heck of a shot. Was she ever in combat?”

Being the wife and partner of Ashton Shaw meant that, in a way, yes. She’d been instrumental in dealing with threats to her husband and the family at the Compound. And she’d done this efficiently and without emotion. But he shook his head no. “She hunts a lot.”

“Well, whole ’nother matter: I want to say something. Han said that you talked to him about me being the chief of police and all. Darn if that wasn’t nice of you.”

“You’re a natural at this business.” Shaw said nothing more. He was not good with gratitude.

“Ah, thank you for that too. But I wanted to tell you, I’m passing.”

Shaw was nodding slowly. “You’re...”

“Not taking the job.”

“But, look, traffic detail in a small town—”

“No, no, no. I guess I never explained. Jim and me’re moving now that the twins’re out of school. We’re going to San Francisco.” She tapped the Hinowah Public Safety patch on her biceps. “I just took this job temporary. I passed the civil service tests at San Francisco PD and I’m going to be fast-tracked for detective.”

Shaw could only laugh. “You’ll be an even better gold shield than a small-town police chief.”

“Here’s hoping.”

“And Tolifson?”

She gave a wry look. “He’s entertaining candidates and took himself off the list for chief.”

“All right, Detective Starr... Get us those reports, and we’ll sign ’em and send ’em back.”

He extended his hand, but she stepped in and hugged him hard.

After she’d left, he put a square of Gorilla Tape over the bullet hole in hopes that it would contain the cracks — this rarely worked, but he was less likely to get a real ticket if the officer saw he was making an effort.

He couldn’t take the camper through town — the valley roads were too narrow and the crest onto the south side of Route 13 would never work, so he made a three-point turn and drove ten miles in a loop around Hinowah, past the defunct fracking operation and then east again.

Picking up on 13, he continued for about a mile through the misty night until he could see the garish red and yellow lights of the motel’s neon sign in duplicate: above the structure itself and, distorted, on the wet asphalt before him.

He pulled into the parking lot and slammed on the brakes.

Three vehicles sat in front of him. Mary Dove’s pickup truck, Dorion’s Pathfinder.

And a blue SUV with Oregon plates.

The vehicle that Tony had seen arrive at and leave the Compound, after scoring Mary Dove’s destination.

No! Margaret had found her prey!

He pulled the camper to the side of the lot and pushed outside fast.

Time was the critical factor now, not subtlety.

Mary Dove and Dorion each had separate rooms but only one that showed activity — shadows moving across the curtains.

He hurried to this door.

A deep breath. Hand on his pistol’s grip.

Then he pounded hard. “Open up. Now.”

Sounding like a police officer.

It seemed a strategic role to play at the moment. And he could think of nothing else to do. Motel doors are far harder to kick down than most people think.

The door swung open. Mary Dove stood there, frowning. “Oh, Colter. That was dramatic.”

Dropping his hand, he looked past her. Dorion sat in one of the cheap armchairs and in the other was the older woman he’d seen outside the Public Safety Office talking with his mother and Mrs. Petaluma. She now glanced at him and offered a pleasant smile.

He took an instinctive glance around the room.

There was no one else.

Shaw tugged his jacket close to hide his weapon.

Dorion gave him a complicated look.

Mary Dove closed the door. “Colter, I’d like you to meet someone.” She nodded to the older woman. “This is Margaret Evans.” A brief pause, and a smile. “Your half-sister.”

72

Colter took a beer.

A Sierra Nevada.

When on a reward job, he liked to drink a local brew, and it didn’t get any more local than this brand.

The women were drinking pinot noir. It was Oregonian and he wondered if Margaret had brought it from wherever she lived in the state.

The woman had an elegance about her. Her straight gray hair, parted in the center, fell to the middle of her back. She wore a simple chain necklace. Three rings, subtle, small, were on fingers tipped in polish-free but carefully trimmed nails: tiger’s eye opal, a diamond and a twisty gold band, like a puzzle ring, on her heart finger. She had changed from the country dress she was wearing earlier and was now in a long denim skirt, white blouse and brown leather vest.

Not dissimilar from what Mary Dove occasionally wore.

Her eyes were dark and sharp and didn’t seem to miss a single thing in the room, including those in it. She was older, yes, but attractive by any standard.

He caught a glimpse of the pistol that had been mentioned in his father’s correspondence, the one from Eddy Street in San Francisco. A 1911 Colt. But she wasn’t carrying it holstered; the gun weighed two and a half pounds and featured a lengthy barrel. The weapon sat in a colorful macrame bag at her feet.

In a soothing voice, tinted with a European accent, she said, “We should dispose of the big question first. Yes, you and Dorion and I are legal half-siblings. We share Ashton as a father.”

Mary Dove seemed unable to contain the smile when looking at Colter’s expression.

“My husband, Robert, and I met him and Mary Dove when we were both guest lecturing at Berkeley. We were journalists and had taken up the cause of writing about the rise of totalitarian movements in the world, the U.S. included.” She sighed. “We felt it was our mission to bring these movements to light. World War Two and Hitler’s coming to power began a mere hundred years ago — and death camps were only eighty. That is just a splinter of time in the history of the world. Would we like to believe we have quote ‘cured’ that type of dementia and sadism? Of course. Have we? No. Absolutely not.

“Your father helped us immeasurably. He was researching an aspect of the problem that we had not thought about: the relationship between corporations and totalitarianism. That was a mistake on our part. Of course companies can facilitate fascism and nationalism. Look at the Krupp weapons company, which helped rearm the country under Hitler — who also leased state-of-the-art computer systems from America to identify and track Jews. Some historians believe the company was aware of that.” She took a sip of wine and looked knowingly at the Shaws. “And then some corporations are totalitarian entities themselves.”

“BlackBridge,” Colter said evenly.

The corporation their father exposed, with disastrous consequences.

Margaret grimaced and continued her narrative.

“Some of his research led us to a company in our home country.” A sour laugh. “On the surface it was a humanitarian aid nonprofit. It seemed to be doing good things, but in reality? It was an intelligence agency identifying dissidents. I continued to focus my research here, and Robert went overseas to interview someone inside the company.”

“He was there no more than a week before...” Her voice caught. “An accident. A car accident. On a straightaway, dry asphalt, and Robert never sped or drove dangerously.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I learned that I was in danger too. I do not know who in the U.S. government received what, but someone sold me out. And my visa was revoked. If I did not leave voluntarily I would have been deported — into the arms of the Ministerstvo Vneshneekonomicheskikh Svyazey. That’s the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations.”

She laughed bitterly. “How is that for a pseudonym? It was really a brutal state security agency — the one responsible for Robert’s death. If I had gone back I would have been killed too. But you know your father — he was always thinking of ways to outwit Them. ‘Them’ with a capital ‘T’ — the enemy that Ashton could see and so many others could not. And he came up with plan.”

Colter said, “He adopted you.”

She offered an amused glance his way.

Dorion said, “And you became a citizen?”

“Not automatically. There were still hoops to jump through. But it stalled the deportation, and eventually I did get citizenship. And then I went underground. New identity. My real name is Sarah.”

Ah, the Sarah in the letters. Ashton’s friend. Not his lover.

“I changed it to Margaret — after Margarete Momma. She lived in eighteenth-century Sweden and is considered the world’s first woman political journalist. I wanted to keep writing, but I knew I had to wait. In the meantime, Ashton got me a job as a teacher in a private school.”

Colter shared a glance with Dorion, who whispered, “We found the letter.”

“We thought it was about you getting admitted to a grade school as a student.”

After a beat of a moment, both Margaret and Mary Dove laughed.

Then their mother cocked her head. “So you thought Ashton had an affair with Sarah, and they had a baby, Margaret?”

Neither of the pair replied.

Mary Dove was not dismayed or disappointed at their assumption. “Understandable. It was a time when Ash was starting to slip away from us all. Besides, what was one of his most important rules?”

Dorion answered. “ ‘Never ignore the facts.’ ”

Their mother offered, “You heard he had a daughter, and you had no indication of her age, other than he’d apparently helped her get into elementary school. And he never mentioned anything about a Sarah or Margaret. Your assumption was logical. Of course... if you’d been less concerned about sparing my feelings and just told me about it in a phone call...”

Partly good-natured chiding. Partly gentle rebuke.

And, as always, she was right.

“So,” Margaret said, “that is the story of how I became your half-sibling and the daughter of a man three years younger than I was.”

Colter said, “The angry letters you wrote. The gun?”

“Oh, you found those too? I told you that somebody here — in the States — had betrayed us. After my husband was killed I went crazy, I will admit it. I wanted to find them, get revenge. I bought the gun from a street dealer on Eddy Street. I’d written a story about the gangs there and had some contacts. I played Hercule Poirot, trying to track down who had done it. But your father convinced me not to. He said revenge was not why God put me on earth. I was a journalist not a soldier. I gave up that idea and started reporting again. Carefully, of course, under various pseudonyms.” A wry, knowing glance. “But of course I kept the gun.” A glance toward her bag.

Margaret now looked him over carefully. “Which brings me to our reunion.” A sip of wine. “I had to find the Compound. I knew about it, but not where it was. And I was too paranoid to use a computer or phone to contact Mary Dove or you. One of the reasons I’ve survived this long is because of what Ashton taught me.” She paused a moment. “And the reason I wanted to find the Compound was... because I needed you, Colter.”

He could see where this was going and he gestured encouragingly.

“In my reporting I learned about a company based in Brussels. A chocolate manufacturer, what else? Their confections are quite good. Popular throughout Europe. But that is merely a cover. Their main function is to engineer misinformation campaigns. And, far more troubling, the company employs one particular individual to identify and murder those exposing totalitarian and anti-democratic threats. Activists and journalists like myself. He’s killed at least five in Russia and other Eastern European Countries. Two in the Middle East.

“I learned that last week he was given the assignment of killing a person or persons within the next month here in the U.S. My source had only limited information. The assassin is a man, middle aged, and he works in the bookkeeping department of the company. That’s what he’s known as, his code name: the Bookkeeper. No one outside the organization knows his identity but the rumors are he is obsessed with balance sheets — and numbers — and is quite good at that job. As good as he is at murder.”

She smiled. “Yes, yes, Colter. You understand now. The Institute for the Freedom of Journalism has offered a reward for information leading to the identity and arrest of this man. And yes, this is the man who killed Robert. Now, I must say—”

“I’ll do it.”

“You don’t want to know about what the Institute is offering?”

If ever there was a reward-free reward job this was it.

“No.”

“Thank you, thank you,” she whispered as relief and gratitude flooded her face. “No one has the resources or the desire, frankly, to pursue anyone with no known record — and no known identity. MI5 and -6, the FBI, the State Department, Homeland, the SDECE in France... If we could give them a name and location, proof of past crimes, maybe some evidence of what he has planned, then they would start a file and assign investigators. But until then, we are on our own.”

“Do you know the targets?”

“No, just that they’re in or near the same city in the U.S.

“The institute has several safe houses they use for at-risk journalists. They will set you up in one there, if you’d like. I’ll meet you there and—”

“No,” Colter said. “It’s time for you to go back underground. It’s what” — he smiled — “our father would have wanted.”

A sigh. “The truth is, I am tired. Endless fighting finally catches up with old bones. The damn body. It simply does not always cooperate.” She dug into her purse and pulled out an envelope. “Here’s the address of the safe house and the phone number of the institute.”

He opened the envelope and glanced at the details of the place that would be his new home for — well, however long it took to find the Bookkeeper and report him to the authorities.

Or come up with a different, perhaps a more efficient, solution to bring him to justice.

In his work, Coler Shaw had learned that sometimes one person’s survival means another person’s demise.

Margaret added, “The Institute will get you more information if they can find any.”

Shaw nodded, then he noted the hour was nearly midnight and he knew everyone was feeling the same exhaustion he was.

This had been a long, long two days.

He said good night and returned to the camper. Walking over the damp gritty asphalt, he was thinking about where the institute’s safe house, for which he would leave at first light, was located.

Colter Shaw’s profession had taken him to some exceedingly inhospitable and dangerous locales.

He wondered if this particular destination would prove to be the most inhospitable and dangerous of any he’d yet worked.

Those were the rumors, at least.

But then he’d never been to New York City.

And he recalled one of his father’s most important rules.

Never judge a place until you plant your feet on the ground.