Speaking In Tongues

7

The rain had started up again.

They were inside now, sitting at the old dining room table, dark oak and pitted with wormholes.

Tate poured wine, offered it to Bett.

She took the glass and cradled it between both hands the way he remembered her doing when they’d been married. In their first year of marriage, because he was a poor young prosecutor and Bett hadn’t yet found her career, they couldn’t afford to go out to dinner very often. But at least once a week they’d try to have lunch at a nice restaurant. They’d always ordered wine.

She sipped from the glass, set it on the table and watched the sheets of rain roll across the brown fields.

“What do we do, Tate?” she asked. “Where do we start?”

Prosecutors know as much about criminal investigations as cops do. But those gears in Tate’s mind hadn’t been used for a long time. He shrugged. “Let’s start with her therapist. Maybe she said something about running away, about where she’d go. What’s his name?” Tate felt he should have remembered.

“Hanson,” Bett said. “He had to cancel the session today-an illness or something. I hope he’s in town” She looked up the number in her address book and dialed it. “It’s his service,” she whispered to Tate. “What’s your cell number?”

She gave the doctor’s answering service both of their mobile numbers and asked him to return the call. She said it was urgent.

“Try that friend again,” Tate suggested. “Amy. Where she spent the night.” He tried to picture Amy. He’d met her once. He’d counted nine earrings in the girl’s left ear but only eight in her right. He’d wondered if the disparity had been intentional or if she’d merely miscounted.

Troubled, he thought again about her boyfriend. Well, she was seventeen. Why shouldn’t she go out? But with a college senior? Tate’s prosecutorial mind thought back to the Virginia provisions on statutory rape.

Bell shifted and cocked the phone closer to her ear. Apparently someone was now home.

“Amy? It’s Megan’s mother. Honey, we’re trying to find her. She didn’t show up for lunch. Do you know where she went this morning after she left you and your mom’s?”

Bett nodded as she listened and then asked if Megan had been upset about anything. Her face was grim.

Tate was half listening but mostly he was studying Bett. The tangles of auburn hair, the striking face, the prominent neck bones, the complexion of a woman who looked ten years younger than her age. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen her. Maybe it was Megan’s sweet sixteen party. An odd evening… For a fleeting moment, as he stood beside the girl -and her mother, delivering what everyone declared to be a brilliant toast, he’d had a sense of them as a family. He and Bett had shared a momentary smile. But it had faded fast and the instant they’d stepped out of the spotlight they’d returned to their separate lives. When he’d seen her after that, Tate couldn’t remember.

He thought: She’s less pretty now but more beautiful. More confident, more assured, her sunset-sky eyes were narrowed and not flitting around-coy arid ethereal-the way they’d habitually done fifteen years ago.

Maybe it’s maturity; Tate reflected. And he wondered again what her impression of him might be.

Bett put her hand over the receiver and said, “Amy said Megan left about nine-thirty this morning and wouldn’t tell her where she was going. She was secretive about it. She left her book bag there. I thought it might have something in it that’d give us a clue where she went. I said we’d be by to pick it up later.”

“Good.”

Bett listened to Amy again. She frowned in concern. “Tate… She said that Megan told her somebody’d been following her.”

“Following? Who?”

“She doesn’t know.”

Okay; hard evidence. The latent prosecutor in Tate Collier awakened a bit more. “Let me talk to her.”

Tate took the phone. “Amy? This is Megan’s father.”

A pause. The girl finally said, “Urn, hi. Is Megan, like, okay?”

“We hope so. We just want to find out where she is. What’s this about somebody following her?”

“She was, like, pretty freaked.”

Not real helpful, he thought and asked, “Tell me exactly what happened.”

“I mean, her and me, we were sitting around watching this movie, I don’t know, on Wednesday, I guess, and it was about a stalker and she goes, ‘I don’t want to watch this.’ And I’m like, ‘Why not?’ And she’s like, ‘There’s this car with some older guy in it and I think he’s been following me around.’ And I go, ‘No way’ But she’s like, ‘Yeah, really.’”

‘Where?” Tate asked.

“Around school, I think,” Amy said.

“Any description?”

“Of the guy?”

“Or the car.”

“Naw. She didn’t tell me. But I’m like, ‘Right, somebody following you…‘ And she’s like, ‘I’m not bullsh-I’m not fooling.’ And she goes, ‘It was there yesterday. By the field.’”

“What field?”

“The sports field behind the school,” Amy answered.

“That was this last Tuesday?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Did you believe her?”

“I guess. She looked pretty freaked. And she says she told some people about it.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Some guys. She didn’t tell me who. Oh, and she told Mr. Eckhard too. He’s an English teacher at the middle school and he coaches volleyball after school and on the weekends. And he said if he saw it he’d go talk to the driver. And I’m like, ‘Wow. This is totally fuck-totally weird.’”

“His name’s Eckhard?”

“Something like that. I don’t know how to spell it. But if you want to, like, talk to him there’s usually volleyball practice on Saturday afternoon, only I don’t know when. Volleyball’s for losers, you know”

“Yeah, I know,” Tate said. It had been the only sport he’d played in college.

“You think something, like, happened to her? That’s way lame.

“We’d just feel a little better knowing where she is. Listen, Amy; we’ll be around to pick up her book bag in the next couple of hours. If you hear from her give us a call.”

“I will.”

“Promise?” he asked firmly.

“Yeah, like, I promise.”

As soon as Tate pushed the End button on Bett’s phone it buzzed again. He glanced at her and she nodded for him to answer it. He pushed Receive.

“Hello?”

“Urn, is this Megan’s father?” a man’s voice asked.

“That’s right.”

“Mr. McCall…

“Actually it’s Collier.”

“That’s right. Sure. Sony. This is Dr. Hanson.”

“Doctor, thanks for calling… I have to tell you, it looks like Megan’s run away.”

There was a pause. “Really?”

Tate tried to read the tone. He heard concern and surprise.

“We got some… well, some pretty angry letters from her. Her mother and I both did. And then she vanished. Is there any way we can see you?”

“I’m in Leesburg now. My mother’s had an accident.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But if Bett and I drove up could you spare a half hour?”

“Well…

“It’s important, Doctor. We’re really concerned about her.”

“I suppose so. All right.” He gave them directions to the hospital.

Tate looked at his watch. It was noon. “We’ll be there in an hour or so.”

“Actually” Hanson said slowly “I think we should talk. There were some things she told me that you ought to know”

“What?” Tate asked.

“I want to think about them a little more. There are some confidentiality issues… But it’s funny-I’d expect any number of things from Megan, but running away? No, that seems odd to me.”

Tate thanked him. It was only after hanging up that he felt a disturbing twist in his belly. What were the “any number of things” Megan was capable of? And were they any worse than her running away?

His precious cargo was in the trunk. But while Aaron Matthews would have liked to meditate on Megan McCall and on what lay ahead for both of them he was instead growing increasingly anxious.

The fucking white cat

He was cruising down I-66. He’d planned to stop at the house he’d rented last year in Prince William County -only two or three miles from Tate Collier’s farm-and pick up some things he wanted to take with him to the mountains.

But he couldn’t risk leading anyone to that house, and this car was just not going away.

It was raining again, a gray drizzle. In the mist and rain he couldn’t see the driver clearly though he was now certain he was young and black.

And because he followed Matthews so carelessly and obviously he sure wasn’t a cop.

But who?

Then Matthews remembered: Megan had a black boyfriend. Josh or Joshua, wasn’t it? The boy that Dr. Hanson had suggested she leave-if Megan had been telling the truth about that bit of advice, which he suspected she might not have been.

What was going through the young man’s mind?

As a scientist, Matthews believed in logic. The only time people acted illogically-even psychotics-was when they were having seizures. We might not be able to perceive the logic they operated by and their actions might be illogical to rational observers hilt that was only because they were not being empathetic. Once we climb into the minds of our patients, he wrote in his well-received essay on delusional behavior in bipolars, once we understand their fears and desires-their own internal system of logic-then we can begin to understand their motives, the reasons behind their actions, and we can help them change…

So, what was this young man thinking?

Maybe Megan had planned to meet him at the office after the appointment. Maybe he’d just happened to see her car, being driven by a man he didn’t recognize, and followed it.

Or maybe-this accorded with Matthews’s perceptions on the frighteningly powerful dynamics of love-he’d been waiting at the office to confront the doctor about the breakup. Maybe even attack him.

Thanks for that, Dr. Hanson, he thought acerbically. Should have broken your hip, not Mom’s… Rage shook him for a moment. Then he calmed.

Did the boy have a car phone? Had he called the police and reported the Mercedes’s license number? It was a stolen plate but the number didn’t belong to a gray Mercedes and that discrepancy would be reason enough for the cops to pull him over and look in the trunk.

But no, of course, he hadn’t called the cops. They’d be after him by now if he had.

But what if he’d called her parents? What did Tate Collier know? Matthews brooded. What was the man thinking? What was he planning to do?

Matthews sped on until he came to a rest stop then he pulled suddenly into the long driveway, weaving slowly through the tractor trailers and four-by-fours filled with vacationers. He noticed that the white Toyota had made a panicked exit and was pulling into the rest stop after him. Fortunately the rain was heavy again. Which gave Matthews the excuse to hold an obscuring Washington Post over his head as he ran to the shelter.

8

They were trotting through the rain to Tate’s black Lexus when his cell phone buzzed.

As they dropped into the front seats he answered. “Hello?”

“Tate Collier, please.” A man’s voice.

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Collier, I’m Special Agent William McComb, with the FBI’s Child Exploitation and Kidnapping Unit. We’ve just received an interagency notice about your daughter.”

“I’m glad you called.”

“I’m sorry about your girl,” the agent said, speaking in the chunky monotone Tate knew so well from working with the feds. “Unfortunately, I have to say, sir based on the facts we’ve got, there’s not a lot we can do. But you made some friends here when you were a commonwealth's attorney and so we’re going to open a file and put her name out on our network. That means there’ll be a lot more eyes looking for her.”

“Anything you can do will really be appreciated. My wife and I are pretty upset.”

“I can imagine,” the agent said, registering a splinter of emotion. “Could you give me some basics about her and the disappearance?”

Tate ran through the physical details, Bett helping on the specifics. Blond, blue eyes, five six, 128 pounds, age seventeen. Then he told McComb about the letters. Tate asked, “You heard about her car?”

“Urn, no sir.”

“The Fairfax County Police found it at Vienna Metro. It looks like she went to Manhattan.”

“Really? No, I didn’t hear that. Well, we’ll tell our office in New York about it… But do I hear something in your voice, sir? Are you thinking that maybe she didn’t run away? Are you thinking there was some foul play?”

Tate had to smile. He’d never thought of himself-especially his speech-as transparent. “As a matter of fact, we’ve been having some doubts, my wife and I.”

“Interesting,” McComb said in a wooden monotone. “What specifically leads you to believe that?”

“A few things. Megan’s mother and I are on our way to Leesburg right now to talk to her therapist. See what he can tell us.”

“He’s in Leesburg?”

“His mother’s in St. Mary’s Hospital. She had an accident.”

“And you think he might be able to tell you something?”

“He said he wanted to talk to us. I don’t know what he’s got in mind.”

“Any other thoughts?”

“Well, Megan told her girlfriend that there was a car following her over the past few weeks.”

“Car, hm? They get any description?”

“Her girlfriend didn’t. But we think a teacher at her school did. Eckhard’s his name. He’s supposed to be at the school later, coaching volleyball. But I’d guess that’s only if the rain breaks up.”

“And what’s her friend’s name?”

He gave the agent Amy Walker’s name. “We’re going to talk to her too. And pick up Megan’s book bag from her. We’re hoping it might have something in it that’ll give us a clue where she’s gone.”

“I see. Does Megan have any siblings?”

“No.”

“Is there anyone else who’s had much contact with the girl?”

“Well, my wife’s fiancé.”

Silence for a moment. “Oh, you’re divorced.”

“That’s right. Forgot to mention it.”

“You have his name and number?” McComb asked.

Tate asked Bett, who gave him the information. Into the phone he said, “His name’s Brad Markham. He lives in Baltimore.” Tate gave him Brad’s phone number as well.

“Do you think he was involved in any way?” the agent asked Tate.

“I’ve never met him but, no, I’m sure not.”

“Okay. You working with anyone particular at the Fairfax County Police?”

“Konnie… That’d be Dimitri Konstantinatis.”

“Out of which office?”

“ Fair Oaks.”

“Very good, sir… You know, nearly all runaways return on their own. And most of the ones that don’t, get picked up and sent back home. A little counseling, some family therapy, and things generally work out just fine.”

“Thanks for your thoughts. Appreciate it.”

“Oh, one thing, Mr. Collier. I guess you know about the law. About how it could be, let’s say, troublesome for you to take matters into your own hands here.”

“I do.”

“Bad for everybody.”

“Understood.”

“Okay. Then enough said.”

“Appreciate that too. I’m just going to be asking a few questions.”

Good luck to both of you.”

They hung up and he told Bett what the agent had said. Her face was troubled.

“What is it?” He felt an urge to append a “honey” but nipped that one fast.

“Just that it seems so much more serious with the FBI involved.”

How foolish people are, how trusting, how their defenses crumble like sand when they believe they’re talking to a friend. And oh how they want to believe that you are a friend…

Why, if wild animals were as trusting as human beings they’d have gone extinct ages ago.

Aaron Matthews, no longer portraying the stony-voiced FBI agent, protector of children, hung up the phone after speaking with Tate Collier. He almost felt guilty-it had been so easy to draw information out of the man.

And what information it was! Oh, Matthews was angry. His mood teetered precariously. All his preparation-such care, such finesse, everything constructed to paralyze Collier and his wife with sorrow and send them home to brood about their lost daughter… and what were they doing but playing amateur detectives?

Their talking to Hanson could be a real problem. Megan might have said something about loving her parents and never even considering running away. ^Or, even worse, they might become suspicious of Matthews’s whole plan and have the police go through Hanson’s office. He’d been careful there but hadn’t wore gloves all the time. There were fingerprints-and the window latch in the bathroom where Matthews had snuck in was still broken. Then there was Amy Walker,

Megan’s friend. With a book bag that probably didn’t have anything compromising but might-maybe a diary or those notes teenage girls are always passing around in school. And this Eckhard, the teacher and coach. What did he know?

Reports of a car following her…

Much of Matthews’s reconnaissance had been conducted around the school. If the teacher had walked up to the car he might easily have gotten the license number of the Mercedes; Matthews hadn’t changed the license plates to the stolen ones until yesterday. And even if Eckhard didn’t think he’d seen much, there were probably some prickly little facts locked away in the teacher’s subconscious; Matthews had done much hypnosis work and knew how many memories and observations were retained in the cobwebby recesses of the mind.

Why the hell was Collier doing this? Why hadn’t the letters fooled him? He was a fucking lawyer! He was supposed to be logical, he was supposed to be cold. Why didn’t he believe the bald facts in front of him?

A dark mood began to settle on Matthews but he struggled to throw it off.

No, I have no lime for this now! Fight it, fight it, fight it…

(He thought of how many patients he’d wanted to grab by the lapels and shake as he shouted, Oh, quit your fucking complaining! You don’t like her, leave. She left you? Find somebody else. You’re a drunk, stop drinking.)

And closing his eyes fiercely, clenching his fists until a nail broke through the flesh of his palm, he struggled to remain emotionally buoyant. After a few minutes he forced the mood away. He returned to the phone and called three Walkers in Fairfax before he got the household that included a teenage Amy.

“Yes, Amy’s my daughter,” the woman’s cautious voice said. “Who’s this?”

“I’m William McComb, with the county. I’ve gotten a call from Child Protective Services.”

“My God, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing to be alarmed at, Mrs. Walker. This doesn’t involve your daughter. We’re investigating a case involving Megan McCall.”

“Oh, no! Is Megan all right? She spent the night here!”

“That’s what we understand. It seems she’s missing and we’ve been looking into some allegations about her father.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“Tate Collier,” Matthews prompted.

“Oh, right. I don’t know him. You think he’s involved? You think he did something?”

“We’re just looking into a few things now. But I’d appreciate it if you’d tell your daughter she shouldn’t have any contact with him.”

“Why would she have any contact with him?” the edgy voice asked. How easily she’ll cry, Matthews predicted.

“We don’t think there’d be any reason for him to hurt or touch her…”

“Oh, God. You don’t think?”

“We just want to make sure Amy stays safe until we get to the bottom of what happened to Megan.”

“‘Happened to Megan’? Please tell me what’s going on.”

“I can’t really say any more at this time. Tell me, where’s your daughter now?”

“Upstairs.”

“Would you mind if I spoke to her?”

“No, of course not.”

A moment later a girl’s lazy voice: “Hello?”

“Hi, Amy. This is Mr. McComb. I’m with the county. How are you?”

“Okay, I guess. Like, is Megan okay?”

“I’m sure she’s fine. Tell me, has Megan’s father talked to you recently?”

“Urn,” the girl began.

“You answer,” the mother said sternly from a second phone.

“Yeah, like, he said she’s missing and asked me about her. He was going to come by and get her book bag.”

“So he’s interested in what’s in her bag? Did you get the impression he was concerned with what might be inside?”

“Like, maybe.”

The mother: “You were going to let him in here? And not tell me?”

The girl snapped, “Mom, just, like, cut it out, okay? It’s Megan’s dad.”

Matthews said sternly, “Amy, don’t talk to him. And whatever you do, don’t go anywhere with him.”

“I-”

“If he suggests going away, getting into his car, going into his barn…“

“God, his barn?” her mother gasped. Yep, Matthews could hear soft weeping.

He continued, “Amy, if he offers you something to drink..

Another gasp.

Oh my, this was fun. Matthews continued calmly, “… whatever he says tell him no. If he comes over don’t answer the door. Make sure it’s locked.”

“Like, why?”

“You don’t ask why, young lady. You do what the man says.”

“Mom, like, come on… What about her book bag?”

“You just hold on to it until you hear from me or someone at Child Protective Services. Okay?”

“I guess.”

“Should we call the police?” Mrs. Walker asked.

“No, it’s not a criminal charge yet.”

“Oh, God,” said Amy’s mother, the woman of the limited epithets. Then: “Amy, tell me. Did Megan’s father ever touch you? Now, tell the truth”

“Who? Megan’s father? Mom, you’re such a loser I never even met him.”

“Mrs. Walker?”

“Yes. I’m here.” Her voice cracked.

“I really don’t want to alarm you unnecessarily.”

“No, no. We appreciate your calling. What’s your number, Mr. McComb?”

“I’m going to be in the field for a while. Let me call you later, when I’m back at the office.”

“All right.”

Matthews felt a cheerful little twinge as he heard her crying. Though Amy’s silence on the other extension was louder.

He couldn’t resist. “Mrs. Walker?”

“Yes?”

“Do you have a gun?”

A choked sob. “No, we don’t. I don’t. I’ve never… I wouldn’t know how to use one. I guess I could go to Sports Authority. I mean-”

“That’s all right,” Matthews said soothingly. “I’m sure it’s not going to come to anything like that.”

“What if Megan’s mother, like, calls?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Walker echoed, “what if her mother calls?”

A concerned pause. “I’d be careful. We’re investigating her too… It was a very troubled household, it seems.”

“God,” Mrs. Walker muttered.

Matthews hung up.

What a mess this could become. The kidnapping had been so simple in theory But, in practice, it was growing so complicated. Just like the art of psychiatry itself, he reflected.

Well, there were other things to do to protect himself. But first things first. He had to get Megan to her new home-with his son, Peter-deep in the mountains.

Matthews returned to the Mercedes. He pulled back onto the highway, noting that the white car was still sticking with him like a lamprey to a fish.

9

Amy wasn’t home.

Oh, brother. Tate sighed. Looked through a window, saw nothing. Walked back to the front door. Pressed the bell again. Standing on the concrete stoop of the split-level house in suburban Burke, Tate kept his hand on the doorbell for a full minute but neither the girl nor her mother came to the door.

Where’d she gone? Bett had said that they’d stop by soon. Why hadn’t Amy stayed home? Or at least put the book bag out on the front stoop?

Didn’t she care about Megan? Was this adolescent friendship nowadays?

“Maybe the bell’s broken,” Bett called from the car.

But Tate pounded on the door with his open palm. There was no response. “Amy!” he called. No answer.

“Go ‘round back,” Bett suggested.

Tate pushed through two scratchy holly bushes and rapped on the back door.

Still no answer. He decided to slip inside and find the bag; a missing teenager took precedence over a technical charge of trespass (thinking: I could make a good argument for an implied license to enter the premises). But as he reached for the doorknob he believed he heard a click. When he tried to open the latch he found the door was locked.

He peered through the window and thought he saw some motion. But he couldn’t be sure.

Tate returned to the car.

“Not there.” He sighed. “We’ll call later.”

“Leesburg?” Bett asked.

“Let’s try that teacher first. Eckhard.”

It was only a five-minute drive to the school. The rain had stopped and youngsters were gathering on the school yard-boys for baseball, girls for volleyball, both sexes for soccer. Hacky Sacks, Frisbees, skateboards abounded. After speaking with several parents and students they learned that Robert Eckhard, the volleyball coach, had put together a practice for three that afternoon. It was now a quarter to two.

Tate flopped down into the passenger seat of the Lexus. He stretched. “This police work… I don’t see how Konnie does it.”

Bett kicked her shoes off and massaged her feet. “Wish I’d worn comfy boots, like you.” Then she glanced toward the school. “Look,” she said.

When they’d been married Bett assumed that he knew exactly what she was thinking or talking about. She’d often communicate with a cryptic phrase, a gesture of her finger, an eyebrow raised like a witch casting a spell. And Tate would have no clue as to her meaning. Today, though, he turned his head toward where she was looking and saw the two blue-uniformed security guards, standing in one of the back doorways of the school.

“Good idea,” he said. And they drove around to the door.

By the time they got there the guards had gone inside. Bett and Tate parked and walked inside the school. The halls had that smell of all high schools-sweat, lab gas, disinfectant, paste.

Tate laughed to himself at the instinctive uneasiness he felt being here. Class work had come easily to him but he’d spent his hours and effort on Debate Club and the teachers were forever booting him into detention hall for skipped classes or missing homework. That he would pause at the door on the way out of class and resonantly quote Cicero or John Calhoun to his teacher didn’t help his academic record any, of course.

The security offices in Megan’s school were small cubicles of carpeted partitions near the gym.

One guard, a crew-cut boy with half-mast eyelids, wearing a perfectly pressed uniform, listened unemotionally to Tate’s story. He adjusted his glistening black billy club.

“Don’t know your daughter.” He turned, called out, “Henry, you know a Megan McCall?”

“Nope,” said his partner, who resembled him to an eerie degree. He stepped into the school proper and disappeared.

“What we’re concerned about is this car. A man seemed to be following her.”

“A car. Following her.” The young man was skeptical.

Bett took over. “Around the school yard. This past week.”

Tate: “We were wondering if anybody might’ve reported it.”

The man’s face eased into that put-upon look security guards are very good at. Maybe they’re resentful that they’re not full-fledged cops and could carry guns. And use them.

“Are the police involved?” the man asked.

“Somewhat.”

“Hm.” Trying to figure that one out.

“What happens if somebody sees something unusual? Is there any procedure for that?”

“The Bust-er Book,” the guard said.

Bett asked, “The… uh?”

“Bust-er. He’s a dog. I mean, a cartoon dog. But it’s like ‘Bust’ as in get busted. Arrested. Then a dash, then e-r If the kids see something suspicious they come tell us and we write it down in the Bust-er Book and then there’s a record of it for the police. If anything, you know, happens.”

Tate recalled what Amy’d said. “It was on Tuesday. Out in the parking lot by the sports field. Could you take a look?”

“Oh, we can’t let you see it,” the guard said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Parents don’t have, you know, access to it. Only the administration and police. That’s the rule.”

“That’s it right there?”

The guard turned around and glanced at the blue binder with the words “Bust-er” on the spine and a cartoon effigy of a dog wearing a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat. “Yes sir.”

“If you don’t mind… See, our daughter’s missing. As I was saying. Could you take a look?”

“Just have the police give us a call.”

“Well, she’s not officially a missing person.”

“I don’t have any leeway, sir. You understand.” The guard’s lean face crinkled. His still eyes looked Tate up and down and his muscular hand caressed his ebony billy club. He was everything Tate hated about northern Virginia. Snide and sullen, this young man would see nothing wrong with a tap on the wife’s chin or a belt on his kids’ butts to keep the family in line. He was master of the house; everyone did as he commanded. And never ask his opinion about the Mideastern and Asian immigrants settling in Fairfax because he’ll tell you in no uncertain terms.

Tate looked at Bett. Her eyebrows were raised as if she were asking:

Why was Tate hesitating? After all, he was the silver-tongued devil. He could talk anybody into anything. (“Resolved: The Watergate break-in was justifiable as a means to a valid end.” Lifelong Democrat, grandson of a lifelong Democrat, Tate had leapt at the chance to take the pro side of the debate and argue that irreverent position-for the pure joy of going up against overwhelming odds. He’d won, to the Judge’s shock and lasting amusement.)

“Officer,” Tate began, thinking of the rhetorical tricks in his arsenal, the logic, the skills at persuasion. Ratiocination. He paused, then walked to the door and motioned the guard to follow.

The lean man walked slowly enough to let Tate know that nobody on earth was going to make him do a single thing he didn’t want to do.

Tate, standing in the doorway, looked out over the school yard. “What do you see there?”

The guard hesitated uncertainly. He’d be thinking, What kinda question’s that? I see trees, I see cars, I see fences, I see clouds.

Tate waited just the right amount of time and said, “I see a lot of young people.”

“Um.” Well, what the hell else’re you gonna see on a school yard?

“And those young people rely on us adults for everything. They rely on us for food, for shelter, for schooling, and you know what else?”

Video games, running shoes, Legos? What’s this clown up to?

“They rely on us for their safety. That’s what you’re doing here, right? It’s the reason they hired a big, strong guy like you. A man who’s got balls, who’s not afraid to mix it up with somebody.”

“I dunno. I guess.”

“Well, my daughter’s relying on me for her safety. She needs me to find out where she is. Maybe she’s in trouble, maybe she isn’t. Hey, let’s take an example: You see some tough big kids talking to a little kid. Maybe they’re just buddies, fooling around. Or maybe they’re trying to sell him some pot or steal his lunch money. You’d go and find out, right?”

“I would. Sure”

“That’s all I’m doing with my daughter. Trying to find out if she’s okay. And going through that book would sure be a big help.”

The guard nodded.

“Well?” Tate asked expectantly.

“Rules is rules. Can’t be done. Have a state trooper or a county officer stop by. I’ll be happy to help.”

Tate sighed. He glanced at Bett, who said icily, “Let’s go, Tate. Nothing more to be accomplished here.”

As they walked toward the car, the guard called, “Sir?”

Tate turned.

“That was a good try, though. Kids and safety and everything. I almost bought it.” He picked up a magazine on customized pickup trucks and sat down.

Tate and Bett continued to the car then climbed in and drove out of the lot.

Neither of them could contain the laughter for long. They both roared. Finally Bett gasped and said, “That was the biggest load of hogwash I ever heard. ‘It’s the reason they hired a big, strong guy like you.’ You sounded like you were trying to pick him up.”

Wiping tears from his eyes, Tate controlled his laughing. “That was some pretty good double-teaming.”

Bett reached under her blouse and pulled out the twenty or thirty sheets of notebook paper she’d ripped from the Bust-er Book while Tate had distracted the guard with his absurd argument. “I figured I better leave the notebook itself” She muttered, “The Bust-er Book? The Bust-er Book? Do people really take that stuff seriously?”

Tate drove about three blocks and pulled over to the curb.

“Okay,” she said, “Tuesday… Tuesday.” Flipping through the pages. “If the storm trooper back there’s the one who keeps the book he’s got handwriting like a sissy. Okay, Tuesday…“ She nodded then read: “‘Two students reported a gray car, no school parking permit, parked on Sideburn Road. Single driver. Drove off without picking up student.’”

“A gray car. Not much to go on. Anything else?”

“Not then. But Amy said Megan’d been thinking she’d been followed for a while.” Bett flipped back through the pages. Her perfect eyebrow rose in a delicate arc. “Listen. A week ago. ‘M. McCall (Green Team)’-that’s her class section at school-’reported gray car appeared to be following her. Security guard Gibson took report. Did not personally witness incident. Checked but no car seen. Subject did not know tag or make of vehicle.’” Bett looked at her ex-husband. “Why didn’t she tell me about it, Tate? Why?”

Tate shrugged. He asked, “Any description of the driver?”

“None, no.”

“What kind of car did her boyfriend drive?”

“White… I think a Toyota.”

“He could’ve borrowed one to follow her,” Tate mused.

“Could have, sure.”

More questions than answers.

Tate stared at the turbulent clouds overhead. The sun tried to break through but a line of thick gray rolled over the sky heading eastward. “We’ll come back and talk to Eckhard later,” he said. “Let’s go to Lees-burg.”

10

Joshua LeFevre glanced down at the odometer. He’d driven another twenty miles along I- 66 in his battered old Toyota since the last time he’d checked. Which put him about seventy miles from Fairfax.

Mr. Tibbs, the unflappable police detective within him, had finally figured out where Megan and her therapist lover were going: to the doctor’s mountain place. It was now chic for professionals to have vacation homes in the Blue Ridge or in West Virginia, where you could buy a whole mountaintop for a song.

The rain had stopped and he cranked the sunroof open, listening to the wind hissing through the Yakima bike rack on the roof.

It was early afternoon when he broke through the Shenandoahs and saw the hazy Blue Ridge in front of him. The rolling hills’ were not evocative gunmetal today, the literature major in him thought, but were tinted with the green frost of spring growth. Recalling that he and Megan had talked about a bike tour along Skyline Drive, which crested the ridge, later in the spring.

Without the rain LeFevre could see more clearly now and he realized that only the doctor was visible in the car. Where was Megan? Taking a nap? Wait… Was her head resting in his lap?

He was considering this appalling thought, distracted and angry, when the Mercedes got away from him.

Never would have happened to Sidney Poitier.

Damn.

The Merce had pulled out to pass a semi and he’d followed. But as soon as the big gray car had cleared the cab of the truck the doctor had steered hard to the right and pulled onto the exit ramp as the truck driver laid on his air horn and braked.

LeFevre’s Toyota was caught in the left lane and he couldn’t swerve back in time to make the exit.

His head swiveled and he saw the roof of the Mercedes sink below the level of the highway as it slowed on the ramp.

LeFevre slammed his fists on the wheel. Tantrums were definitely not Poitier’s style but he couldn’t help it. He thought about making an illegal U over the median, but he was a black kid with knobby dreads driving through the crucible of the Confederacy; the fewer laws he broke, the better.

The next exit was a mile down the highway and by the time he’d followed the Mobius strip of ramps and returned to the exit the Mercedes had taken, there was no sign of the big car-only an intersection of three different country roads, any one of which they might have taken.

And now that he thought about it, the doctor might just have stopped for gas and gotten back on to the interstate, continuing west.

He closed his eyes in frustration and pressed back hard into the headrest. Metal snapped.

What the hell’m I doing here?

The stuff love makes you do, he thought.

Hate it, hate it, hate it…

LeFevre pulled into the gas station, filled up at the self-service island then walked up to the skinny, sullen attendant with long hair sprouting from under a Valvoline giveaway cap, which was as greasy as his brown strands.

“How you doing?” Sidney Poitier asked very politely.

“Okay yourself?” the man muttered.

“Not bad. Not bad.”

The man stared at LeFevre’s hair, which was not exactly modeled on Mr. Poitier’s, circa 1967, but was much closer to a rap star’s.

“Helpya?”

It occurred to LeFevre that even Officer Tibbs, in suit, tie and polished oxfords, wouldn’t get a lot of cooperation from a guy like this by asking which way a seventy-thousand-dollar automobile had just gone.

At least, not without some incentive.

LeFevre opened his wallet and extracted five twenties. Looked down at them.

So did the attendant. “That’s cash.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You charged your gas. I seen you.”

“I did.”

“Well, whatsitfor?” The grimy hair swung as he nodded at the money.

“It’s for you,” LeFevre said in his most carefully crafted queen’s English.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Why’s it for me?” The man seemed to sneer.

“I have a little problem.”

The stubbly face asked, Who cares?

“I was driving down sixty-six and this Mercedes cut me off, ran me off the road. Nearly killed me.” (This had happened to Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night. More or less.) “Did it on purpose. The driver, I mean.”

“Don’t say.” The man yawned.

“Front end’s all screwed up now. And see what kind of bodywork I’ll need?”

Thank goodness, LeFevre thought. He’d never fixed the damage after he’d scraped the side of the car on a barricade when he’d dropped his mother off at Neiman Marcus in Tysons Corner last month.

The attendant looked at the car without a splinter of interest.

“So you want me to look at the front end?”

“No, I want the license number of that Mercedes. He came by here five, ten minutes ago. I was hoping he stopped here for gas.”

This had seemed like a good way to break the ice-asking for the license number. It made things official-as if the police were going to get involved. LeFevre believed this trick was definitely something that Sidney Poitier would do.

“Why’d he run you off the road?” the man asked abruptly.

Which brought LeFevre up cold.

“Well, I don’t know.” LeFevre shrugged. Then he asked, “You know which car I mean?” He remained respectful but asked this firmly. He’d decided not to be too polite. Sidney Poitier had glared at Rod Steiger quite a bit.

“Maybe.”

“So he stopped here for gas.”

“Nope.” The scrawny guy looked at the money. Then he shook his head; his slick grin gave LeFevre an unpleasant glimpse of bad teeth. “Fuck. Why’re you bullshittin’ me? You don’t want that tag number.”

“Um, I-”

“What you want is to find out where that sumvabitch lives. Am I right?”

“Well…”

“An’ I’ll tell you why you want that.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause he was drivin’ his big old Mercedes and he thunk t’himself,

Why, here’s a black man-only he was thinking the N-word-driving a little shit Jap car and I can cut him off ‘cause he don’t mean shit to me and he don’t got the balls to complain to nobody ‘bout it.” A faint laugh.

“And you don’t want no tag number for State Farm Insurance or the po-leece. Fuck. You wanna find him and you wanna beat the shiny crap outta him.”

So, end of story. Well, it was a nice try. LeFevre was about to put the money away and return to his car-before the man called some real-life Rod Steigers-when the attendant shook his head and said, “God bless you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That frosts me, what he done. Truly does.”

“I’m sorry?” LeFevre repeated.

“I mean, I got friends’re black. Couple of ‘em. And we have a good time together and one of ‘em’s wife cooks for me and my girlfriend nearly every week.”

“Well, is that right?”

“Fuck, yeah, that’s right.” The twenties were suddenly in the man’s stained fingers. “I say, more power to you. Find him and wail on him all you want. I know that sumvabitch.”

“The man in the Mercedes?”

“Yeah.”

“Dr. Hanson, right?”

“I don’t know his name. But I seen him off and on for a spell. He comes and goes. Never stops here-probably thinks my gas ain’t good enough-but I seen him. Pisses me off royal, people like him. Moving everybody down the mountain.”

“What do you mean, ‘moving down the mountain’?” Sidney Poitier asked politely, smiling now and giving the man plenty of thinking room.

“See, what happened was, when folk settled here they moved to the top of the Ridge. Naturally, where else? That’s the best part. But they couldn’t keep the land, most of ‘em. Money troubles, you know. Taxes. So they kept selling to the government for the park or to rich folks wanted a weekend place, and families kept moving down the mountain, Now, most everybody’s in the valley-most of the honest folk, I mean. Pretty soon there won’t be no mountains left ‘cept for the rich pricks and the government. ‘S what my dad says. Makes sense to me.”

“Where’s his place?”

The skinny young man nodded toward one narrow road.

“That’s the way he goes but I don’t know where exactly his house is. Only place I know of up there’s the hospital. Been for sale for years. He probably bought it and’s gonna put a big fancy house on the land.”

“What hospital?”

“Loony bin. Closed a while ago.”

“How far is it?”

“Five miles, give’r take, At the end of Palmer Road yonder.” He pointed. “Now, you ain’t going to kill him, are you? I’d have some problems with that.”

“No. I really do just want to talk.”

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” The man squinted then offered his bad-tooth grin again. “You know, you remind me of that actor.”

“I do?”

“Yeah. He’s a good one. Don’t exactly look like him but you sorta hold yourself the same. What’s his name? What’s his name?”

LeFevre, grinning himself, answered his question.

The man blinked and shook his head. “Who the hell’s Sidney Poitier?”

LeFevre said, “Maybe he was before your time.”

“What’s that guy’s name? I can picture him… Kicked the shit out of some ninjas in this movie with Sean Connery. Wait! Snipes… Wesley Snipes. That’s it. That man can act.”

LeFevre walked to the edge of the tarmac. The smell of gasoline mixed with the scent of spring growth and clayish earth. Palmer Road vanished into a dark shaft of pine and hemlock, winding up into the mountains.

The young attendant stuffed a strand of slick hair up under his hat, “You stay away from that hospital. I wouldn’t go there for any money. Hear stories about it. People sometimes get attacked. By wild dogs or something.”

Or something?

“Kids find bloody bones sometimes. Probably deer or boar but maybe not.”

LeFevre’s anger was turning to concern. Megan, what’ve you gotten yourself into? “I just follow that road?”

“Right. Five miles, I’d guess. Keeps to the high ground. Then circles back on itself like a snake.”

“A snake,” LeFevre said, absently staring into the murky forest. Thinking of the quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy:

Halfway through life's journey I came to myself in a dark wood, where the straight way was lost.

Recalling the story too: the author’s guided tour of hell.

“Listen,” the attendant said, startling him, “you stop on your way back, okay? Let me know what happens.”

LeFevre nodded and shook the man’s oily hand. He climbed into his car and sped along Palmer Road. In an instant, civilization vanished behind him and the world became black bark, shadows and the waving arms of tattered boughs.

The things we do for love, LeFevre thought. The things we do for love.

Aaron Matthews pulled the Mercedes into a grove of frees beside the asphalt and climbed out, looking back’ over Palmer Road.

No sign of the white car.

He was sure he’d tricked the boy-friend just fine when he’d sped off the highway beside the truck. The kid was probably in West Virginia by now and even if he managed to figure out which exit they’d taken and backtracked he’d have no way of knowing which way Matthews had gone into the maze of back roads here. Although Matthews had been coming to the deserted hospital for the past year, ever since he’d brought his son here, he’d made a point of never stopping for gas or food at the service station or grocery store near the exit ramp off I-66. He was sure the local hicks knew nothing about him.

He climbed back in the car and continued on to the Blue Ridge Mental Health Facility.

Just past the cleft where the road passed between two steep vine-covered hills, the ground opened into the shallow bowl of a valley. Through a picket line of scab by trees a sprawl of low, decrepit buildings was visible.

BRMHF had been the last destination for the hard-core crazies in the commonwealth of Virginia. Schizophrenics, uncontrollable bipolars, borderline personalities, delusionals, souls lost forever. Security was high-the patients (that is, inmates) were locked down at night in secure quarters (padded cells). The eight-foot chain-link fence enclosing the ten-acre grounds was “designed to provide comforting boundaries to patients and nearby residents alike” (it sported a live current of 500 volts).

The hospital had served its purpose well until two years ago, when it had been closed down by the state, and the patients were shipped to other facilities and halfway houses. BRMHF was soon overgrown with foliage and the place was forgotten.

Dr. Aaron Matthews was intimately familiar with the hospital; the patients here had found him a confidant, confessor, judge… a virtual father over the course of nearly four years. When he thought of home he thought first of this hospital and second of the Colonial house in Arlington, Virginia, he’d lived in with Margaret and their son, Peter.

Matthews now braked the Mercedes to a halt and examined the place carefully for signs of intruders though a break-in would have been very unlikely. The current to the fence had been shut off long ago but the chain link was intact and the grounds were patrolled by five knob-headed rottweilers, as raw and brutal as dogs could be, teeth sharp as obsidian; they hunted in packs and once or twice a week killed one of the deer that often strolled through the gate when it was open.

He listened carefully again-no sound of approaching cars-and unlocked the two tempered steel locks securing the gate. He drove inside and parked.

Then he lifted Megan from the trunk and carried her inside, pushing through a door with his shoulder. He’d reversed the locks on the doors-you could simply push in from the outside but couldn’t get back out without a key.

He stepped into the lobby.

Asylums smell far more visceral than do regular hospitals because ‘even though their province is the mind, the by-product of mental pathology is piss, shit, sweat, blood. This was still true of the Blue Ridge Facility years after its closing; the air stank of bodily functions and decay.

Through these murky halls Matthews carried his prize in his arms. Feeling every ounce of her weight-though it wasn’t the weight of a burden; it was the weight of treasure: a golden or platinum artifact, solid and perfect.

Matthews carried Megan into the room he’d fixed up for her. He laid her on the bed and undressed her. First the blouse and the bra. Then jeans and panties and socks. His eyes coursed up and down her body. Yet he touched her only once-to make sure her pulse was regular.

Taking her clothes, he left the room, locked her door with a heavy padlock. He thought about stopping to see his son but the boy was in a different part of the hospital and Matthews had no time for a visit now. Tate Collier still troubled him. He left the building, got into his car and started through the gate. He’d driven only ten feet before he heard the thump-thump-thump of the flat tire.

Oh, not now! His mood suddenly darkened. And he fought once more to keep the blackness at bay. He thought of Megan. It buoyed him just enough to keep him functional. Matthews climbed out and walked to the rear of the car.

He took one look at the slash mark in the Michelin and leapt toward the driver’s door to get to the pistol in his glove compartment.

Too late.

“Don’t move.” The young man held the rusty machete, left over from the groundskeeping Matthews had done when he’d brought his son here. He gripped the long knife awkwardly but with enough manic determination to make Matthews freeze and raise his hands. The boy’s muscles were huge.

He blurted, “I’ll give you my wallet. And there’s-”

“I want to know what’s going on.”

The young man’s voice was astonishing. What a beautiful patois. Carolinian and Caribbean and some succulent English, which tempered the two. This man could fuck any woman he wanted simply by telling her she was beautiful.

“Don’t hurt me,” Matthews said desperately.

A flicker of uncertainty in the brown eyes.

“What’ve you done with Megan?”

Matthews frowned. “Who are you?”

Ah, young man, asked the silent therapist within Matthews, you’re not a fighter at all, are you? You’re out of your element, brandishing that knife like a squash racket… And why do you feel so guilty, why do you feel so unsure?

The pistol was in the glove compartment only feet away. But his assailant was riding on pure nerves. With his strength it wouldn’t take much for the boy to injure Matthews seriously, without even trying. Besides, while he believed the young man wasn’t dangerous Matthews had learned that premature diagnoses can be very risky.

He smiled and lowered his hands. He nodded knowingly. “Wait, wait. You’re not… You must be Joshua.”

The boy’s face squirreled up into a frown. “You know me?”

“Sure, I know you,” Matthews said smoothly. “I was hoping we’d get a chance to talk.”

11

“You startled me,” said the soothing voice of Aaron Matthews. “I didn’t mean to react the way I did.” He glanced at the tire, laughed. “But, then again, you did attack my Mercedes with a machete.”

With his voice trembling (love that voice, love it), the boy said, “I thought you’d just brought her here on a date. To show her some of your property or something. Then I saw you carry her inside. What the hell’s going on? Tell me!”

“Wait. Carry who inside?” Matthews frowned.

Show her some of your property?

“Megan. I saw you two.”

So he’s thinking real estate development. Matthews shook his head, glanced toward the hospital. “You mean just a few minutes ago? Well, I carried in some bags of cleaning supplies. And a tarp. I bought this place and I’m turning it into condos.”

A minuscule lessening of his suspicion. Not believing your own eyes, are you? How often we don’t. Also, in his face was a suspicion that the young man himself had made a stupid error here. You don’t do well with embarrassment, do you? A gift from the African-American executive mom, I’d say. The one with practiced elocution and the Chanel scarf over her shoulder and the defensive eyes?

Matthews noted, however, that the boy continued to hold the rusty blade firmly in his hand.

“Where is she? What were you doing with her car?”

“Joshua,” Matthews said patiently, “I just dropped Megan off at my weekend place up the road.” He pointed into the woods. “A couple miles from here. She wanted to get a head start on making lunch.”

“Why’d you switch cars at the Metro?”

“Megan’s got a friend. Amy.” He paused.

Joshua said, “I know Amy.”

“Amy’s borrowing her car. We left it at the Metro for her and took the Mercedes.”

The boy frowned. “I didn’t think Amy had a license.”

Matthews laughed. “Oh? She didn’t share that with us. I wondered why she didn’t want us to drop it off at her house.”

Good, Matthews told himself, giving his performance high marks.

“But wait… I didn’t see Megan in your car when I was behind you.”

“You were following us?” Now a frown-at the boy’s odd behavior.

“Yes, I was following you. How did you think I found you?”

“I assumed that Megan told you about me. And that we come up here sometimes.”

Joshua blinked.

Matthews studied the young man for a moment then tilted his head and said with sympathy, “Look, Joshua, don’t do this to yourself.”

“Do what?”

Oh, the desperation Matthews could see in the olive eyes was so sweet… He nearly shivered with pleasure. He whispered, “You should forget about her.”

“But I love her!”

“Forget about her. For your own good.”

Matthews realized he’d been right. The man had probably arrived at Hanson’s office toward the end of the session, planning to confront Megan-and presumably the doctor too-about Hanson’s advice on breaking up.

A little obsessive-compulsive, are we?

Or just too much testosterone in the blood?

If it weren’t for romance we poor psychiatrists would have nothing to do. As Freud said, more or less, love’s a bitch, ain’t it?

“You talked her into breaking up with me so you could see her!” Joshua said.

“Megan said that?” he snapped. “Well, it’s not true. That’s completely unethical and I’d never do it.”

Joshua blinked at the vehemence in Matthews’s voice. The therapist had deduced that the boy would be a rules-and-regulations victim. Thanks to the other parent, of course-Dad the soldier.

The therapist continued, “She decided to break up with you on her own, Joshua. And then we started going out.”

“That’s not what she said. She said you told her to break up with me.”

“No, Joshua. That’s not the way it was at all.”

“But she told me!”

“Well, we can’t blame her for not being completely honest all the time, now, can we?”

“Blame her?”

“See, Megan has trouble taking responsibility for certain things. Not unusual, not a serious problem. We all suffer from it to varying degrees. It’s hard for her to express her inner feelings. Given her parents… You know Tate and Bett?”

Hearing the names, the familiarity in Matthews’s voice, the boy’s defenses slipped a bit more. But he was still dangerous. Too confused, too much in love, riding on too much emotion. Matthews decided he couldn’t win the boy’s confidence; he’d have to go in a different direction.

“I’ve met her mother, not her father,” Joshua said.

“Well, believe me, they’re to thank for a lot of her problems. Her lying, for instance. And the way she’d lose her temper sometimes. It could be bad, couldn’t it?”

“A couple of times. But who doesn’t blow off steam?”

The question told Matthews that the boy was buying the argument. He laughed. “Joshua, put that thing down and go home. Forget about Megan. This is only going to mean heartache for you.”

“I love her.” He was nearly in tears.

By now Matthews had pegged the boy the way a geologist recognizes pyrite. An underachiever terrified of his parents. Military dad. Supermother cutting a swath through America Online or TRW. A couple who probably were-to use Megan’s tired adjective-great people. And so Joshua wouldn’t let himself be angry with them.

But the anger was there inside him. It had to be. But where? Let’s find out…

“Joshua, you don’t understand. You-” “Then tell me.”

“It’s not appropriate-”

Joshua persisted. “Tell me! What is going on?”

Matthews’s eyes went wide, as if he were losing his temper. He said, “All right! You want to know the truth?”

“Yes!”

Matthews started to speak then shook his head as if he were struggling to control himself. “No, no, you don’t.”

“Yes I do!” The boy stepped forward, menacingly.

“All right. But don’t blame me. The truth is Megan didn’t like you.” The young man’s face froze into a glossy ebony mask. “That’s not true!”

Matthews’s mouth grew tight. “She told me that the first night we slept together.”

Joshua gasped. “You’re lying.”

“You don’t think we’re lovers?” Matthews asked viciously; as befit a man no longer fearful but angry

“No, I don't.”

“Well, then how do I know about that birthmark just below her left nipple?”

Joshua couldn’t hold Matthews’s cold eyes and he looked down at the moss covering a fallen tree. His hands were shaking.

“What do we think of her pubic hair? A bit sparse? And what does she like in bed? She likes men to go down on her all night long. And she loves to get fucked in the ass.”

But not by you apparently, Matthews observed, noting the young man’s shocked face.

“Stop it!”

“During our first session she asked me how she could get rid of you.”

“No.”

“Yes!” Matthews spat out. “You know what she called you? The white nigger.”

The eyes glazed over in pain as the scalpel of these words incised the young man’s soul.

“She’d never say that.”

“You were the big minority experiment. She wanted a black man to fuck. But somebody who wasn’t too black of course. She thought you’d be a good compromise. About as white as they come. But then she decided she’d got herself a clunker. She told me she had to drink a half bottle of Southern Comfort just so she could kiss you!”

“No!”

“She and Amy’d stay up all night making fun of you. Megan does a great impression of you. She’s got you down cold.”

“Go to hell!”

“Joshua, you asked for this!” Matthews shouted. “You pushed me, so you’re going to hear the truth whether you want it or not. She wanted your pathetic face out of her life. White nigger. You were a toy. She told me again this morning. When we were fucking on the desk in my office.”

The boy erupted. And while Matthews’s words might have driven someone else to act ruthlessly and efficiently it drove Joshua manically forward toward Matthews, out of control. He dropped the machete and flailed away with his fists. “She never said that!” he cried. “She never said that never said that never said that-”

Matthews fell to the ground, covering his head with his left arm. And when he rose a moment later he was holding the machete.

The young man froze.

Matthews studied him for a moment-the boy suddenly realizing that something very bad was going on.

Joshua lowered his arms. “What are you going to do to me?” he asked in a soft, pathetic whisper.

Matthews tasted the extraordinary voice one last time and stepped forward, swinging the machete into Joshua’s throat.

The boy gave a gurgling scream and stumbled forward. Matthews leapt back, away from the boy’s swinging fist, and slashed his arm deeply Then his leg. Joshua fell onto his back, cradling the gash in his throat.

Matthews plunged the rusty blade into the young man’s abdomen. But with astonishing strength Joshua pushed Matthews off, twisted away, and rose to his knees, choking and coughing. The blood flowed between the fingers clutching his torn neck as Joshua crawled fast, like an animal, back through the gate toward the hospital. Matthews didn’t bother to pursue him. Joshua got thirty feet into the field surrounding the hospital before collapsing in a stand of Queen Anne’s lace, which turned a deep purple under the spray of his blood.

Matthews slowly walked toward him. Then stopped. He heard an animal snarling, growing closer. He backed quickly away from the quivering body.

The rottweilers appeared from behind the house. They paused, stood rigid for a moment then charged forward hungrily Matthews stepped out of the gate and swung it closed as the dogs swarmed in a single muscular pack over the body, which had looked so strong and impervious moments ago and was now just ragged meat.

Matthews leaned against the bars of the gate, enraptured, watching the young man die. Joshua fought hard-he tried to rise and struggled to hit the dogs. But it was useless. The big male rottie closed his enormous jaws on the back of Joshua’s neck and began to shake. After a moment the body went limp.

The animals dragged him into the ravine for the feast. His body vanished under the mass of snarling, bloody mouths.

Matthews quickly changed the Mercedes’s tire and climbed into the car then sped down the rough road. He’d bury what remained of the boy’s corpse later. He didn’t have time now. Too many things to do. He was thinking that this was just like when he was a practicing therapist. Busy days, busy days. There were people to see, people to talk to.

I’m here to change your life forever

Who is he? Who?

Megan McCall floated on a dark ocean, that one question the only thing in her thoughts. She opened her eyes and gripped the thin, filthy mattress she lay on. The room swayed and bobbed.

She was dizzy and nauseated. Her mouth painfully dry, her eyes swollen half closed. She rolled onto her back and examined the small room. There were flaking cushions mounted on all the walls, bars on the windows.

A padded cell.

And the whole place stank so bad she thought she might puke.

She sat up briefly, trying to find a light. There was none. The overhead lamp had been removed and the room was dark. Maybe she- Suddenly roaring filled her ears. Her vision dissolved into black grains and she collapsed back on the bed, passed out. Sometime later she opened her eyes again, managed to sit up then waited until the dizziness passed and she stumbled into the tiny bathroom. The drug he’d injected… it was still in her system. She’d have to take it slow.

Megan sat down on the toilet, spread her legs and finally worked up the courage to examine herself. No tenderness or pain. No come. He might have groped but he hadn’t raped her. She sighed in relief then urinated and washed her hands and face in the basin. She drank a dozen handfuls of icy water. As she stood-careful, careful, take your time-she caught sight of herself in the metal mirror bolted to the wall. She gasped. Pale and haggard, blond hair knotted and filthy. Eyes red and puffy. And frightened. Megan stepped away from the mirror quickly.

She looked for her clothes. Nothing. She couldn’t find anything to wrap herself in. No sheets or curtains. This started a crying fit. She huddled into a ball and sobbed.

Wondering how long she’d been unconscious. A week, a day? She wasn’t hungry so she guessed it was still Saturday. Maybe Sunday at the latest.

Was anyone looking for her?

Did anyone know she was missing?

Her parents, of course. She’d missed the lunch. Which she’d been going to blow off anyway. Thank God she hadn’t called her mother and told her she wasn’t coming, the way she’d planned. If that had happened they still wouldn’t miss her.

And Amy…

Should have told her where I was going.

But, no, Crazy Megan wouldn’t hear of that. C.M. was embarrassed, didn’t want anybody to know she’s been seeing a shrink. Fuck. She should’ve gone to Juvie Detention after all. Ten days in jail and it’d be over with. But Megan had to pick the nut doctor.

Who is he? she screamed to herself. Was he the man in that car that’d been following her near school? She’d started to believe that was her imagination.

Guess not, honey, Crazy Megan offers with no sympathy whatsoever.

Standing by the bed, Megan looked out the barred window into a huge field of tall grass and brush. Some trees, many of them cut down and left to rot.

She gasped suddenly as a huge dog trotted past the window and stopped, staring up at her. A bit of bloody flesh dangled from its mouth, red, like a scrap of steak. Its eyes were spooky-too human-and it seemed to recognize her. Then suddenly the dog tensed, wheeled and vanished.

She examined the window. The iron bars were thick and the space between them was far too small for her to get through.

Frustrated, she pounded her palms against the wall.

Who is he?

Megan strode to the door, gripped and pulled it hard. It was, of course, locked tight. The tears returned suddenly; they fell on her breasts, and her nipples contracted painfully from the sobbing and the dank cold of the dismal room.

Who is he?

Why did they make her go to see the doctor? If they hadn’t this never would’ve happened.

What’d I do to deserve this? Nothing! I didn’t do a thing!

If her mother was going to fuck nerds in Baltimore then for Christ’s sake why didn’t she call me? Just a three-minute phone call. Sorry honey I’m going to be late call Domino’s and use the charge card have Amy over and all right even Brittany too but no boys…

If her father was going to waste his life chasing bimbettes why couldn’t he at least spend more than one weekend a month with her?

This was their fault! Her parents!

I hate you so much! I fucking hate you. I- A sound.

What was it?

A scuttling…

It came from the ceiling. Looking up, she saw a number of dark clusters where the wall met the ceiling. She moved closer. Spiders! Two huge black ones. And one had just given birth-a hundred hundred tiny dots of infants flowed down the wall like black water.

Megan shivered, overwhelmed with disgust, her skin crawling at the sight. She raced toward the door, slamming into it with all her weight, and collapsed onto the splintery floor. She crawled along it, pushing at the baseboards, trying to find a weak spot. Nothing.

She pulled a wad of toilet paper off the roll, hesitated then crushed the spiders with it. Megan flushed the messy shroud and curled up in a ball on the cold floor. Cried for five minutes.

What’s that? Crazy Megan asks her alter ego.

This stopped the tears.

Squick, squick.

That sound again. In the ceiling and the walls.

Squirrels, she decided. Then stood and walked to the wall, which was made of cinder block. How could there be animals in the walls if they were made out of cement?

Then she glanced into the bathroom and squinted. Those walls were just plasterboard. And there was a rectangular plate about twelve by eighteen inches mounted on the wall beside the toilet. Where did it lead?

She walked inside, crouched down and ran her finger across the edge of the metal, which was covered with many layers of paint. In the corners she felt one screw head but three holes, from which the screws were missing. If she could break through the thick paint she might be able to pull the plate up and bend the metal till it snapped.

But the enamel was thick, like glue, and with her short nails she couldn’t get a grip. She thought of her friend Brittany, with the killer fingernails, a regular at a local Vietnamese manicure parlor. That was what she needed-slut claws…

She searched the bedroom once more but couldn’t find anything to use as a tool. Sighing, she returned to the bathroom, lay on the floor and slugged the metal plate. It resounded hollowly, tantalizing with the promise of an empty passageway on the other side. But it didn’t move a millimeter. Keep going, Crazy Megan says.

Megan slammed her fist into it again and again, until her knuckles began to bruise and swell. She turned around and kicked with her heel. As the center pushed in slightly, a hairline crack formed around the edge and she kicked harder. Her foot felt as if it were going to shatter.

Go! C.M. encourages. Go for it!

Megan spun round and tried again to grab the side of the plate. But her nails just weren’t long enough to get a purchase in the crack and she howled in frustration then lunged forward, bared her teeth and shoved her face against the wall, trying to dig her incisors into the crack.

Her gum tore open on the rough paint and plaster. Her jaw exploded with cramping pain and she tasted blood. Then suddenly, with a snap, her front teeth slipped into the crack and pulled the plate away from the wall a fraction of an inch. Megan pressed her hands to her face to ease the pain. Then she spit blood, grabbed the plate and yanked so furiously it gave way at once, ripping the remaining screw from the wall. She fell backward.

Jesus, Crazy Megan says respectfully. Good job.

With a gasp of joy she sat up, seeing faint light through the hole. She shoved her head into the opening, looking into another room. The plate had apparently covered an old heating vent. There was a thin grille on the other side about a foot away. On her back, she guided her leg into the wail and kicked. The grille fell clattering to the floor. She froze. Quiet! she reminded herself. He could be nearby.

Then she started crawling through the opening, headfirst. Her shoulders were broad but she managed to ease them through. She had to reach down, cramping her arm, and cradle her breasts to keep her nipples from scraping on the sharp bottom edge of the vent. One inch at a time she forced her way through the vent. As she eased through she examined the other room. There were bars on these windows too. But the door was open. She could see a dim corridor beyond the doorway.

Another ten or twelve inches. Then twelve more.

Until her hips. They stopped her cold.

Those fucking hips, Crazy Megan mutters. Hate ‘em, hate ‘em, hate ‘em. You just couldn’t lose those ten pounds, could you?

I don’t need any of your crap now, okay? Megan thinks to her alter ego.

The vent on the other side of the wall was, it seemed, slightly smaller than the one in her room. Megan tried wriggling, tightening her muscles, licking her fingers and swabbing her sides with spit but she still remained stuck-halfway between each room, her butt dead center in the wall.

No way, she thought to herself. I’m not getting trapped here! A terrible burst of claustrophobia shook through her. She fought it down, wriggled slightly and moved forward an inch or two before she froze again.

Then she heard the noise. Squick, squick.

The scuttling of claws in the wall above. Accompanied by a high-pitched twitter.

Oh, my God, no. The squirrels.

Her heart began to pound.

Squick, squick.

Right above where she was stuck. Two of them, it sounded like. Then more, gathering where the wall met the ceiling.

Then she looked into the corner of the room-at an animal’s nest. It rustled and a creature appeared, staring at her with tiny red eyes.

Oh, fuck, they’re rats! Crazy Megan blurts.

Megan began to sob. The noise of their little feet started coming down the wall. She stifled a scream as something-a bit of insulation or wood-fell onto her skin.

Squick. Squick. squick. squick. Walking along the ceiling, several of them gathering above her, curious. Maybe hungry. Hundreds of terrible creatures moving toward her stuck body-cautiously but unstoppably.

More rats. Squick.

Twitters and scuttling, growing closer still. There seemed to be a dozen now, two dozen. She pictured needle-sharp yellow teeth. Tiny gray tongues.

Closer and closer. Curious. Attracted to her smell. She’d just finished her period a day ago. They’d smell the blood. They’d head right for it. Jesus.

More scuttling.

Oh…

She closed her eyes and sobbed in terror. It seemed that the whole wall was alive with them. Dozens, hundreds of rats converging on her. Closer, closer. Squick squick squick squicksquicksquick…

Megan slapped her palms against the wall and pushed with all her strength, kicking her feet madly. Then, uttering a dentist’s-drill squeal, one rat dropped squarely onto her. She gasped and felt her heart stutter in terror. She pounded the wall, wriggling furiously. The startled animal climbed off and she felt the snaky tail slip in between her legs as he moved back up the wall.

“Oh,” she choked, “No…

As she struggled to free herself and scrabbled her feet on the bathroom floor, another animal tentatively reached out with a claw and then stepped onto the small of her back. The paws gripped softly and began to move. A damp whiskered nose tapped on her skin as the creature sniffed along her body.

Her arms cramping, she shoved hard. Her foot caught the edge of the toilet in the bathroom behind her and she pushed herself forward two or three inches. It was just enough. She was able to wriggle her hips free. The rat leapt off her and Megan burst into the adjoining room. She crawled frantically into the far corner, as four rats escaped from the wall and vanished through the open door, joined by their friend in the nest.

She sobbed, gasping for breath, brushing her palms over her skin frantically to make sure none of them clung to her. After five minutes she’d calmed. Slowly she stepped back to the vent and listened. Squick squick squick… More scuttling, more twitters. She slammed the grille against the vent opening. The rest of the rats vanished up the wall. An angry hiss sounded from the hole.

God…

She found some stacks of newspapers, removed the grille, wadded up the papers and stuffed them inside the wall to keep the creatures trapped inside.

She collapsed back on the floor, trying to push away the horrible memory of the probing little paws, filthy and damp.

Looking into the dim corridor, cold and yellow, windows barred, filthy, she happened to glance up at a sign on the wall.

PATIENTS SHALL BE DELOUSED ONCE A WEEK.

That sign-a few simple words-brought the hopelessness home to her.

Don’t worry about it, Crazy Megan tries to reassure.

But Megan wasn’t listening. She shivered in fear and disgust and curled up, clutching her knees. Hating this place. Hating her life, her pointless life… Her stupid, superficial friends. Her sick obsession with Janis, the Grateful Dead and all the rest of the cheerful, lying, fake-ass past.

Hating the man who’d done this to her, whoever he was.

But most of all hating her parents.

Hating them beyond words.

12

The forty-minute drive to Leesburg took Tate and Bett past a few mansions, some redneck bungalows, some new developments with names like Windstone and The Oaks. Cars on blocks, vegetable stands selling-at this time of year-jars of put-up preserves and relishes.

But mostly they passed farmland.

Looking out over just-planted land like this, some people see future homes or shopping malls or town houses and some see rows of money to be plucked from the ground at harvest time. And some perhaps simply drive past seeing nothing but where their particular journey is taking them.

But Tate Collier saw in these fields what he felt in his own farmland-a quiet salvation. Something he did, yet not of his doing, something that would let him survive, if not prosper, graciously: the silence of rooted growth. And if at times that process betrayed him-hail, drought, tumbling markets-Tate could still sleep content in the assurance that there was no malice in the earth’s heart. And that, the former criminal prosecutor within him figured, was no small thing.

So even though Tate claimed, as any true advocate would, that it made no never mind to him whether he was representing the plaintiffs or defendants in the Liberty Park case, say, his heart was in fact with the people who wanted to protect the farmland from the roller coasters and concession stands and traffic.

He felt this even more now, seeing these rolling hills. And he felt, too, guilt and a pang of impatience that he was distracted from his preparations for the Liberty Park hearing. But a look at Bett’s troubled face put this discomfort aside. There’d be time to hone his argument. Right now there were other priorities.

They passed the Oatlands farm and as they did the sun came out. And he sped on toward Leesburg, into old Virginia. Confederate Virginia.

There weren’t many towns like this in the northern part of the state; most people in Richmond and Charlottesville didn’t really consider most of northern Virginia to be in the commonwealth at all. Tate and Bert drove through the city’ limits and slowed to the posted thirty miles per hour. Examining the trim yards, the white clapboard houses, the incongruous biker bar in the middle of downtown, the plentiful churches. They followed the directions Tate had been given to the hospital where Dr. Hanson was visiting his mother.

“Can he tell us much?” Bert wondered. “Legally, I mean.”

She’d be thinking, he guessed, of the patient-doctor privilege, which allowed a doctor to keep secret the conversations between a patient and his physician. Years ago, when they’d been married, Tate had explained this and other nuances of the law to her. But she often grew offended at these arcane rules. “You mean if you don’t read him his rights, the arrest is no good? Even if he did it?” she’d ask, perplexed. Or: “Excuse me, but why should a mother go to jail if she’s shoplifting food for her hungry child? I don’t get it.”

He expected that same indignation now when he explained that Hanson didn’t have to say anything to them. But Bett just nodded, accepting the rules. She smiled coyly and said, “Then I guess you’ll have to be extra persuasive.”

They turned the corner and the white-frame hospital loomed ahead of them.

‘Well, busy day,” Bert said, assessing the front of the hospital as she flipped up the car’s mirror after refreshing her lipstick. There were three police cars parked in front of the main entrance. The red and white lights atop one of them flashed with urgent brilliance.

“Car wreck?” Bett suggested. Route 15, which led into town, was posted fifty-five but everybody drove it at seventy or eighty.

They parked and walked inside.

Something was wrong, Tate noted. Something serious had happened. Several nurses and orderlies stood in the lobby, looking down a corridor. Their faces were troubled. A receptionist leaned over the main desk, gazing down the same corridor.

‘What is it?” Bett whispered.

“Not a clue,” Tate answered.

“Look, there he is,” somebody said.

“God,’ someone else muttered.

Two policemen were leading a tall, balding man down the corridor toward the main entrance. His hands were cuffed behind him. His face was red. He’d been crying. As he passed, Tate heard him say, “I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it! I wasn’t even there!”

Several of the nurses shook their heads, eyeing him with cold expressions on their faces.

“I didn’t do it!” he shouted.

A moment later he was in a squad car. It made a U-turn in the driveway and sped off.

Tate asked the receptionist, ‘What’s that all about?”

The white-haired woman shook her head, eyes wide, cheeks pale.

Speaking in Tongues / 129

“We nearly had an assisted suicide.” She was very shaken. “I don’t believe it.”

“What happened?”

“We have a patient-an elderly woman with a broken hip. And it looks like he”-she nodded toward where the police car had been- “comes in and talks to her for a while and next thing we know she’s got a syringe in her hands and’s trying to kill herself. Can you imagine? Can you just imagine?”

“But they saved her?” Tate asked.

“The Lord was watching over her.”

Bett blinked. “I’m sorry?”

The receptionist continued, “A nurse just happened by. My goodness. Can you imagine?”

Bett shook her head, very troubled. Tate recalled that she felt the same about euthanasia as she did about the death penalty. He thought briefly of her sister’s husband’s death. Harris. He’d used a shotgun to kill himself. Like Hemingway. Harris had been an artist-a bad one, in Tate’s estimation-and he’d shot himself in his studio, his dark blood covering a canvas that he’d been working on for months.

Absently he asked the receptionist, “That man. Who is he? Somebody like Kevorkian?”

“Who is he?” the woman blurted. “Why, he was the poor woman’s son!”

Tate and Bett looked at each other in shock. She said in a whisper, “Oh, no. It couldn’t be.”

Tate asked the woman, “The patient? Was her name Hanson?”

“Yes, that’s the name.” Shaking her head. “Her own son tried to talk her into killing herself! And I heard he was a therapist too. A doctor! Can you imagine?”

Tate and Bert sat in the hospital cafeteria, brooding silence between them. They’d ordered coffee that neither wanted. They were waiting for a call from Konnie Konstantinatis, whom Tate had called ten minutes ago-though the wait seemed like hours.

Tate’s phone buzzed. He answered it before it could chirp again.

“Lo.”

“Okay, Counselor, made some calls, But this is all unofficial. There’s still no case. Got it? Are you comfortable with that?”

“Got it, Konnie. Go ahead.”

The detective explained that he had called the Leesburg police and spoken to a detective there. “Here’s what happened. This old lady, Greta Hanson, fell and broke her hip last week. Fell down her back stairs. Serious but not too serious. She’s eighty. You know how it is.”

“Right.”

“Okay, today she’s tanked up on painkillers, really out of it, and she hears her son-your Dr. Hanson-hears him telling her that it looks like the end of the road, they found cancer, she only has a few months left. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The pain’s gonna be terrible. Tells her it’s best to just finish herself off, it’s what everybody wants. He’s pretty persuasive, sounds like. Leaves her a syringe of Nembutal. She says she’ll do it. She sticks herself but a nurse finds her in time. Anyway, she’s pretty doped up but tells ‘em what happened and the administrator calls the cops. They find the son in the gift shop buying a box of candy. Supposedly for her. They collar him. He denies it all, of course. What else is he going to say? So. End of story.”

“And this all happens fifteen minutes before Bert and I are going to talk to him about Megan? It’s no coincidence, Konnie. Come on.”

Silence from Fairfax.

“Konnie. You hear me?”

“I’m telling you the facts, Counselor. I don’t comment otherwise.”

“She’s sure it was her son who talked to her?”

“She said.”

“But she was drugged up. So maybe it was somebody else talking to her.”

“Maybe. But-”

“We can talk to Hanson?”

“Nope. Not till the arraignment on Monday. And he’s probably not gonna be in any mood even then.”

“All right. Answer me one question. Can you look up what kind of car he drives?”

“Who? Hanson? Yeah, hold on.”

Tate heard typing as he filled Bett in on what Konnie’d said.

“Oh, my,” she said, hand rising to her mouth.

A moment later the detective came back on the line. “Two cars. A Mazda nine two-nine and a Ford Explorer. Both this year’s models.”

‘What colors?“

“Mazda’s green. The Explorer’s black.”

“It was somebody else, Konnie. Somebody was following Megan.”

“Tate, she took the train to New York. She’s going to see the Statue of Liberty and hang out in Greenwich Village and do whatever kids do in New York and-”

“You know the Bust-er Book?”

“What the hell is a buster book?” the detective grumbled.

“Kids at Jefferson High are supposed to write down anybody who comes up and offers them drugs or candy or flashes them.”

“Oh, that shit. Right.”

“A friend of Megan’s said there’d been a car following her. In the Bust-er Book, some kids reported a gray car parked near the school in the afternoon. And Megan herself reported it last week.”

“Gray car?”

“Right.”

A sigh. “Tate, lemme ask you. Just how many kids go to that school of hers?”

“I’m not saying it’s a good lead, Konnie-”

“And just how many parents in gray cars pick ‘em up?”

“-but it is a lead.”

“Tag number? Make, model, year?”

Tate sighed. “Nothing.”

“Look, Counselor, get me at least one of the above and we’ll talk… So, what’re you thinking, somebody snatched her? The Amtrak schedule is bogus?”

“I don’t know. It’s just fishy.”

“It’s not a case, Tate. That’s the watchword for today. Look, I gotta go.

“One last question, Konnie. Does she have cancer? Hanson’s mother?”

The detective hesitated. “No. At least it’s not what they’re treating her for.”

“So somebody talked her into believing she’s dying. Talked her into trying to kill herself.”

“Yeah. And that somebody was her son. He could have a hundred motives. Gotta go, Counselor.”

Click.

He relayed to Bett the rest of his conversation with Konnie.

“Megan was seeing a therapist who tried to kill his mother? God.”

“I don’t know, Bett,” he said. “You saw his face. Did he look guilty?”

“He looked caught,” she said.

Tate glanced at his watch. It was two-thirty. “Let’s get back to Fairfax and find that teacher. Eckhard.”

Crazy Megan finally gets a chance to talk.

Listen up, girl. Listen here, kiddo. Biz-nitch, you listening? Good. You need me. This is serious… You’re not sneaking cigarettes in the Fair Oaks mall parking lot. You’re not flirting with a George Mason junior to get him to buy you a pint of Comfort or Turkey. You’re not sitting in Amy’s room, snarfing wine, hating it and saying it’s great, while you’re like, “Sure, I come every time Josh and Ifuck…

Leave me alone, Megan thought.

But G.M. won’t have any of her attitude. She snaps, You hate the world. Okay. What you want- A family is what I want, Megan responded. That’s all I wanted.

Oh. Well, that’s precious, her crazy side offers, nice and sarcastic. Who the fuck doesn’t? You want Mommy and Daddy to wave their magic wand and get you out of here? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, ain’t going to happen, girl. So get off your fat ass and get out.

I can’t move, Megan thought. I’m scared, I’m tired.

Up, girl. Up. Look, he- And who is he?

Crazy Megan is in good form today. What difference does it make? He’s the bogeyman, he’s Jason, he’s Leather face, he’s Freddy Krueger, he’s your father- All right, stop it. You’re like so… tedious.

But C.M.’s wound up now. He’s everything bad, he’s your mother giving Brad a blow job, he’s the barn at your father’s farm, he’s an inconvenient child, he’s a whispering bear- “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Megan screamed out loud. But nothing stops Crazy Megan when she gets going. It doesn’t matter who he is. Don’t you get it? He thinks you’re locked up tight in your little padded cell. But you’re not. You’re out. And you may not have much time. So get your shit together and get the hell out of here.

I don’t have any clothes, Megan pointed out.

That’s the girl 1 love. Oooo. The sarcasm is thick as Noxema. Sit back and find excuses, Let’s see: You’re pissed ‘cause Mom’s off to Baltimore to fuck Mr. Rogers and do you say anything about it? No. It rags you that Dad fits you in around his dates with girls who’ve got inflatable boobs but do you bitch about it? Do you call him on it? No. You go off and get drunk. You have another cigarette. What other distractions can we come up with? Nail polish, CDs, Victoria ’s Secret Taco Bell the mall the multiplex a boy’s fat dick gossip…

I hate you, Megan thought. I really, really hate you. Go away, go back where you came from.

lam where I came from, Crazy Megan responds. You may have some time to fuck around like this, whining, and you may not. Now, you’re buck naked and you don’t like it. Well, if that’s an issue, go find some clothes. And, no, there’s no Contempo Casual around here. Of course, I personally would say, Fuck the clothes, find a door and run like hell. But that’s up to you.

Megan rolled to her feet.

She stepped into the corridor.

Cold, painful. Her feet stung from kicking the wall. She started walking. Looking around, she saw it was a rambling place, one story; and built of concrete blocks. All the windows had thick bars on them. With the padded cell, she figured it was a mental hospital but she couldn’t imagine treating patients here. It was totally depressing. No one could have gotten better here.

She found a door leading outside and pushed it. It was locked tight. The same with two others. She looked outside for a car, didn’t see one in the lot. At least she was alone. Dr. Peters must have left.

Keep going, Crazy Megan insists.

But- Keep. Going.

She did.

The place was huge, wing after wing, dozens of corridors, gloomy wards, private rooms, two-bed rooms. But all the doors leading outside were sealed tight and all the windows were barred. Every damn one of them. Two large interior doorways had been bricked off sloppily with cinder blocks and Sakrete-maybe because they led to less restricted wings. Dozens of the large concrete blocks that hadn’t been needed lay scattered on the floor. She picked up one and slammed it into a barred window. It didn’t even bend the metal rods.

For several hours she made a circuit of the hospital, moving quietly. She was careful; in the dim light she could make out footprints, hundreds of them. She couldn’t tell if they’d been left by Dr. Peters alone or by him and someone else but she was all too aware that she might not be alone.

By the time she’d made it back to her cell she hadn’t found a single door or window that looked promising. Shit. No way out.

Okay, Crazy Megan offers, chipper as ever. At least find something you can use to nail his ass with.

What do you mean?

A weapon, bitch. What do you think?

Megan remembered seeing a kitchen and returned there.

She started going through drawers and cupboards. But there wasn’t anything she could use. There were no metal knives or forks, not even dinner knives, only hundreds of packages of plastic utensils. No glasses or ceramic cups. Everything was paper or Styrofoam.

She pulled open a door. It was a pantry full of food. She started to close the door but stopped, looked inside again.

There was enough food for a family to live on for a year. Cheerios, condensed milk, Diet Pepsi, Doritos, Lay’s potato chips, tuna, Hostess cupcakes, Cup-A-Soup, Chef Boyardee…

What’s funny here?

Jesus. Crazy Megan catches on first.

Megan’s hand rose to her mouth as she too understood and she started to cry.

Jesus, Crazy Megan repeats.

These were exactly the same brands that Megan liked. This was what her mother’s cupboards were stocked with. Here too were her shampoo, conditioner and soap.

Even the type of tampon that Megan used.

He’d been in her house, he knew what she liked.

He’d bought this all for her!

Don’t lose it, babes, don’t…

But Megan ignored her crazy side and gave in to the crying.

Thinking: If a family of four could live on this for a year, just think how long it would last her by herself.

Twenty minutes later Megan rose from the floor, wiped her face and continued her search. It didn’t take her long to find the source of the footprints.

In a far wing of the hospital were two rooms that had been “homi-fied,” as Bett would say when she’d dress up a cold-looking house to make it warmer and more comfortable. One room was an office, filled with thousands of books and files and papers. An armchair and lamp and desk. The other room was a bedroom. It smelled stale, turned her stomach. She looked inside. The bed was unmade and the sheets were stained. Off-white splotches.

Guys’re so disgusting, Crazy Megan offers.

Megan agreed; who could argue with that?

This meant that someone else probably lived here-someone young (she supposed older guys jerked off too but tried to imagine, say, her father doing it and couldn’t).

Way gross thought. From CM.

Then she saw the closet.

Oh, please! She mentally crossed her fingers as she pulled the door open.

Yes! It was filled with clothes. She pulled on some jeans, which were tight around her hips and too long. She rolled the cuffs up. She found a work shirt-which was tight, too, but that didn’t matter. She felt a hundred percent better. There were no shoes but she found a pair of thick black socks. For some reason, covering her feet gave her more confidence than covering the rest of her body.

She looked through the closet for a knife or gun but found nothing. She returned to the other room. Rummaged through the desk. Nothing to use as a weapon, except a Bic pen. She took it anyway. Then she looked through the rest of the room, focusing at first on the bookshelves.

Some books were about psychiatry but most were fantasy novels and science fiction. Some were pretty weird. Stacks of comic books too- Japanese, a lot of them. Megan flipped through several. Totally icky- girls being raped by monsters and gargoyles and aliens. X-rated. She shivered in disgust.

The name inside the books and on the front of the comic books was Pete Matthews. Sometimes he’d written Peter M. It was written very carefully but in big block letters. As if he was a young kid.

Megan looked through the files, most of them filled with psychological mumbo jumbo she couldn’t understand. There were also stacks of the American Psychiatric Association Journal. Articles were marked with yellow Post-its. She noticed they’d been written by a doctor named Aaron Matthews. The boy’s father? she wondered. His bio gave long lists of credentials. Dozens of awards and honorary degrees. One newspaper clipping called him “the Einstein of therapists” and reported, “He can detect and categorize a psychosis from listening to a patient’s words for three or four minutes. A master diagnostician.”

In between two file folders was another clipping. Megan lifted it to the light. It showed Dr. Peters and a young man in his late teens. But wait… The doctor’s last name wasn’t Peters. The caption read: “Dr. Aaron Matthews leaves the funeral home after the memorial service for his wife. He is accompanied by his son, Peter.” Matthews… the one who wrote those articles. So he must have been a doctor here. That’s how he knew about the hospital-and that it would make a perfect prison.

Megan studied the picture again, feeling crawly and scared. The doctor’s son was… well, just plain weird. He was a tall boy, lanky, with long arms and huge hands. He had thick floppy hair that looked dirty and his forehead jutted over his dark eye sockets. He had a sick smile on his face.

Leaving his mother’s funeral and he’s smiling?

So this was his room-the son’s. Maybe Peters-well, Matthews- kept the boy locked up here, a prisoner too.

Her eyes fell to an official-looking report. She read the top page.

EMERGENCY INTAKE EVALUATION

Patient Peter T. Matthews presents with symptoms typical of an antisocial and paranoid personality. He is not schizophrenic, under DSM-III criteria, but he has, or claims to have, delusions. More likely these are merely fantasies, which in his case are so overpowering that he chooses not to recognize the borderline between his role-playing and reality. These fantasies are generally of a sadoerotic nature, with him playing a nonhuman entity-stalking and raping females. During our sessions Peter would sometimes portray these entities-right down to odd mannerisms and garbled language. He was often “in character,” and quite consistent in his role-playing. However, there was no evidence of fugue states or multiple personalities. He changed personas at his convenience, to achieve the greatest stimulation from his fantasies.

Peter is extremely dangerous. He must be hospitalized in a secure facility until the determination is made for a course of treatment. Recommend immediate psychopharmacological intervention.

Stalking… rape.

Megan put the report back on the desk. She found a notebook. Peter’s name was written on this too. She read through it. In elaborate passages Peter described himself as a spaceman oran alien stalking women, tying them up, raping them. She dropped the book.

Tears again.

Then another thought: Her cell! This Dr. Matthews, her kidnapper, had locked her up not only to keep her from getting out but to keep his son from getting in. He was- A creak, a faint squeal. A door closed softly in a far part of the hospital.

Megan shivered in terror.

Move it, girl! Crazy Megan cries, in a silent voice as panicked as uncrazy Megan’s. It’s him, it’s the son.

She grabbed a pile of things to take with her-several of the magazines, file folders about the hospital, letters. Anything that might help her figure out who this Dr. Matthews was. Why he’d taken her. How she might get out.

Footsteps…

He’s coming. He’s coming here. .. Move it. Now!

Holding the files and clippings under her arm, Megan fled out the door. She ran down the corridors, getting lost once, pausing often to listen for footsteps. He seemed to be circling her.

Finally she found her way and raced into the room that adjoined hers, the “rat room.” She rubbed the grate along the edges of the hole in the wall to widen it. She started through and, whimpering, clawed her way forward. Five inches, six, a foot, two feet. Finally she grabbed the toilet in her room and wrenched herself through the hole. She replaced the grate on the far side of the wall and then slammed the metal plate into place in her bathroom.

She ran to the door and pressed her ear against it. The footsteps grew closer and closer. But Peter didn’t stop at her door. He kept moving. Maybe he didn’t know she was here.

Megan sat on the icy floor with her hands pressing furiously against the plate until they cramped.

Listen, C. M. starts to say. Maybe you can- Shut up, Megan thought furiously.

And for once Crazy Megan does what she’s told.

13

The eyes.

The eyes tell it all.

When Aaron Matthews was practicing psychotherapy he learned to read the eyes. They told him so much more than words. Words are tools and weapons and camouflage and shields.

But the eyes tell you the truth.

An hour ago, in Leesburg, he’d looked into the glassy, groggy eyes of a drugged Greta Hanson and knew she was a woman with no reserves of strength. And so he’d leaned close, become her son and spun a tale guaranteed to send her to the very angels that she was babbling on and on about. It’s quite a challenge to talk someone into killing herself and he’d thoroughly enjoyed playing the game.

He doubted she’d die from the dosage of Nembutal he’d given her and he doubted that she could find a vein anyway. Besides, it was important for her to remain alive-to blame her son for the Kevorkian number. Poor Doe Hanson now either in jail or on the run. In any case, he’d be no help as a witness to Tate Collier.

Now, as he strolled along the sidewalk near Jefferson High School, Aaron Matthews was looking at another set of eyes.

Robert Eckhard’s-the teacher who’d seen his car as he stalked Megan.

Studying the man’s eyes, Matthews was concluding that Eckhard might or might not have been a good English teacher but he didn’t doubt that he was one hell of a girls’ volleyball coach. The diminutive, tweedy man sat with a sports roster on his lap outside the sports field between the grade and high schools.

Wearing a baseball cap and thick-framed reading glasses he’d bought at Safeway-he remembered that Eckhard might have seen him near the school in the Mercedes-Matthews walked slowly past. He studied his subject carefully. The teacher was a middle-aged man, in Dockers and a loose tan shirt. Matthews took in all these observations and filed them away but it was the eyes that were most helpful; they told him everything he needed to know about Mr. Eckhard.

Continuing down the sidewalk, Matthews walked into a drugstore and made several purchases. He slipped into the rest room of the store and five minutes later returned to the school yard. He sat down on the bench next to Eckhard’s and rested the Washington Post in his lap. He gazed out at the young girls playing informal games of soccer or jump rope in the school yard.

Once, then twice, Eckhard glanced at him. The second time, Matthews happened to turn his way and saw the teacher looking at him with a hint of curiosity in his tell-all eyes.

Matthews’s face went still with uneasy alarm. He waited a judicious moment then stood quickly and walked past Eckhard. But as he did, the disposable camera fell from the folds of his newspaper. Matthews blinked then stepped forward suddenly to pick it up but his foot struck the yellow-and-black box. It went skidding along the sidewalk and stopped in front of Eckhard.

Matthews froze. The teacher, his eyes on Matthews’s, smiled again. He reached down and picked up the camera, looked at it. Turned it over.

“I-” Matthews began, horrified.

‘It’s okay,” Eckhard said.

“Okay?” Matthews’s voice faltered. He looked up and down the sidewalk, uneasy

“I mean, the camera’s okay,” Eckhard said, rattling it. “It doesn’t seem to be broken.”

Matthews began speaking breathlessly, over explaining-as his script required. “See, what it was, I was going to D.C. later today. I was going to the zoo. Take some pictures of the animals.”

“The zoo.” Eckhard examined the camera.

Matthews again looked up and down the sidewalk.

‘You like photography?” the teacher asked.

After a moment, Matthews said, “Yes, I do. A hobby” Smiled awkwardly, summoning a blush. “Everybody should have a hobby That’s what my father said.” He fell silent.

“It’s my hobby too.”

“Really?”

“Been doing it for about fifteen years,” Eckhard said.

“Me too. Little less, I guess.”

“You live around here?” the teacher asked.

“ Fairfax.”

“Long time?”

“A couple of years.”

Silence grew between them. Eckhard still held the camera. Matthews crossed his arms, rocked on his feet. Looking out over the school yard. Finally he asked, “You do your own developing and printing?”

“Of course,” Eckhard said.

Of course. The expected answer. Matthews’s eyes narrowed and he appeared to relax. “Harder with color,” he offered. “But they don’t make the throwaways in black and white.”

“I’m getting a digital camera,” Eckhard said. “I can just feed the pictures into my computer at home.”

“I’ve heard about those. They’re expensive, aren’t they?”

“They are… But you know hobbies. If they’re important to you you’re willing to spend the money.”

“That’s my philosophy,” Matthews admitted. He sat down next to Eckhard. They looked out on the playing field, at a cluster of girls, who were around ten or eleven years old. Eckhard looked through the eyepiece of the camera. “Lens isn’t telephoto.”

“No,” Matthews said. Then after a moment: “She’s cute. That brunette there.”

“Angela.”

“You know her?”

“I’m a teacher at the high school. I’m also a grade school counselor.” Matthews’s eyes flashed enviously. “Teacher? I work for an insurance company. Actuarial work. Boring. But summers I volunteer at Camp Henry. Maryland. Ages eight through fourteen. You know it?”

Eckhard shook his head. “I also coach girls’ sports.”

“That’s a good job too.” Matthews clicked his tongue.

“Sure is.” Eckhard looked out over the field. “I know most of these girls.”

“You do portraits?”

“Some.”

“You ever photograph her? That girl by the goal post?”

But Eckhard wouldn’t answer. “So, you take pictures just around the area here?”

Matthews said, “Here, California. Europe some. I was in Amsterdam a little while ago.”

“ Amsterdam. I was there a few years ago. Not as interesting as it used to be.”

“That’s what I found.”

“ Bangkok ’s nice, though,” Eckhard volunteered.

“I’m planning on going next year,” Matthews said in a whisper.

“Oh, you have to,” Eckhard encouraged, kneading the yellow box of the camera in his hands. “It’s quite a place.”

Matthews could practically see the synapses firing in Eckhard’s mind, wondering furiously if Matthews was a cop with the Child Welfare Unit of the Fairfax County Police or an FBI agent. Matthews had treated several pedophiles during his days as a practicing therapist. He recognized the classic characteristics in Eckhard. He was intelligent- an organized offender-and he’d know all about the laws of child molestation and pornography. He could probably just keep the testosterone under control to avoid actually molesting a child but photographing young girls was a compulsion that ruled his life.

Matthews offered another conspiratorial smile then glanced at a girl bending down to pick up a ball. Gave a faint sigh. Eckhard followed his gaze and nodded.

The girl stood up. Eckhard said, “ Nancy. She’s nine. Fifth grade.”

“Pretty. You wouldn’t happen to have any pictures of her, would you?”

“I do.” Eckhard paused. “In a nice skirt and blouse, I seem to recall.”

Matthews wrinkled his nose. Shrugged.

He wondered if the man would take the bait.

Snap.

Eckhard whispered, “Well, not the blouse in all of them.”

Matthews exhaled hard. “You wouldn’t happen to have any with you?”

“No. You have any of yours?”

Matthews said, “I keep all of mine on my computer.”

One of Matthews’s patients had seven thousand images of child pornography on computer. He’d traded them with other pedophiles while he’d been serving time for a molestation charge; the computer they resided on was the warden’s at Hammond Falls State Penitentiary in Maryland. The prisoner had written an encryption program to keep the files secret. The FBI cracked it anyway and, despite his willingness to go through therapy; the offense earned him another ten years in prison.

Matthews said, “I don’t have too many in my collection. Only about four thousand.”

Eckhard’s eyes turned to Matthews and they were vacuums, He whispered a long, envious ‘Well..

Matthews added, “I’ve got some videos too. But only about a hundred of them.”

“A hundred?”

Eckhard shifted on the bench. Matthews knew the teacher was lost. Completely. He’d be thinking: At worst, it’s entrapment and I can beat it in court. At worst, I can talk my way out of it. At worst, I’ll flee the country and move to Thailand… As a therapist Matthews was continually astonished at how easily people won completely unwinnable arguments with themselves.

Still, you land a fish with as much care as you hook it.

“You seem worried…,” Matthews started. “And I have to say, I don’t know you, and I’m a little nervous myself. But I’ve just got a feeling about you. Maybe we could help each other out… Let me show you a couple of samples of what I’ve got.”

The teacher’s eyes flickered with lust.

Always the eyes.

“That’d be fine. That’d be good. Please.” Eckhard cleared his excited throat.

Oh, you pathetic thing…

“I could give you a computer disk.” Matthews suggested.

“Sure. That’d be great.”

“I only live about three blocks from here. Let me run up to my house and get some samples.”

“Good.”

“Oh,” Matthews said, pausing. A frown. “I only have girls.”

“Yes, yes. That’s fine,” Eckhard said breathlessly. A bead of spit rested in the corner of the mouth. Desperately he asked, “Can you go now?”

“Sure. Be right back.” Matthews started up the street.

He turned and saw the teacher, a stupid smile on his face, grinning from ear to ear, looking out over the field of his sad desire, rubbing his thumb over the disposable camera.

In the drugstore once again, Matthews walked up to the pay phone and called 911.

When dispatch answered he said urgently, “Oh, you need somebody down to Markus Avenue right away! The sports field behind Jefferson School.” He described Eckhard and said, “He took a little girl into the alley and pulled his, you know, penis out. Then took some pictures. And I heard him ask her to his house. He said he’s got lots of pictures of little girls like her on his computer. Pictures of little girls, you know… doing it. Oh, it’s disgusting. Hurry up! I’m going back and watch him to make sure he doesn’t get away”

He hung up before the dispatcher could ask for his identity.

Matthews didn’t know if snapshots of a fully dressed little girl in a school yard next to frames of a man’s erect dick (Matthews’s own penis, taken in the drugstore rest room twenty minutes ago) were an offense, but once the cops got a search warrant for the man’s house Eckhard would be out of commission-and a completely unreliable witness about a gray Mercedes or anything else-for a long, long time.

By the time he was back on the street, walking toward his car, Matthews heard the sirens.

Fairfax County apparently took children’s well-being very seriously.

Tate and Bett arrived at the school yard, taking care to avoid the main building, just in case the clean-cut young fascist of a security guard had happened to glance inside the Bust-er Book after Tate and Bett had left and found twenty pages missing.

But volleyball practice had been canceled for today, it seemed. Nobody quite knew why.

In fact the yard was almost deserted, despite the clear skies.

They found two students and asked if they’d seen Eckhard. They said they hadn’t. One teenage girl said, “We were coming here for the practice.”

“Volleyball?”

“Right. And what it was was somebody said it’s been canceled and we should all go home. And stay away from here. Totally weird.”

“And you haven’t seen Mr. Eckhard?”

“Somebody said he had to go someplace. But they didn’t tell us where. I don’t know. He was here earlier. I don’t get it. He’s always here. I mean, always.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“ Fairfax someplace. I think.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Robert.”

Tate called directory assistance and got his number then called. There was no answer. He left a message. He looked out over the school yard for a moment and had a thought. Tate asked his ex-wife, “Where did she hang out?”

“Hang out?” Bett asked absently. He saw her looking into her purse, eyes on the letter containing her daughter’s searing words.

“Yeah, with her friends. After school,”

She looked up. “Just around. You know”

“But where? We’ll go there, ask if anybody’s seen her.”

There was a long hesitation. Finally she said, “I’m not sure.”

“You’re not?” Tate asked, surprised. “You don’t know where she goes?”

“No,” Bett answered testily “Not all the time. She’s a seventeen-year-old girl with a driver’s license.”

“Oh. So you don’t know where she’d spend her afternoons.”

“Not always, no.” She glanced at him angrily. “It is not like she hangs out in southeast D.C., Tate.”

“I just-”

“Megan’s a responsible girl. She knows where to go and where not to go. I trust her.”

They walked in silence back to the car. Bett grabbed her phone again and her address book. She began making calls-to Megan’s friends, he gathered. At least she had their numbers, if not Megan’s boyfriend’s. Still, it irked him that she didn’t seem to know much basic information-important information-about the girl.

When they arrived at the car she folded up the phone. “Her favorite place was called the Coffee Shop. Up near Route fifty.” Bett sounded victorious. “Like Starbucks. All right? Happy?”

She dropped into the seat and crossed her arms. They drove in silence north along the parkway.

14

Braking to five miles an hour, Tate surveyed the crowded parking lot. He found a space between a chopped Harley-Davidson and a pickup bumper-stickered with the Reb stars ‘n’ bars. He navigated the glistening Lexus into this narrow spot.

He and Bett surveyed the cycles, the tough young men and women, all in denim, defiantly holding open bottles, the tattoos, the boots. At the other end of the parking lot was a very different crowd, younger- boys with long hair, girls with crew cuts, layers of baggy clothes, plenty of body piercing. Bleary eyes.

Welcome to the Coffee Shop.

“Here?” Bett asked. “She came here?”

Starbucks? Tate thought. I don’t think so.

She glanced at the notes she’d jotted. “Off fifty near Walney. This’s it. Oh my.”

Tate glanced at his ex-wife. Her horrified expression didn’t diminish his anger. How could she have let Megan come to a place like this? Didn’t she check up on her?

Her own daughter, for Christ’s sake…

Tate pushed the door open and started to get out. Bett popped her seat belt but he said abruptly, “Wait here.”

He walked up to the closest cluster-the bikers; they seemed less comatose than the slacker gang at the other end of the lot.

But no one he queried had heard of Megan. He was vastly relieved. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Maybe her friend meant a generic coffee shop someplace.

At the far end of the lot he waded into a grungy sea of plaid shirts, Doe Marten boots, JNCO jeans and bell-bottom Levi’s. The girls wore tight tank tops over bras in contrasting colors. Their hair was long, parted in the middle, like Megan’s. Peace symbols bounced on breasts and there was a lot of tie-dyed couture. The images reminded Tate of his own coming-of-age era, the early seventies.

“Megan? Sure, like I know her,” said a slim girl, smoking a cigarette she was too young to buy.

“Have you seen her lately?”

“She’s here a lotta nights. But not in the last week, you know. Like, who’re you?”

“I’m her father. She’s missing.”

“Wow. That sucks.”

“How’d she get in? She was seventeen.”

“Uhm. I don’t know.”

Meaning: a fake ID.

He asked, “Do you know if anybody’s been asking about her? Or been following her?”

“I dunno. But her and me, we weren’t, like, real close. Hey, ask him. Sammy! Hey, Sammy.” To Tate she added, “They’d hang out some.”

A large boy glanced their way, eyed Tate uneasily. He set a paper cup behind a garbage can and walked up to him. He was about the lawyer’s height, with a pimply face, and wore a baseball cap backward. He wore a pager and a cell phone.

“I’m looking for Megan McCall. You know her?”

“Sure.”

“Have you seen her lately?” “She was here this week.” “She comes here a lot?” Tate asked.

“Yeah, she, like, hangs here. Her and Donna and Amy. You know.”

“How about her boyfriend?”

“That black dude from Mason?” Sammy asked. “The one she broke up with? Naw, this wasn’t his scene. I only saw ‘em together once, I think.”

“Was somebody-some man in a gray car-asking about her, following her around?”

Sammy gave a faint laugh. “Yeah, there was. Last week, Megan and me, we were here and she was like, ‘What’s he want? Him again.’ And I’m like, ‘You want me to go fuck him up?’ And she goes, ‘Sure.’ I go up to the car but the asshole takes off.”

“Did you get a look at him?”

“Not too close. White guy. Your age, maybe a little older.”

“You get the plate number?”

“No. Didn’t even see what state. But it was a Mercedes. I don’t know what model. All those fucking numbers. American cars have names. But German cars, just fucking numbers.”

“And you don’t have any idea who he was?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, I knew who he was. But Megan doesn’t like to talk about it. So I let it go.”

Tate shook his head. “Talk about what?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know,” Tate said. “What?”

“Well, just…“ Sammy lifted his hands. “What she used to do. I figured he was looking for some more action and had tracked her down here.”

“Action? I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

“I figured him and Megan had… get it? And he wanted some more.”

“What are you talking about?” Tate persisted.

“What d’you think I’m talking about?” The kid was confused. “He fucked Megan and liked what he got.”

“Are you saying she had a boyfriend in his forties?”

“Boyfriend?” Sammy laughed. “No, man. I’m saying she had a customer.”

‘What?”

“Sure, she-”

The boy probably had twenty’ or thirty pounds on Tate but farm work keeps you strong and in two seconds Sammy was flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. Both hands were raised, protecting his face from Tate’s lifted fist.

“What the fuck’re you saying?” the lawyer raged.

Sammy shouting back, “No, man, no! I didn’t do anything. Hey…

“Are you saying she had sex for money?”

“No, I’m not saying nothing! I’m not saying a fucking thing!”

The girl’s voice was close to his ear, the blonde he’d first spoken to. “It’s, like, not a big deal. It was a couple years ago.”

“Couple years ago? She’s only seventeen now, for Christ’s sake.” Tate lowered his hand. He stood up, brushed the dust off. He looked at the people in front of the bar, staring at him. The huge, bearded bouncer was amused. Bett was half out of the car, looking at her ex-husband with alarm. He motioned her to stay where she was.

Sammy said, “Fuck, man, what’d you do that for? I didn’t fuck her. She gave it up a while ago. You asked me what I thought and I told you. I figured the guy liked what he had and wanted more. Jesus.”

The girl said, “Sorry; mister. She had a thing for older men. They were willing to pay. But it was okay, you know.”

“Okay?” Tate asked, numb.

“Sure. She always used rubbers.”

Tate stared at her for a moment then walked back to the car.

Sammy stood up, picked up his beeper, which had fallen off his belt in the struggle. “Fuck you, man. Fuck you! Who’re you anyway?”

Turning back, Tate snapped, “I’m her father.”

“Father?” the boy asked, frowning.

“Yeah. Her father,”

Sammy looked at the girl, who shrugged. The boy said, “Megan said she didn’t have a father.”

Tate frowned and Sammy continued, “She said he was a lawyer or something but he ran off and left her when she was six. She hasn’t heard from him since.”

In the car Tate asked angrily, “You didn’t know she went there?”

“I told you I didn’t. You think I’d let her go to a place like that?”

“I just think you might want to know where she was hanging out. From time to time.”

“You ‘just think.’ You know when people say that?”

‘What are you-?” he began.

“They say that when they mean, you damn well ought to know where she was.”

“I didn’t mean that at all,” Tate snapped.

Though, of course, he had.

He sped out onto the highway, tires squealing, gravel flying from beneath the tires. Putting the Coffee Shop far behind them.

She finally asked, ‘What was that all about?”

He didn’t answer.

“Tate? What were you fighting with that boy about?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said darkly.

“Tell me!”

He hesitated but then he had to say it. “He said he thought the guy in the gray car might’ve been a customer.”

“Customer?”

“Of Megan’s.”

“What?… Oh, God. You don’t mean…

“That’s exactly what I mean. That’s what the boy said. And that girl too.”

“Vile. You’re disgusting…

“Me? I’m just telling you what he said.”

Tears coming down her face. “She wouldn’t! There’s no way. It’s impossible.”

“They didn’t seem to think it was impossible. They seemed to think she did it pretty often.”

“Tate! How can you say that?”

“And he said it was a couple years ago. When she was fifteen.”

“She didn’t, I’m certain.”

A wave of fury consumed him. His hands cramped on the steering wheel. “How could you not know? What were you so busy doing that you didn’t notice any condoms in your daughter’s purse? Didn’t you check who called her? Didn’t you notice what time she got home? Maybe at midnight? At one? Two?”

“Stop it!” Bett cried. “Don’t attack me. It’s not true! It’s a misunderstanding. We’ll find her and she’ll explain it.”

“They seemed to think-”

She screamed, “It’s a lie! It’s just gossip. That’s all it is! Gossip. Or they’re talking about somebody else. Not Megan.”

“Yes, Megan. And you should have-”

“Oh, you’re blaming me? It isn’t my fault! You know, you might have been more involved with her life.”

“Me?” he snapped.

“Okay-sure, your happy family didn’t turn out the way you wanted. Well, I’m sorry about that, Tate. But you could have checked on her once in a while.”

“I did. I paid support every month-”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I don’t mean money You know how often she’d ask me, Why doesn’t Daddy like me? And I’d say, He does, he’s just busy with all his cases. And I’d say, It’s hard to be a real daddy when he and Mommy are divorced. And I’d say-”

“I spent Easters with her. And the Fourth of July,”

“Yeah, and you should’ve heard the debriefings on those joyous holidays.” Bett laughed coldly.

“What do you mean? She never complained.”

“You have to know somebody before you complain to them.”

“I took her shopping,” he said. “I always asked her about school. I-”

“You could’ve done more. We might’ve made some accommodation. Might’ve been a little more of a family.”

“Like hell,” he spat out.

“People’ve done it. In worse situations.”

“What was I supposed to do? Take up your slack?”

“This isn’t about me,” she snapped.

“Well, apparently it is. You’re her mother. You want somebody else to fix what you’ve done? Or haven’t done?”

“I’ve done the best I could!” Bett sobbed. “By myself.”

“But it wasn’t you yourself. It was you and the boyfriends.”

“Oh, I was supposed to be celibate?”

“No, but you were supposed to be a mother first. You should’ve noticed that she had problems.”

Tate couldn’t help but think of Bett’s sister, Susan. The woman had desperately wanted children, while Bell had always been indifferent to the idea. After her husband, Harris’s, death Susan had moved in with a man very briefly-he was abusive and, from what Tate heard, half crazy. But he was a single man-divorced or widowed-with a child. And Susan put up with a lot of crap from him just to have the young boy around; she desperately’ wanted someone to mother. After they’d broken up, the lover had turned dangerous and stalked her but even at the worst moments Susan still seemed to regret the loss of that child in her life. Tate now wished Bett had shown some of that desire for Megan.

“I saw she was unhappy,” Bett said. “But who the hell isn’t? What was I supposed to do? Wave a magic wand?”

His anger wouldn’t release the death grip it had on his heart. “Hell, that’s probably exactly your idea of mothering. Sure. Or cast a spell, look up something in the I Ching. Read her tarot.”

“Oh, stop it! I gave up all that shit years ago… I tried to be a good mother. I tried.”

“Did you?” he was astonished to find himself saying. “You sure you weren’t out looking for your King Arthur? Easier than changing diapers or helping her with homework or making sure when she was home after school. Making sure she wasn’t fucking-”

“I tried… I tried Bett was sobbing, shaking.

Tate realized the car was nudging eighty. He slowed. A deep breath. Another.

Long, long silence. His eyes, too, welled up with tears. “Listen, I’m sorry.”

“I tried. I wanted… I wanted..

“Bett, please. I’m sorry.”

“I wanted a family too, you know,” she whispered, wiping her face on the sleeve of her blouse. “I saw the Judge and his wife and you and the rest of the Colliers. I didn’t talk about it the way you did but I wanted a family too. But then things happened… You know.”

“I lost my temper. I don’t… You’re right. Those kids back there… it was probably just gossip.”

But his words were flaccid. And, of course, they came far too late. The damage had been done. He wondered if they’d separate now and never speak to each other again. He supposed that would happen. He supposed that it would have to.

And oddly, he realized how much the idea upset him, No, it terrified him; he had no idea why.

A long moment passed.

Bett spoke first. He was surprised to hear her say, in a calm, reasoned voice, “Maybe it’s true, Tate-what you heard about her. Maybe it is. And maybe part of it’s my fault. But you know, people change. They can. They really can.”

They continued on in silence. Bett closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the headrest.

What a man hears, he may doubt. What he sees, he may possibly doubt.

“Bett? I am sorry.” What he does… “Bett?”

But she didn’t answer.

15

She decided she was safest here, in her cell.

If the father-Aaron Matthews-had wanted to kill her he could have done so easily. He didn’t have to stash her away here, he didn’t have to buy all the food. No, no, she had this funny sense that though he kidnapped her he didn’t want to hurt her.

But the son… He was the threat. She needed protection from him. She’d stay here locked in Crazy Megan’s padded cell until she figured out how to escape.

She opened one of the files she’d taken from Peter’s room. In the dim light she scanned the pages, trying to find something that might help her. Maybe the hospital was near a town. Were there photos or brochures of the hospital and grounds? Maybe she could find a map. If she started a fire, people might see the smoke. Or maybe she’d find ventilation shafts or emergency exits. She remembered a padlocked door marked Basement down one of the corridors nearby. If she could break the lock on the door, were there exits down there she might get through? She flipped through the documents, looking for a picture or photo of the hospital-trying to find basement windows or doors she might climb out of.

Damn, that’s smart, says an impressed Crazy Megan.

Shhhh…

Megan happened to glance at the papers on the top of the pile.

…patient Victoria Skelling, 37, paranoid schizophrenic, was found dead in her room at 0620 hours, April 23. COD was asphyxia, from inhalation of mattress fibers. County police (see annexed report) investigated and declared the death suicide. It appeared patient Skelling gnawed through the canvas ducking of her mattress and pulled out wads of stuffing. She inhaled approximately ten ounces of this material, which lodged in her throat. The patient had been on Thorazine and Haldol, delusions were minimal. Orderlies described her in “good spirits” for much of the morning of her death but after spending the day on the grounds with a group of other patients she grew increasingly depressed and agitated. She complained that rats were coming to get her. They were going to chew her breasts off (earlier delusions and certain dreams centered around poisoned breast milk and suckling). She calmed again at dinnertime and spent the evening in the TV room. She was extremely upset when she went to bed and orderlies considered using restraints. She was given an extra dose of Haldol and locked into her room at 2200 hours. She said. “It’s time to take care of the rats. They win, they win.” She was found the next morning dead…

Gross, both Megan and C.M. think simultaneously.

She flipped through more pages.

…Patient Matthews (No. 97-4335) was the last person to see her alive and he reported that she seemed “all spooky.”

So Aaron Matthews’s son, Peter, had been hospitalized here. And after the hospital was closed his father brought him back. Why, she couldn’t guess. Maybe he felt at home here. Maybe his father broke him out of the hospital for the criminally insane to have him nearby.

She flipped through another report and learned that someone else had committed suicide.

…The body of Patient Garber (No, 78-7547) was found behind the main building. The police and coroner had determined that he had swallowed a garden hose and turned the water on full force. The pressure from the water ruptured his stomach and several feet of intestine. He died from internal hemorrhaging and shock. Although several patients were nearby when this happened (Matthews, No. 97-4335, and Ketter, No. 9h3212), they could offer no further information. The death was ruled suicide by the medical examiner.

Megan read through several other files. They were all similar-reports of patients killing themselves. One victim was found in the library. He’d apparently spent hours tearing apart books and magazines, looking for a sheet of paper sturdy enough to slice through the artery in his neck. He finally succeeded.

She shivered at the thought.

Someone else had leapt out of a tree and broken his neck. He didn’t die but was paralyzed for life. When asked about why he’d done it he said, “He’d been talking to ‘some patients’ and he realized how pointless life was, how he was never going to get better Death would bring some peace.”

Yet another report stated, “Patient Matthews was the last person to see victim alive.” The administrator wondered if he’d been involved and the boy had been interviewed and evaluated but no charges were brought.

Reading more, she found that not long after the last suicide a reporter from the Washington Times heard of the deaths and filed an investigative report. The state board of examiners looked into the matter and closed the hospital.

But Megan understood that the deaths weren’t suicides at all. How could they have missed it? Peter Matthews had killed the other patients and somehow covered up the evidence to make the deaths look like suicide.

She flipped through the rest of the files and clippings.

Nothing she found told her anything helpful. She shoved them under the bed. What can I do? There has to- Then she heard the footsteps.

Faint at first.

Oh, no… Peter was coming back up the hall.

Well, he’d missed her before.

Closer, closer. Very soft now, as if he was trying not to make any noise. But she heard his breathing and remembered the picture of the eerie-looking boy-his twisted mouth, the tip of his pale tongue in the corner of his lips. She remembered the stained sheets and wondered if he was walking around, looking for her, masturbating…

Megan shivered violently. Started to cry. She eased up to the door, put her head against it, listened.

No sounds from the other side.

Had he-?

A fierce pounding on the door. The recoil knocked her to her knees.

Another crash.

A whispered voice. “Megan And in that faint word she heard lust and desperation and hunger. “Megan.

He knows I’m here… He knows who I am!

Peter was rattling the lock. A few loud slams of a brick or baseball bat on the padlock.

No, please… Why’d Matthews leave her alone with him? As much as she hated the doctor, Megan prayed he’d return.

“Megannnnnnn?” It now sounded as if the boy was laughing.

A sudden crash, into the door itself. Then another. And another. Suddenly a rusty metal rod-like the spears in his horrible comic books-cracked the wood and poked through a few inches. Just as Peter pulled the metal back out Megan leapt into the bathroom, plastered herself against the wall. She heard his breath on the door and she knew he was looking through the hole he’d made. Looking for her.

“Megan…

But from that angle he couldn’t see that there was a bathroom; the door was to the side.

For an eternity she listened to his lecherous breathing. Finally he walked off.

She started back into the room. But stopped.

Had he really gone? she wondered.

She decided she’d wait until dark. Peter might be outside and he’d see her. And if she plugged up the hole he’d know for certain she was there.

She sat on the toilet, lowered her head to her hands and cried.

Come on, girl. Get up.

I can’t. No, I can’t. I’m scared.

Of course you’re scared, Crazy Megan chides. But what’s that got to do with anything? Lookit that. Lookit the bathroom window.

Megan looked at the bathroom window.

No, it’s nuts to think about it.

You know what you’ve got to do.

I can’t do it, Megan thought. I just can’t.

Yeah? What choice’ve you got?

Megan stood and walked to the window, reached through the bars and touched the filthy glass.

I can’t.

Yes, you can!

Megan crawled back into the room, praying that Peter wasn’t outside the door and looking through the peephole he’d made. She reached under the bed, sure she’d come up with a handful of rat. But no, she found only the manila file folder she’d been looking for. She returned to the bathroom and eased up to the window, pressed the folder against the glass. She drew back her fist and slugged the pane. The punch was hard but the glass held. She hit it again and this time a long crack spread from the top to the bottom of the window Finally, another slug and the glass shattered. She pulled her fist back just as the sharp shards fell to the windowsill.

She picked a triangular piece of glass about eight inches long, narrow as a knife. Taking her cue from patient Victoria Skelling’s sad end, Megan, using her teeth, ripped a strip off one of the mattress pads on the wall. She wound this around the base of the splinter to make a handle.

Good, C.M. says with approval. Proud of her other self

No, better than good Megan reflected: great. Fuck you, Dr. Matthews. I feel great! It reminded her of how she’d felt when she’d written those letters to her parents in Dr. Hanson’s office. It was scary, it hurt, but it was completely honest.

Great.

Crazy Megan wonders, So what’s next?

“Fuck the kid up with the knife,” Megan responded out loud. “Then get his keys and book on out of here.”

Atta girl, C.M. offers. But what about the dogs?

They’ve got claws, I’ve got claws. Megan dramatically held up the glass.

Crazy Megan is impressed as hell.

“There’s a van.”

“A van?” Bett asked.

“Following us,” Tate continued, as they drove past the Ski Chalet in Chantilly.

Bett started to turn.

“No, don’t,” he said.

She turned back. Looked at her hands, fingers tipped in faint purple polish. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. A white van.”

Tate made a slow circle through the shopping center then exited on Route 50 and sped east. He pulled into the Greenbriar strip mall, stopped at the Starbucks and climbed out. He bought two teas topped with foamed milk and returned to the car.

They sipped them for a moment and when a red Ford Explorer cut between his Lexus and the van he hit the gas and took off past a bookstore, streaking onto Majestic Lane and just catching the tail end of the light that put him back on Route 50, heading west this time.

When he settled into the right lane he noticed the white van was still with him.

“How’d he do that?” Tate wondered aloud.

“He’s still there?”

“Yep. Hell, he’s good.”

They continued west, passing under Route 28, which was the dividing line between civilization here and the farmland that led eventually to the mountains.

“What’re we going to do?”

But Tate didn’t answer, hardly even heard the question. He was looking at a large sign that said, FUTURE HOME OF LIBERTY PARK…

He laughed out loud.

This was one of those odd things, noticing the sign at the same time the van was following them. A high-grade coincidence, he would have said. Bett-well, the old Bett-would of course have attributed it to the stars or the spirits or past lives or something. Didn’t matter. He’d made the connection and at last he had a solid lead.

“What?” she cried, alarmed, responding both to his outrageous U-turn, skidding 180 degrees over the grassy median and the harsh laugh coming from his throat.

“I just figured something out. We’re going to my place for a minute. I have to get something.”

“Oh. What?”

“A gun.”

Bett’s head turned toward him then away. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yep. Very serious.”

Some years ago, when Tate had been prosecuting the improbable case of the murder of a Jamaican drug dealer at a Wendy’s restaurant in suburban Burke, Konnie Konstantinatis had poked his head into Tate’s office.

“Time you got yourself a piece.”

“Of what?”

“Ha. You’ll want a revolver ‘cause all you do is point ‘n’ shoot. You’re not a boy to mess with clips and safeties and stuff like that.”

“What’s a clip?”

Tate had been joking, of course-every commonwealth’s attorney in Virginia was well versed in the lore of firearms-but the fact was he re -ally didn’t know guns well. The Judge didn’t hold with weapons, didn’t see any need for them and believed the countryside would be much more highly populated without weaponry

But Konnie wouldn’t take no for an answer and within a week Tate found himself the owner of a very unglamorous Smith & Wesson.38 special, sporting six chambers, only five loaded, the one under the hammer being forever empty; as Konnie always preached.

This gun was locked away where it’d been for the past three or four years-in a trunk in Tate’s barn. He now sped up his driveway and leapt out, observing that with his manic driving he’d lost the white van without intending to. He ran into the barn, found the key on his chain and after much jiggling managed to open the trunk. The gun, still coated with oil as he’d left it, was in a Ziploc bag. He took it out, wiped it clean and slipped it into his pocket.

In the car Belt asked him timidly, “You have it?” the way a college girl might ask her boyfriend if he’d brought a condom on a date.

He nodded.

“Is it loaded?”

“Oh.” He’d forgotten to look. He took it out and fiddled with the gun until he remembered how to open it. Five silver eyes of bullets stared back from the cylinder.

He clicked it shut and put the heavy gun in his pocket.

“It’s not going to just go off, is it? I mean by itself.”

“No.” He noticed Belt staring at him. ‘What?” he asked, starting the engine of the Lexus.

“You’re… you look scary.”

He laughed coldly. “I feel scary. Let’s go.”

Manassas, Virginia, is this:

Big-wheeled trucks, sullen pick-a-fight teenagers (the description filling both the boys and the girls), cars on the street and cars on blocks, Confederate stars ‘n’ bars, strip malls, PCP labs tucked away in the woods, concrete postwar bungalows, quiet mothers and skinny fathers struggling, struggling, struggling. It’s domestic fights. It’s women sobbing at Garth’s concerts and teens puking at Aerosmith’s.

And a little of it, very little, is Grant Avenue.

This is Doctors’ and Lawyers’ Row. Little Taras, Civil War mansions complete with columns and detached barns for garages, surrounded by expansive landscaped yards. It was to the biggest of these houses-a rambling white Colonial on four acres-that Tate Collier now drove.

“Who lives here?” Bett asked, cautiously eyeing the house.

“The man who knows where Megan is.”

“Call Konnie,” she said.

“No time,” he muttered and he rolled up the drive, past the two Mercedeses-neither of them gray, he noticed-and skidded to a stop about five feet from the front door, nearly knocking a limestone lion off its perch beside the walk.

“Tate!”

But he ignored her and leapt from the car.

“Wait here.”

The anger swelled inside him even more powerfully, boiling, and he found himself pounding fiercely on the door with his left hand, his right gripped around the handle of the pistol.

A large man opened the door. He was in his thirties, muscular, wearing chinos and an Izod shirt.

“I want to see him,” Tate growled.

‘Who are you?”

“I want to see Sharpe and I want to see him now.”

Pull the gun now? Or wait for a more dramatic moment?

“Mr. Sharpe’s busy right at the-’

Tate lifted the gun out of his pocket. He displayed it, more than brandished it, to the assistant or bodyguard or whatever he was. The man lifted his hands and backed up, alarm on his face, “Jesus Christ!”

“Where is he?”

“Hold on there, mister, I don’t bow who you are or what you’re doing here but-”

“Jimmy, what’s going on?” a voice called from the top of the stairs.

“Cot a problem here, Mr. Sharpe.”

“Tate Collier come a-calling,” Jack Sharpe sang out. He glanced at the gun as if Tate were holding a butterfly net. “Collier, whatcha got yourself there?” He laughed. Cautious, sure. But it was still a laugh.

“Was he driving the white van?” Tate pointed the gun at the man in the chinos, who lifted his hands. “Careful, sir, please!” he implored.

“It’s okay; Jimmy,” Sharpe called. “Just let him be. He’ll calm down. What van, Collier?”

“You know what van,” Tate said, turning back to Sharpe. ‘Was he the asshole driving?”

‘Why’n’t you put that thing away so’s nobody gets hurt. And we’ll talk… No, Jimmy, it’s okay, really.”

“I can shoot him if you want, Mr. Sharpe.”

Tate glanced back and found himself looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, chrome plated, held steadily in Jimmy’s hand. It was an automatic, he noticed-with clips and safeties and all the rest of that stuff

“No, don’t do that,” Sharpe said. “He’s not going to hurt anybody. Collier, put it away Be better for everybody.”

Jimmy kept the gun pointed steadily at Tate’s head.

Tate put his own pistol back into his pocket with a shaking hand.

“Come on upstairs.”

“Should I come too, Mr. Sharpe?”

“No, I don’t think we’ll needya, Jimmy. Will we, Collier?”

“I don’t think so,” Tate said. “No.”

“Come on up.”

Tate, breathless after the adrenaline rush, climbed the stairs. He followed Jack Sharpe into a sunlit den. He glanced back and saw that Jimmy was still holding the shiny pistol pointed vaguely in Tate’s direction.

Sharpe-wearing navy-blue polyester slacks and a red golfing shirt

– was now all business. No longer jokey.

“What the fuck’s this all about, Collier?”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“Your daughter? How should I know?”

“Who’s driving the white van?”

“I assume you’re saying that somebody’s been following you.”

“Yeah, somebody’s been following me.”

When Tate had seen the Liberty Park sign he’d remembered that his clients in that case had complained to him last week that private eyes had been following them. Tate’d told them not to worry-it was standard practice in big cases (though he added that they shouldn’t do anything they wouldn’t want committed to videotape). “Same as somebody's been following my clients. And probably my wife-”

“Thought you were divorced,” Sharpe noted.

“How’d you know that?”

“Seem to remember something.”

“So if you were following us-”

“Me?” Sharpe tried for innocence. It didn’t take.

“-you’ve been following my daughter too. Who just happened to disappear today.”

Sharpe slowly lifted a puller from a bag of golf clubs sitting in the corner of his study, addressed one of the dozen balls lying on the floor and sent it across the room. It missed the cup.

“I hire lawyers to fight my battles for me. As you well know, having decorated the walls of the courtroom with their hides recently. That’s all I hire.”

Tate asked, “No security consultants?”

“Ha, security consultants. That’s good. Yeah, that’s good. Well, no, Collier. There ain’t no private eyes and no see-curity consultants on my payroll. Now, what’s this about your daughter?”

“She’s missing and I think you’re behind it.” Another putt. He missed the cup again.

“Me? Why? Oh, I get it. To take you outta the running at the oral argument next Thursday down in Richmond, right?”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Well, it don’t make sense to me. I don’t need to do that to beat you. You know, I fired those half-assed shysters you reamed at the trial. I got the big boys involved now. Lambert, Stone and Bums. They’re gonna run right over you. Don’t flatter yourself. They’ll bum you up like Atlanta.”

“Liberty Park, Sharpe. Tell me. How much’ll you lose if it doesn’t get built?”

“The park? It don’t go through? I don’t lose a penny.” Then he smiled. “But the amount I won’t make is to the tune of eighteen million. Say, ain’t it unethical for you to be here without my lawyer being present?”

Tate said, ‘Where is she? Tell me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, Jack. You think I don’t know about defendants harassing clients and lawyers so they’ll drop cases?”

Sharpe ran his hand through his white hair. He sat down beneath a picture of himself on the eighteenth tee of the Bull Run Country Club, a place that proudly had not a single member who wasn’t white and Protestant. Male too-though that went without saying.

“Collier, I don’t kidnap people.”

“But how about some of those little roosters that work for you? I wouldn’t put it past a couple or three of them. That project manager of yours. Wilkins? He was in Lorton for eighteen months.”

“For passing bad paper, Collier, not kidnapping girls.”

‘Who knows who they might’ve hired? Some psycho who does kidnap girls. And maybe likes it.”

“Nobody hired nobody,” Sharpe said, though Tate could see in his eyes that he was considering the possibility that one of his thugs had snatched Megan. But five seconds on the defensive was too much for Jack Sharpe. “Running outta patience here, Collier. And whatta I know-I’m just a country boy-but if I’m not mistaken isn’t that slander or libel or some such you’re spouting?”

“So file suit, Jack. But tell me where she is.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Collier. You’re gonna have to look elsewhere. You’re not thinking clear. You bow Prince William as good as your grandfather did before you. If you do a deal like Liberty Park you play hardball. That’s the way business works in these parts. But for Christ’s sake, this ain’t southeast D.C. I’m not gonna hurt a seventeen-year-old girl. Now it’s time for you to leave. I got work to do.”

He sank the next putt into the small cup, which spit the ball back to him.

Tate, chin quivering with rage, stared back at the much calmer face of his opponent.

From the doorway Jimmy asked calmly, “You want me to help him outside?”

Sharpe said, “Naw. Just show him to the door. Hey, so long, Counselor. See you in Richmond next Thursday. Hope you’re rested and comfy. They’re going to rub every inch of your skin off. It’s gonna be pretty to watch.”

16

Rhetoric, Plato wrote, is the universal art of winning the mind by argument.

Tate Collier, at eleven years of age, listened to the Judge recite that definition as the old man rasped a match to light his fragrant pipe and decided that one day he would “do rhetoric.”

Whatever that meant.

He had to wait three years for the chance but finally, as a high school freshman, he argued (what else?) his way into Debate Club, even though it was open only to upperclassmen.

Tournament debating started in colonial America with the Spy Club at Harvard in the early 1700s and opened up to women a hundred years later with the Young Lathes Association at Oberlin, though hundreds of less formal societies, lyceums and bees had always been popular throughout the colonies. By the time Tate was in school, intercollegiate debate had become a practiced institution.

He argued in hundreds of National Debate Tournament bouts as well as the alternative-format-Cross Examination Debate Association-tournaments. He was a member of the forensic honorary fraternities-Delta Sigma Rho, Phi Rho Pi and Pi Kappa Delta-and was now as active in the American Forensics Association as he was in the American Bar Association.

In college-when it was fashionable to be antimilitary, antifrat, anti-ROTC-Tate shunned bell-bottoms and lie-dye for suits with narrow lies and white shirts, There he honed his technique, his logic, his reasoning. If…then…Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. Knocking down straw men, circular logic and ad hominem tactics by his opponents. He fought debaters from Georgetown and George Washington, from Duke and North Carolina and Penn and Johns Hopkins, and he beat them all.

With this talent (and, of course, with the Judge for a grandfather) law school was inevitable. At UVA he’d been the state moot court champion his senior year at the Federal Bar Moot Court Open in the District. Now he frequently taught well-attended appellate advocate continuing-ed courses, and his American Trial Lawyers’ Association tape was a best-seller in the ABA catalogue.

When he’d been a senior at UVA and the champion debater on campus the Judge had traveled down to Charlottesville to see him. As predicted, he’d won the debate (it was the infamous pro-Watergate contest). The Judge told him that he’d heard someone in the audience say, “How’s that Collier boy do it? He looks like a farm boy but when he starts to talk he’s somebody else. It’s like he’s speaking in tongues.”

No, there was no one Tate Collier would not match words with. Yet the incident with Sharpe had left him unnerved. He’d let emotions dictate what he’d said. What was happening to him? He was losing his orator’s touch.

“I blew it,” he muttered. And told Bell what had happened.

“Did he have anything to do with it?”

“I think he did, yeah. He was slick, too slick, He was expecting me. But he was also surprised about something.”

“What?”

“I think something happened he hadn’t planned on. It’s true. I don’t think his boys would kidnap Megan themselves, But I think they hired somebody to do it. Oh, and he knew we were divorced and that Megan was seventeen. Why would he how that if he hadn’t looked into our lives?”

“Are you going to tell Konnie?”

“Oh, sure I am. But people like Sharpe are good. They don’t leave loose ends. You follow the trails and they vanish.”

She picked up the pistol, which he’d set on the dashboard. She slipped it in the glove compartment distastefully. “Aren’t we a pair, Tate? Guns, private eyes.”

He said, “Bett, I’m sorry. About before.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “There was truth in what you said.”

They drove in silence for several moments.

She sighed then asked reflectively, “Do you like your life?” He glanced at her. Responded: “Sure.”

“Just sure?”

“How much more can you be than sure?” “You can be convincing,” she said.

“What’s life,” he asked, “but ups and downs?”

“You ever get lonely?”

Ah, there’s a question for you… Sometimes the women would stay the night, sometimes they’d leave. Sometimes they decided to return to their husbands or lovers or leave him for other men, sometimes they’d talk about getting divorced and sometimes they were single, unattached and waiting for a ring. Sometimes they’d introduce Tate to their parents or their cautious-eyed children or, if they had none, talk about how much they wanted youngsters. A boy first, they’d invariably say, and then a girl.

They all faded from his life and, yes, most nights he was lonely. “I keep pretty busy,” he said. “You?”

She said quickly, “I’m busy too. Everybody needs interior design.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Things working out well with Brad?”

“Oh, Brad’s a dear. He’s a real gentleman. You don’t see many of them. You were one. I mean, you still are.” She laughed. “You know, I keep expecting to see you on Court TV,” she said. “Prosecuting serial killers or terrorists or something. Channel Nine loved you. You gave great interviews.”

“Those were the days.”

“Why’d you quit practice?”

He kept his hands at ten to two on the wheel and his eyes straight ahead.

“Tate?” she repeated.

“Prosecuting’s a young man’s game,” he said. Thinking he was the epitome of credibility.

But Bell said, “That’s an answer. But not the answer.”

“I didn’t quit practice.”

“You know what I mean. You were the best in the state. Remember those rumors that you’d get that job you wanted?”

Solicitor general-the lawyer who represented the government in cases before the Supreme Court-the most important forensic orator in the country. Tate’s grandfather had always hoped his grandson might get that job. And Tate himself had for years had his sights on that job.

“I wanted to spend more time on the farm.”

“Bullshit.” Well, this was definitely a new Bell McCall. The ethereal angel had come to earth with muddy cheeks. ‘Why won’t you tell me?”

“Okay. I lost my taste for blood,” he explained. “I prosecuted a capital case. I won. And I wished I hadn’t.”

Bett had been deeply ashamed that while they were married Tate had sent six men to death row in Jarratt, Virginia. Her horror at this achievement had always seemed ironic to him for she believed in the immortality of souls and Tate did not.

“He was innocent?” she asked.

“No, no. It was more complicated than that. He killed the victim. There was no question about that. But he was probably only guilty of manslaughter at best. Criminally negligent homicide, most likely. The defense offered a plea-probation and counseling. I rejected it and went for lethal injection. The jury gave him life imprisonment. The first week he was in prison, he was killed by other inmates. Actually”-his voice caught-”he was tortured and then he died.”

“God, Tate.”

What a man hears, he may doubt…

“I talked him to death, Bett. I conjured the jurors. I had the gift on my side, not the law. And he’s dead when he shouldn’t be. If he’d been out of prison, had some help, he’d be alive now and probably a fine person.”

But what he does, he cannot doubt.

He waited for her disgust or anger.

But she said only, “I’m sorry.” He looked at her and saw not pity or remorse but simple regret at his pain. “They fired you? The commonwealth's attorney’s office?”

“Oh, no. No. I just quit.”

“I never heard about it.”

“Small case. Not really newsworthy. The story died on the Metro page.”

Staring at the road, Tate confessed, “You know something?”

He felt Bett’s head turn toward him.

He continued, “I wanted to tell you about what happened. When I heard that he’d died I reached for the phone to call you-before any-body else. Even before Konnie. I hadn’t seen you in over a year. Two years maybe. But you were the one I wanted to tell.”

“I wish you had.”

He chuckled. “But you hated me taking capital cases.”

There was a long pause. She said, “Seems to me you’ve served enough time over that one. ‘Most everybody gets a parole hearing, don’t they?” As Tate signaled to make the turn for Bett’s exit she said, “Could we just drive a bit? I don’t feel like going home.”

His hand wavered over the signal stem. He clicked it off.

17

Tate piloted his Lexus back through Centreville, which some of the redder of the rednecks around these parts disparagingly called New Calcutta and New Seoul-because of the immigrants settling here. He made a long loop around Route 29 and turned down a deserted country road.

The sun was low now but the heat seemed worse. The sour, sickly aroma of rotting leaves from last year’s autumn was in the air.

“Tate,” Bett asked slowly, “what if nothing happened?”

“Nothing happened?”

“What if nobody kidnapped her? What if she really did run off? Because she hates us.”

He glanced at her, She continued, “If we find her-”

“When we find her,” he corrected.

“What if she’s so mad at us that she won’t come home?” “We’ll convince her to,” he told her.

“Could you do it, do you think? Talk her into coming back home?”

Can I? he wondered.

There’s a transcendent moment in debate when your opponent has the overwhelming weight of logic and facts on his side and yet still you can win. By leading him in a certain direction you get him to build his entire argument on what appears to be an irrefutable foundation, the logic of which is flawless. But which you nonetheless destroy at the same time as you accept the perfection of his argument.

It’s a moment, Tate tells his classes, just like in fencing, when the red target of a heart is touched lightly with the button of the foil while the fencer’s attention is elsewhere. No flailing away, no chops or heavy strokes, but a simple, deadly tap the opponent never sees coming.

All cats see in the dark.

Midnight is a cat.

Therefore Midnight can see in the dark.

Irrefutable. The purest of logic.

Unless… Midnight is blind.

But what kind of argument could he make to convince Megan to return home?

He thought about the two letters she’d written and he didn’t have any thoughts at all; he saw only her perfect anger.

“We’ll get her back,” he told Bett. “I’ll do that. Don’t worry”

Bett pulled down the makeup mirror in the sun visor to apply lipstick. Tate was suddenly taken back to the night they met-at that party in Charlottesville. He’d driven her home afterward and had spent a passionate half hour in the front seat of the car removing every trace of her pink Revlon.

Five weeks later he’d suggested they move in together.

A two-year romance on campus. He’d graduated from law school the year Bell got her undergraduate degree. They left idyllic Charlottesville for the District of Columbia and his clerkship at federal District Court; Bell got a job managing a New Age bookstore. They lived the bland, easy life that Washington offered a young couple just starting out. Tate’s consolation was his job and Bell’s that she finally was close to her twin sister, who lived in Baltimore and had been too ill to travel to Charlottesville,

Married in May

His antebellum plantation built the next spring.

Megan born two years later

And three years after that, he and Bett were divorced.

When he looked back on their relationship his perfect memory was no longer so perfect. What he recalled seemed to be merely sharp peaks of an island that was the tip of a huge undersea mountain range. The wispy, ethereal woman he’d seen at the party, singing a sailor’s mournful song of farewell. Walks in the country. Driving through the Blue Ridge toward Massanutten Mountain. Making love in a forest near the Luray Caverns. Tate had always enjoyed being out of doors- the cornfields, the beach, backyard barbecues. But Bett’s interest in the outside arose only at dusk. “When the line between the worlds is at its thinnest,” she’d told him once, sitting on the porch of an inn deep in the Appalachians.

“What worlds?” he asked.

“Shhh, listen,” she’d said, enchanting him even while he knew it was an illusion. Which was, he supposed, irrefutable proof of her ability to cast a spell. Betty Sue McCall, devoted to her twin sister, with whom she had some mystical link that unnerved even rationalist Tate, reedy folk singer, collector of the unexplained, the arcane, the invisible… Tate had never figured out if her sublime mystique magnified their love falsely or obscured it, or indeed if it was the essence of their love.

Magic…

In the end, of course, it didn’t matter, for they separated completely, moved far away from each other emotionally. She became for him what she’d been when he was first captivated by her: the dark woman of his imagination.

Today she prodded her face in the mirror, rubbed at some invisible blemish as he remembered her doing many times. She’d always been terribly vain.

She flipped the mirror back, “Pull over, Tate.”

He glanced at her. No, it was not an imperfection she’d been examining; she’d been crying again.

“What is it?”

“Just pull over.”

He did, into the Park Service entrance to the Bull Run Baffle-field.

Bett climbed from the car and walked up the gentle slope. Tate followed and when they were on level ground they stopped and simultaneously lifted their eyes toward the tumultuous clouds overhead,

“What is it, Bett?” He watched her stare at the night sky. “Looking for an angel to help you decide something?”

Suddenly he was worried that she’d take offense at this-an implicit reference to her flighty side-though he hadn’t meant it sardonically.

But she only smiled and lowered her eyes from the sky. “I was never into that angel stuff. Too Hallmark card, you know. But I wouldn’t mind a spirit or two.”

“Well,” he said, “this’d be the place. General Jackson came charging out of those trees right over there and stopped the Union boys cold in their tracks. Right here’s where he earned himself the name Stonewall.” The low sun glistened off the Union cannons’ black barrels in the distance.

Bett turned, took his hands and pulled him to her. “Hold me, Tate. Please.”

He put his arms around her-for the first time in years. They stood this way for a long moment. Then found a bench and sat. He kept his arm around her. She took his other hand. And Tate wished suddenly, painfully, that Megan were here with them. The three of them together and all the hard events of the past dead and buried, like the poor bodies of the troops who’d died bloody and broken on this very spot.

Wind in the trees, billowing clouds overhead.

Suddenly a streak of yellow flashed past them.

“Oh, what’s that?” Bett said. “Look.”

He glanced at the bird that alighted near them.

“That’d be, let me see, a common yellowthroat. Nests on the ground and feeds in the tree canopy.”

Her laugh scared it away. “You know all these facts. Where do you learn them?”

A girlfriend, age twenty-three, had been a bird-watcher.

“I read a lot,” he said.

More silence,

“What are you thinking?” she wondered after a moment.

A question women often ask when they find themselves in close contact with a man and silence descends.

“Unfinished business?” he suggested. “You and me?”

She considered this. “I used to think things were finished between us. But then I started to look at it like doing your will before you get on a plane.”

“How’s that?”

“If you crash, well, maybe all the loose ends’re tied up but wouldn’t you still rather hang around for a little while longer?”

“There’s a metaphor for you.” He laughed.

She spent a moment examining the sky again. “When you argued before the Supreme Court five or six years ago. That big civil rights case. And the Post did that write-up on you. I told everybody you were my ex-husband. I was proud of you.”

“Really?” He was surprised.

“You know what occurred to me then, reading about you? It seemed that when we were married you were my voice. I didn’t have one of my own.”

“You were quiet, that’s true,” he said.

“That’s what happened to us, I think. Part of it anyway. I had to find mine.”

“And when you went looking…, so long. No half measures for you. No compromises. No bargaining.”

The old Bett would have grown angry or dipped into her enigmatic silence at these critical words. But she merely nodded in agreement. “That was me, all right. I was so rigid. I had all the right answers. If something wasn’t just perfect I was gone. Jobs, classes… husband. Oh, Tate, I’m not proud of it. But I felt so young. When you have a child, things do change. You become more..

“Enduring?”

“That’s it. Yes. You always know the right word.”

He said, “I never had any idea what you were thinking about back then.”

Bett’s thoughts might have been on what to make for dinner. Or King Arthur. Or a footnote in a term paper. She might have been thinking of a recent tarot card reading.

She might even have been thinking about him.

“I was always afraid to say anything around you, Tate. I always felt tongue-tied. Like I had nothing to say that interested you.”

“I don’t love you for your oratorical abilities.” He paused, noting the tense of the verb. “I mean, that’s not what attracted me to you.”

Then reflected: Oh, she’s so right-what she’d said earlier… We humans have this terrible curse; we alone among the animals believe in the possibility of change-in ourselves and those we love. It can kill us and maybe, just maybe, it can save our doomed hearts. The problem is we never know, until it’s too late, which.

“You know when I missed you the most?” she said finally “Not on holidays or picnics. But when I was in Belize-”

‘What?” Tate asked suddenly

She waved lethargically at a yellow jacket. “You know, you and I always talked about going there.”

They’d read a book about the Mayan language and the linguists who trooped through the jungles in Belize on the Yucatan to examine the ruins and decipher the Indian code. The area had fascinated them both and they planned a trip. But they’d never made the journey. At first they couldn’t afford it. Tate had just graduated from law school and started working as a judge’s clerk for less money than a good legal secretary could make. Then came the long, long hours in the commonwealth’s attorney's office. After that, when they had the money saved up, Bett’s sister had a serious relapse and nearly died; Bett couldn’t leave home. Then Megan came along. And three years after that they were divorced.

“When did you go?” he asked.

“Three years ago January. Didn’t Megan tell you?”

“No.”

“I went with Bill. The lobbyist?”

Tate shook his head, not remembering who he was. He asked, “Have a good time?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said haltingly “Very nice. It was hotter than Hades. Really hot.”

“But you like the heat,” he remembered. “Did you see the ruins?”

“Well, Bill wasn’t into ruins so much. We did see one. We took a day trip. I… Well, I was going to say-I wished you’d been with me.”

“Two years ago February,” Tate said, ‘What?”

“I was there too.”

“No! Are you serious?” She laughed hard. “Who’d you go with?”

Her face grew wry when it took him a moment to remember the name of his companion.

“Cathy.”

He believed it was Cathy.

“Did you get to the ruins?”

‘Well, we didn’t exactly. It was more of a sail boarding trip. I don’t believe it… Damn, how ‘bout that. We finally got down there. We talked about that vacation for years.”

“Our pilgrimage.”

“Great place,” he said, wondering how dubious his voice sounded. “Our hotel had a really good restaurant.”

“It was fun,” she said enthusiastically. “And pretty.”

“Very pretty,” he confirmed. The trip had been agonizingly dull.

Her face was turned toward a distant line of trees. She was thinking probably of Megan now, and the Yucatan had slipped far from her thoughts.

“Let me take you home,” he said. “There’s nothing more we can do tonight. We should get some rest. I’ll call Konnie, tell him about Sharpe.”

She nodded.

They drove to Fairfax and he pulled up in front of her house. She sat in the front seat in silence for a while.

“You want to come in?” she asked suddenly.

His answer was balanced on the head of a pin and for a long moment he didn’t have a clue which way it was going to tilt.

Tate pulled her to him, hugged her, smelled the scent of Opium perfume in her hair. He said, “Better not.”

18

Crazy Megan reveals her true self.

She isn’t crazy at all and never has been. What C.M. is is furious.

He’s going down, she mutters. This asshole Peter is going down hard.

Megan McCall was angry too but she was much less optimistic than her counterpart as she moved cautiously through the corridors of the hospital, clutching three boxes of plastic dining utensils under her arm and her glass knife in the other.

Though she was feeling better physically, having eaten half a box of her favorite cereal-Raisin Bran-and drunk two Pepsis.

Listening.

There!

She heard a shuffle, a few steps of Peter’s feet. Maybe a whisper of breath.

Another shuffle. A voice.

Was he muttering her name?

Yes, no?

She couldn’t tell.

This could be it! Got a good grip on the knife?

Be quiet! Megan thought. She shivered and felt a burst of nausea from the fear. Wished she hadn’t eaten so fast. If I puke he’ll hear and that’ll be it…

She inhaled slowly.

A clunk nearby. More footsteps. These were close.

Megan gasped and closed her eyes, remaining completely still, huddling behind an orange fiberglass chair.

She pressed into the wall and began mentally working her way through Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits album line by line. She cried noiselessly throughout “Me and Bobby McGee,” then grew defiant once more when she mind-sang “Down on Me.”

Peter Matthews wandered away, back toward his room, and she continued on. Ten endless minutes later she made it to the end of the corridor she’d decided to use.

It was here that she was going to lay the trap.

She needed a dead end-she had to be sure of which direction he’d come from. Crazy Megan points out, though, that it also means she’ll have no escape route if the trap doesn’t work.

Who’s the pussy now? Megan asked.

Like, excuse me, C.M. snaps in response. Just letting you know.

She rubbed her hand over the wall.

Sheetrock.

Megan had recalled one time she’d been at her father’s house. A few years ago. He’d been dating a woman with three children. As usual he’d been thinking about marrying her-he always did that, it was so weird-and’d gone so far as to actually hire a contractor to divide the downstairs bedroom into two smaller ones for her young twins. Halfway through the project they’d broken up; the construction went unfinished but Megan recalled watching the contractors easily slice through the Sheetrock with small saws. The material had seemed as insubstantial as cardboard.

She took a plastic dinner knife from the box. It was like a toy tool. And for a moment the hopelessness of her plan overwhelmed her. But then she started to cut. Yes! In five minutes she’d sliced a good-sized slit into the wall. The blades were sharper than she’d expected.

For about fifteen minutes the cutting went well. Then, almost all at once, the serrated edge of the knife wore smooth and dull. She tossed it aside and took a new one. Started cutting again.

She lowered her head to the plasterboard and inhaled its stony moist smell. It brought back a memory of Joshua. She’d helped him move into his cheap apartment near George Mason University. The workmen were fixing holes in the walls with plasterboard and this smell reminded her of his studio. Tears flooded into her eyes.

What’re you doing? an impatient Crazy Megan asks.

I miss him, Megan answered silently.

Shut up and saw. Time for that later

Cutting, cutting… Blisters formed on the palm of her right hand. She ignored them and kept up the hypnotic motion. Resting her forehead against the Sheetrock, smelling mold and wet plaster. Hand moving back and forth by itself. Thoughts tumbling…

Thinking about her parents.

Thinking about bears…

No, bears can’t talk. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t learn something from them.

She thought of the Whispering Bears story, the illustration in the book of the two big animals watching the town burn to the ground. Megan thought about the point of the story. She liked her version better than Dr. Matthews’s; the moral to her was: people fuck up.

But it didn’t have to be that way. Somebody in the village could have said right up front, “Bears can’t talk. Forget about ‘em.” Then the story would have ended: “And they lived happily ever after.”

Working with her left hand now, which was growing a crop of its own blisters. Her knees were on fire and her forehead too, which she’d pressed into the wall for leverage. Her back also was in agony. But Megan McCall felt curiously buoyant. From the food and caffeine inside her, from the simple satisfaction of cutting through the wall, from the fact that she was doing something to get out of this shithole.

Megan was thinking too about what she’d do when she got out.

Dr. Matthews had tricked her-to get her to write those letters. But the awesome thing was that what she’d written had been true. Oh, she was pissed at her parents. And those bad feelings had been bottled up in her forever, it seemed. But now they were out. They weren’t gone, no, but they were buzzing around her head, getting smaller, like a blown-up balloon you let go of. And she had a thought: The anger goes away; the love doesn’t. Not if it’s real. And she thought maybe, just maybe-with Tate and Bett-the love might be real. Or at least she might unearth a patch of real love. And once she understood that she could recall other memories.

Thinking of the time she and her father went to Pentagon City on a spur-of-the-moment shopping spree and he’d let her drive the Lexus back home, saying only, “The speedometer stops at one forty and you pay any tickets yourself.” They’d opened the sunroof and laughed all the way home.

Or the time she and her mother went to some boring New Age lecture. After fifteen minutes Bett had whispered, “Let’s blow this joint.” They’d snuck out the back door of the school, found a snow saucer in the playground and huddled together on it, whooping and screaming all the way to the bottom of the hill. Then they’d raced each other to Starbucks for hot chocolate arid brownies.

And she even thought of her sweet sixteen party the only time in- how long?-five, six years she’d seen her parents together For a moment they’d stood close to each other, near the buffet table, while her father gave this awesome speech about her. She’d cried like crazy hearing his words. For a few minutes they seemed like a perfectly normal family.

If I get home, she now thought.. No, when I get home, I’ll talk to them. I’ll sit down with them. Oh, I’ll give ‘em flicking hell but then I’ll talk. I’ll do what I should’ve done a long lime ago.

The anger goes away; the love doesn’t…

A blister burst. Oh, that hurt. Oh, Jesus. She closed her eyes and slipped her hand under her arm and pressed hard. The sting subsided and she continued to cut.

After a half hour Megan had cut a six-by-three-foot hole in the Sheetrock. She worked the piece out and rested it against the floor then leaned against the wall for a few minutes, catching her breath. She was sweating furiously.

The hole was ragged and there was plaster dust all over the floor She was worried that Peter would see it and guess she’d set a trap for him. But the window at this end of the corridor was small and covered with grease and dirt; very little light made it through. She doubted that the boy would ever see the trap until it was too late.

She snuck back to where his father-or someone-had bricked up the entrance to the administration area of the hospital and, quietly, started carting cinder blocks back to the trap, struggling under their weight. When she’d lugged eight bricks back to the corridor she began stacking them in the hole she’d cut, balancing them on top of one another, slightly off center.

Megan then used her glass knife and sliced strips off the tail of her shirt. She knotted them into a ten-foot length of rope and tied one end to one of the blocks in the stack. Finally she placed the piece of Sheetrock back in the opening and examined her work. She’d lead Peter back here and when he walked past the trap she’d pull the rope. A hundred pounds of concrete would crash down on top of him. She’d leap on him with the knife and stab him-she decided she couldn’t kill him but would slash his hands and feet-to make sure he couldn’t attack or chase her. Then she’d demand the keys and run like hell.

Megan walked softly down to the main corridor and looked back. Couldn’t see anything except the tail of rope.

Now, she just needed some bait.

“Guess that’s gonna be us, right?” she asked, speaking out loud, though in a whisper.

Who else? Crazy Megan answers.

Bett McCall poured herself a glass of chardonnay and kicked her shoes off.

She was so accustomed to the dull thud of the bass and drums leaching through the floor from Megan’s room upstairs that the absence of the sound of Stone Temple Pilots or Santana brought her to tears.

It’s so frustrating, she thought. People can deal with almost anything if they can talk about it. You argue. You make up and live more or less comfortably for the rest of your lives. Or you discover irreconcilable differences and you slowly separate into different worlds. Or you find that you’re soul mates. But if the person you love is physically gone-if you can’t talk-then you have less than nothing. It’s the worst kind of pain.

The house hummed and tapped silently. A motor somewhere clicked, the computer in the next room emitted a pitch slightly higher than the refrigerator’s.

The sounds of alone.

Maybe she’d fake a bath, Bett thought. No, that would remind her of the soap dish Megan was going to give her. Maybe…

The phone rang. Heart racing, she leapt for it. Praying that it was Megan. Please… Please… Let it be her. I want to hear her voice so badly.

Or at least Tate.

But it was neither. Disappointed at first, she listened to the caller, nodding, growing more and more interested in what she heard. “All right,” she said. “Sure… No, a half hour would be fine…Thank you. Really, thank you.”

After she hung up she dropped heavily into the couch and sipped her wine.

Wonderful, she thought, feeling greatly relieved after talking to him for only three minutes. The caller was Megan’s other therapist-a colleague of Dr. Hanson’s, a doctor named Bill Peters, and he was coming over to speak to her about the girl. He didn’t have any specific news. But he wanted to talk to her about her daughter’s disappearance. He’d sounded so reassuring, so comforting.

She was curious only about one thing that the doctor had said during his call. Why did he want to see her alone? Without Tate there?