Stalked

46

The second glass of shiraz made Helen Danning's head swim. She usually avoided alcohol, but a few days at Evelyn's house had relaxed her. She sat in a fraying easy chair and hummed as she listened to the soundtrack from Damn Yankees on the stereo. She had seen nearly every performance of the show at the Ordway, with Jerry Lewis in the role of the devil. He was a great devil.

Helen filed her fingernails to perfect crescents and swung up her legs to do the same with her toenails. She was particular about her nails, makeup, lipstick, and hair. Everything had to be clean and in place. She ironed all her clothes, even her socks and underwear, when they were fresh out of the dryer. She kept her countertops disinfected and sparkling and never left a dirty dish in the sink. Evelyn wasn't so fussy. Her friend liked mess creeping in at the edges, but she didn't complain when Helen obsessively cleaned her house.

Evelyn warbled the chorus from the show tune on the speakers. She dipped to one knee and spread both arms wide as she bounded into the living room.

Helen laughed.

"That's what I like to see," Evelyn told her. "You laughing. You with your feet up."

"I'm a little drunk," Helen said.

"Good."

Evelyn reached inside the hall closet and took out a fleece jacket covered with strips of silver reflective tape. She shrugged it on.

"You're going jogging?" Helen asked. "It's late."

"I know, I got caught up in my latest masterpiece." Evelyn wiped a smudge of paint from her cheek.

"It's slippery out there."

The windows were pasted with snow.

Evelyn shrugged. "I'm used to it. Anyway, there's nothing but flurries now. The storm tracked north. Duluth is getting buried."

"I'm hungry," Helen said.

"I won't be long, and then we can have dinner." Evelyn sighed as her golden retriever launched a frenzy of barking in the front of the house. "That dog barks at every damn deer that wanders into the woods. Edgar! Leave Bambi alone! You know, I found him nose to nose with a moose one morning, and the moose was looking at that dog like he was nuts."

Evelyn padded over to the ottoman in her white socks, pushed Helen's legs aside, and sat down. She began putting on her tennis shoes and eyed Helen thoughtfully.

"So did you write back to that woman who sent you the e-mail? Eric's wife?"

Helen frowned. "I told her to leave me alone."

"You think that's the right thing to do?"

"She's a cop. I don't want anything to do with cops."

"She's also a woman whose husband was murdered. You might be able to help her. Don't you think you should?"

"I don't want to get in the middle of this."

"You already are."

"What do you mean?"

Evelyn dug into the pocket of her sweat pants and pulled out a scrap of paper. She handed it to Helen. It was a phone number with a 218 area code.

"Somebody called me at the shop today," Evelyn said. "He was with the Duluth police."

Helen tensed. "Oh, my God."

"They're looking for you, honeybun."

"You didn't tell him anything, did you?"

"Of course not, but he knew we were best friends. He gave me his number and said I should ask you to call him."

Helen bolted up. "I have to go."

Evelyn put a calming hand on her chest. "Whoa there, girl. Think about this. Why don't you call and talk to him? What would a phone call hurt? I know you had a bad time with the police in college, but this is different."

"Evelyn, I just want this all to go away. I want to live my life and not have anyone bother me, you know?"

"It's too late for that," Evelyn told her. "You might be the one person who can help them catch this guy."

"All I ever wanted was to put this behind me."

"I know. Look, have some more wine, and think about it, okay? We can talk about it over dinner."

"I may not be here when you come back."

"And miss my spinach spaghetti and meatless meatballs? Bite your tongue."

"I'm scared."

"Don't be. I told you before, you're safe here. Okay? Just hang on, and I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Couldn't you skip your run tonight?" Helen asked.

"I could skip it every night, but then I'd never do it. I won't be long." She jogged over to the front door. The golden retriever was still barking outside. "Edgar! You don't even like venison! Stupid dog."

When she was gone, Helen shut the music off. She put the second glass of wine down on the edge of a bookshelf. She was keyed up, and she got out of the easy chair and paced. She used the remote control to turn on the television, and she stood with her arms folded, watching an old sitcom, before she realized she wasn't even listening to the dialogue. She shut the television off, too.

Helen thought about Eric Sorenson, the attractive man with the flowing blond hair. When he first approached her at the theater, she didn't trust him, and she didn't want to hear his story. It was only when he told her what had happened to his wife that she agreed to meet him for dinner after the show. That was a mistake. She didn't want to get involved. She had been running away from the assault in college since she was twenty years old, and the last thing she needed was this stranger bringing it all up again.

Then, three days later, it was all over the news. The man who had sat across the table from her was dead. Murdered. His wife was the suspect.

His wife, who had sent an e-mail on Helen's blog. I need your help.

Helen didn't want to help. She didn't want to be pulled into any of this. She had lived a long time on her own, keeping her world immaculate, losing herself in musicals every night. She wanted to be left alone, to be safe, to forget. But Evelyn was right. It was too late to do that. She was in the middle of everything, whether she liked it or not.

She retrieved her glass of wine and finished it. She sat back down in the easy chair, closed her eyes, and turned on the rest of the Damn Yankees soundtrack. She listened to it all the way to the end, where the devil gets outsmarted, where the good guy gets his soul back. When it was over, Helen wondered if that could happen in real life. She wondered if you could ever outrun the devil, or if he would always get you in the end.

She looked at the scrap of paper with the phone number on it.

Call the police. It sounded so simple, but Evelyn didn't know what she was asking Helen to do. And for what? She had no evidence of anything. For all she knew, Eric's wife did kill him. She had nothing to tell them, not really.

Helen picked up the phone, felt its weight in her hand, and put it down again. She was having trouble breathing. If the cop answered, she wasn't sure if she could talk. She didn't know what to say. Her mouth was dry. She walked away from the phone and stared at it from across the room. She didn't owe Eric anything. She didn't owe his wife. The only person she owed was herself.

Then do it for yourself, she thought.

Helen marched back to the phone and dialed the number before her hesitation made her freeze. She held her breath as the phone rang, and an instant later, someone picked it up.

"Hello," the voice said.

Helen was speechless with surprise. "Oh," she blurted finally. "Is this the Duluth police?"

"No, it's not."

"Well, does a policeman live there?"

"No, you've got the wrong number."

"I'm sorry," Helen said.

She hung up and repunched the buttons carefully, reciting them aloud from Evelyn's note. She waited as the phone rang.

"Hello," the same voice said.

Helen didn't say anything this time. Her brain raced. Her heart took off like a rocket.

"Who's there?" the man asked loudly. When Helen was silent, he swore and hung up on her. The dial tone buzzed in her ear.

She laid the phone gently back in its cradle. Her body went warm with sweat, and her bowels constricted. Her skin bubbled with gooseflesh.

If Evelyn were here, she'd say, Get a grip, honeybun. So I got the number wrong.

But Evelyn wouldn't make a mistake like that.

Where was she? She should be back by now. Evelyn never jogged for more than half an hour in the evenings, and when Helen checked the mantel clock, she realized that an hour had slipped by while she was listening to the music.

Get a grip, honeybun. So I'm a little late.

Maybe Evelyn had sprained an ankle. Maybe she had found an injured animal by the highway and was trying to rescue it. She was always doing that.

Maybe.

Helen backed up slowly and silently until her hand grazed the north wall of the house, and then she stood motionless, studying the shadows in the hallway that led to the bedrooms. She sucked her upper lip between her teeth and bit it hard.

The dog wasn't barking anymore. Why?

Maybe the deer was gone. Maybe Edgar was asleep.

You've been drinking, she told herself. You're paranoid.

Helen followed the wall toward the rear porch that overlooked the river. When she reached the easy chair where she had been sitting, she reached behind and shut off the lamp, bathing the house in darkness. She navigated around the wicker furniture and then put a hand on the cold glass as she stared outside through the storm door. Somewhere in the night, below the garden, behind the weeping willow that brushed the ground with its dangling branches, was the Mississippi. She couldn't see a light anywhere. It reminded her again of how much she hated darkness and open spaces, how much she preferred to be cloistered where it was bright and crowded.

You need to go. Now.

He's here.

Helen cracked open the porch door and slid outside into the bitter air. The wooden deck was glazed with ice. She nearly fell as she hurriedly took two steps down to the grass, which crackled with frost.

Her car was steps away, parked beside Evelyn's old tool shed.

All she had to do was make it from here to there.

All she had to do was get in her car and drive away. She could call Evelyn from the road. Evelyn would be safe at home by then and cross at Helen for leaving. Nothing had happened to her. Helen was imagining the fog of menace around her. The presence of the devil.

She could drive to Duluth and find Eric's wife and put an end to a lifetime of running.

Twenty yards of open space, twenty yards of night, lay between her and the car. Then she would be free.

She remembered that the soundtrack to Show Boat was in her CD player, and she smiled at the idea of listening to it as she drove. She was thinking about that black man singing "Ol' Man River" as she ran for the car. She was thinking how scared she was of dying as she felt the hands around her throat.

47

Dan Erickson had a crystal glass of gin in his hand, and he was dressed in black slacks and a dress shirt, with a loosened tie hanging around his neck. His hair was mussed. When he saw Stride in his doorway at midnight, his mouth squeezed into a frown, and his eyes betrayed his anxiety. Stride laid two hands on Dan's chest and shoved him back into the house, where he stumbled on the wood floor, his drink and ice cubes spilling, the heavy crystal rolling away and bumping on the wall.

"What's wrong with you?" Dan demanded.

"He's got her, you stupid, arrogant son of a bitch!" Stride shouted. "He's got Serena, and I want to know who he is!"

Dan brushed his hair out of his eyes. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't play games with me. Don't even think about it. Someone put your balls in a vise, and you went and hired Serena to get you out of it."

"She told you that?"

"What, do you want a refund on your bill? It's time to come clean, Dan. I don't care if it means you lose everything. You're going to tell me what's going on."

"I don't have to tell you a thing."

Stride shook his head. "Lauren may have January lake water in her veins, but not you. I don't think it's only been about power and money with you."

"Then I guess I'm shallower than you think."

"Okay, maybe you are," Stride said. "I don't give a shit. What I'm telling you is that the life you know is over one way or another. It's all coming out. You can tell me right now and help me try to save Serena's life, or you can shut up and let the reporters start feeding on you tomorrow. Take your pick."

Dan leaned against the wall, exhaling like the air squealing from a tire. When he retreated down the hallway, Stride followed. A walnut door led into a dark office, where a computer screen glowed on Dan's desk. He took a seat in the reclining chair and rocked back, staring at the ceiling, his legs spread, his arms dangling. There was a photo of him and Lauren on the wall over his head, the two of them smiling and looking prosperous.

"I'm sorry about Serena."

"Sorry doesn't change anything," Stride said.

Dan sat up straight. "You know why I'm so good at putting people in prison? I understand how criminals think. I know what it's like to go after something you want and not give any thought to the consequences. I'm like a teenager getting laid and not using protection."

"You're wasting my time, Dan."

"I just want you to understand, okay? But you don't. You're too disciplined, Stride. Always in control."

"That's the last thing I am."

"Well, you've never let a woman lead you around by the cock, have you? That's my life."

Stride heard movement behind him and saw Lauren waiting in the pale light of the doorway, listening. Their eyes met. He had never seen her blue eyes so intense and bitter cold. She sauntered into the office, her hands in the pockets of stonewashed blue jeans. She wore a navy-blue flannel shirt, untucked, with the top two buttons undone, and suede boots.

"What's going on?" she asked.

Dan glared at her, and Stride saw in his expression what it was like to spend a lifetime of impotence under a rich woman's thumb. "This doesn't concern you."

"No? I heard you mention your cock, Dan. That always concerns me."

"Funny."

"It's not funny at all," Lauren said. "What have you done?"

Dan was silent. Lauren turned to Stride with a question in her eyes.

"He's being blackmailed," Stride said. "He hired Serena to be the go-between. The blackmailer kidnapped her tonight."

"Oh, my God."

"This guy is blowing up all the mines he buried, Dan," Stride told him. "Mitchell Brandt was paying off your blackmailer over an insider trading scheme, and this guy decided to fuck him. You're next. Don't you get it, Dan? Your number's up. This guy is capable of anything. We think he's already added rape and murder to his extortion racket."

"How much did you pay him?" Lauren asked her husband.

Dan didn't answer.

"How much?"

"A hundred and ten thousand dollars."

"You idiot," Lauren snapped.

"What does he have on you?" Stride asked.

Dan hesitated and looked at Lauren.

"Tell him," she said. "Tell both of us."

Dan shrugged. "It was Tanjy."

"Did you rape her?" Stride asked. "Did you kill her? Is that what this is all about?"

"No! We were having an affair."

Stride shook his head. "Why was that worth so much money?"

"You know what Tanjy's fantasies were like. We did things that no one would understand. He had photos of us. It would have been devastating if people found out."

"Did you kill Tanjy to keep her quiet?" Stride asked.

"No, no, that's not what happened at all."

Lauren's face was a mask of granite. "You realize what this means. This is all going to be in the papers." She looked at Stride. "Am I right?"

Stride nodded.

" Washington is gone," she told Dan. "We're ruined."

"It was never supposed to come out," Dan protested.

"Who do you think you are, JFK? Bill Clinton? You think you can get away with anything? I can't believe what you've done to me. It's all over now, Dan. Do you realize that? You just threw our lives away."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Was it really worth it?" Lauren demanded. "Was she worth it?"

Dan stared at her hard, and Stride wondered if it was the first time in his life that he had told her the truth. "Yeah, she was."

Lauren stalked across the room and slapped him so hard it sounded like a rifle firing. It was an end-of-life slap. End of everything. Lauren and Dan were over the cliff. She turned and marched out of the room, and five seconds later the front door slammed so hard that the old house quivered.

"We need to find this guy," Stride repeated. "I need to know who he is."

"I have no idea."

"Then we're going to sit here and figure out how he tore apart your life, and how he tore apart Mitchell Brandt's life, and how he knew about Sonia and the goddamn sex club. And don't tell me you didn't know about the club."

"I knew about it," Dan admitted. "Look, Stride, I didn't want to tell you this, but there's something else. I don't think it will help us find him, but you should probably know about it."

"Go on."

"This guy's obsessed with Serena," Dan said. "He was obsessed with her from the very beginning."

"What do you mean?" Stride asked. He could barely breathe.

"I mean, it wasn't an accident that I hired Serena to be the go-between. That was part of the deal. Part of the price. He didn't just want money when he first approached me. He wanted Serena."

48

Stride let the silence drag out between them and grow violent. Hostility filled the room like smoke flooding from the air vents. They stared at each other. The computer on Dan's desk whirred as its fan blew. Somewhere outside, the engine of an expensive sedan raced as Lauren fled from the garage and away from the estate.

"I had no idea anything like this would happen," Dan said.

"You should have had alarm bells going off in your head, but you just didn't care. You were trying to save your ass."

Dan shrugged. "All right, maybe I was."

"If something happens to Serena, I will destroy you."

"You'll have to take a number."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"Look, I did not think it would go down like this. You know as well I do that most blackmailers aren't violent. They're cowards at heart. I thought maybe this guy had a crush on Serena, or hell, I thought they might be in it together. She was new in town. I had no idea who the hell she was."

Stride didn't believe him, but it didn't matter. He shoved his anger aside. "Do you have any clue who this guy is?"

"I told you, no."

"Did Serena?"

"If she did, she never told me."

"How did he contact you?"

"The first time was by phone," Dan said. "He called me at home."

"When?"

"Last Tuesday."

"What did he say?" Stride asked.

"He knew about my affair with Tanjy."

"What did he want?"

"He wanted ten thousand dollars, or he was going to tell the press and Lauren about my affair."

"Did he say why he wanted Serena involved?"

"No, he just said he knew I wasn't going to want to handle the dirty work personally, so there was someone who could be our go-between. I don't know how he knew her, or why he wanted her."

"How did he know about you and Tanjy?"

"I have no idea."

"What happened next?"

"I paid him, end of story. Serena handled the drop. A few days later, he gave Serena a very explicit photograph of me and Tanjy in Grassy Point Park. This time the price went way up."

"How did he get the photo?"

"Like I told Serena, I don't know. Tanjy took them, but I deleted them from her computer. No way this guy should have been able to find them."

"Were the photos stored anywhere else? Were they on your computer?"

"No, Tanjy took them on a digital camera, and I uploaded them to her PC for her. As far as I know, that was it. She sure as hell wouldn't have shared them with anyone else. I got rid of them back in November, after the rape charge blew up and Tanjy and I split."

"So she could have retrieved them."

"Tanjy? That girl needed a manual to turn her computer on."

"Well, someone retrieved them. Unless this guy found them before you deleted them."

"Then why wait to blackmail me?"

Stride nodded. He didn't understand the logic, but he also realized he was getting close to something important. The blackmailer had to have access to Tanjy's computer.

"What if this guy is a hacker?" Stride asked. "He could be intercepting e-mails, or breaking in via an Internet connection, or piggybacking on a wireless network."

Stride thought about everything else the blackmailer knew and felt his adrenaline surging. Mitchell Brandt and his insider trading scheme. Dates, trades, dollars, Brandt had said. The sex club and Sonia, who kept detailed records about the club on her desktop. Photos of Tanjy and Dan. Stored on Tanjy's computer.

"No way this guy got into Tanjy's machine from outside," Dan said. "It must be someone who was inside her apartment."

Stride thought about his first visit to Tanjy's apartment and then remembered the kid from across the street who spent his days spying on Tanjy from his bedroom window. What the hell was his name? Doug? Duke? If Stride got into her place simply by unlocking a window, how many times had this kid done the same thing? What if he booted up Tanjy's computer and found a gold mine?

Stride was excited, but then he discarded the thought. Even if the kid had a connection to Tanjy, it didn't explain how he could have known what Mitchell Brandt or Sonia Bezac were hiding.

He thought about what Dan had just said. "Why are you so sure this guy didn't hack in from outside?"

"I made sure she installed a state-of-the-art firewall," Dan replied. "I knew the kind of stuff she was keeping on her system, and I didn't want anyone swiping it."

"You said she was hopeless with computers."

"Sure, she called Byte Patrol. They configured the firewall for her."

Stride stopped. Everything stopped. "Byte Patrol? Those are the guys in the purple vans, right? And the purple shirts?"

"Yeah, you see them all over town."

One by one, Stride remembered. The details broke away from the mass of facts in his head and dropped like coins plinking into the metal tray of a slot machine. The cherries lined up, and he cashed out.

He was in Tanjy's bedroom, and he saw the neon purple folder next to her computer.

He was in Sonia's living room, and she was telling him about the hacker-proof security system on her computer. Installed by Byte Patrol.

He was talking to Mitchell Brandt and hearing about the research software he used. Designed by Byte Patrol.

He was inside Silk, and Sonia was chewing out a tech in a purple shirt. The guy was like a bear, his giant paws over the keyboard. Stride tried to picture exactly what the man looked like, but all he could remember was the instant where the tech caught Stride's eye and winked.

The man from Byte Patrol knew exactly who Stride was. He was laughing at his own joke. This was the man who knew everything hidden inside the computers. This was the man who was pulling strings and selling secrets all over the city. This was the man who had raped Maggie.

Stride thought about Eric talking to Tony Wells. How can you tell if someone ordinary could be a sexual predator?

This was the man, Stride thought, that Eric went to see that night.

This was the man who had Serena.

49

Serena knew she was awake because of the pain. Her skull felt as if someone had punched it in like an eggshell. When she turned her neck, a jolt of agony shivered up her spine and made her whole body jerk. When she opened her eyes, she saw only black but felt the world spin. She tried to move her hands, but they were bound. So were her feet. She was pinned down, a butterfly captured by a collector. The mattress below her felt like burlap and scratched her skin. It smelled of mold and blood. The air carried a waft of gutted fish spilling out roe, bones, and organs. She tried to talk, shout, cry, and scream, but she was gagged, and the taste of wet cotton soured her mouth. Her throat squealed out a sound so pitiful that the wind laughed at it.

The blizzard was a monster inches away, noisy and ferocious. Steel rattled and quivered as the gales assaulted metal walls. She heard hissing, like a thousand snakes, which was the whip of snow, as furious as a tornado. Wherever she was, she may as well have been outside, because there was no protection here from the wind and cold blasting through the walls. The frozen air across her skin told her she was naked. Her bare flesh puckered. Her toes curled, and she tightened her fingers into fists. A drop of water fell on her through the ceiling, tracing an icy trail down her thigh.

She cursed herself for being so stupid. Not telling Jonny. Not watching her back. She was a prisoner now, and she didn't fool herself with hopes of rescue, and she knew it was going to be bad. The kind of bad when you realized there was no God coming for you. The kind of bad she had been through before.

He was in the room with her. Every few seconds, she heard the screech of wood and nails separating as he shifted in a rickety chair. Without seeing him, she felt his eyes. She wanted him to say something. She wanted it to begin and be over with, but long minutes passed where he let her struggle in her blind, cold world, as if he knew that the waiting was worst of all. She felt like a child in line for a scary ride, her stomach balling up into fear.

She told herself it didn't matter. It was just pain. Long ago, she had taught herself how to tunnel inside her brain to hide from pain. To switch off her emotions until she felt nothing at all. No hurt. No fury. No love. She tried to remember how she had done it, how she could follow the trail there again, how she could find that place. Even now, she found herself resisting, not wanting to go back. Nothingness was a torture all its own, a soundless room that she had spent decades trying to escape.

She struggled at her bonds, feeling the bed jostle and shake as she tried to free herself, knowing she was wasting her strength. He laughed, the first real sound he had made, and then she heard him stand up. She smelled him getting closer. She tried to wriggle backward, but there was nowhere to go. He bent over her. His breath was in her face. She wrenched her face away, but his fingers grabbed her jaw like a pincer and twisted her back.

"I've waited a long time for this," he said.

She tried to drown out his voice and the odd echoes of terror it awakened in her. She focused on the storm, imagining the burying snow on the other side of the wall, wondering if the wind would pick her up and carry her away.

He dragged something cold and sharp against her skin, starting at her neck, making a line across her throat with what she realized was the point of a knife. He pushed deep enough to make her squirm but not enough to break the skin. The knife explored her like a curious animal. It made a circle around her breasts, and then her aureoles, and then punctured one nipple in the very center, a pinprick that made her shudder and drew a wet, warm drop of blood.

Unbidden, tears streamed down her face.

The knife moved lower, scraping through her navel, detouring to her thighs, pushing up under the bones of her knees, running up the balls of her feet, climbing back up and zeroing in between her legs. He turned the knife and laid the cold flat of the blade along her mound. She tensed and hunted for the faraway place, the nothingness room, but it was lost in her brain, and she didn't know where to find it.

"I should sign my work," he said. "That way, when Stride finds you, he'll know who it was."

She threw her head back and forth violently, ignoring the pain in her skull, and thrust her body up off the bed at him. Another scream died in the wet cotton in her mouth. He waited until her resistance ran out of force, and she collapsed backward, spent, dizzy.

His big hand found the flat square of her stomach and pushed down, expelling air through her nose. He stretched the skin between his fingers until it was taut, like a canvas.

"No!" she wailed, but there was no sound coming from her, just the storm outside. The protest, the begging, the pleading, were only in her mind.

The knifepoint penetrated her. Tissue separated cell by cell. Blood oozed. He began to carve.

Somewhere in the middle, she passed out. When she awoke again, her stomach was cold and hot, stinging and frozen, all at the same time. The blood had become ice, hard like sugar candy. The storm raged on behind the wall. The smells and sounds were the same, but something was different, and she realized that the rag stuffed into her mouth was gone. She could work the muscles of her jaw and breathe stale air.

Serena screamed, and she discovered she was in a small place, because the noise rattled back and forth between the walls, unbearably loud and tinny. Outside, though, it was a murmur held up against the roar of the wind. She kept screaming until her throat was hoarse and sore, and when she stopped, nothing at all happened. No one ran to find her. The blizzard paid no attention.

"Scream if you want, but no one will hear you," he said.

She didn't answer.

"Go two feet outside, and you can't hear anything. Believe me, you don't want to go outside now. You wouldn't last thirty seconds."

It sounded like thirty seconds of paradise to her. Thirty seconds of exposure, and then she could be warm and asleep and out of pain.

"Why me?" she asked.

"You were the one I wanted all along," he said.

"Why?" she repeated.

"Haven't you guessed?"

Something in the way he said it made her realize for the first time that this wasn't random. She hadn't crossed paths with a stalker and accidentally wound up in his sights. This was about her and him and always had been. Personal.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"I think you know."

He was right. She did know him. When she thought about it like that, she realized that there was something familiar about him, something in his voice that stirred memories. She searched her past, but there were so many names. It was like that when you were a cop-the names blurred together. Most of the time it didn't matter, because how many perps cared about being collared by a fat cop in his fifties? But when you were a woman, when you were beautiful, when you were from Las Vegas, the past somehow hung on and never let go.

Her bad luck.

Right then and there, she knew. Bad luck. Tommy Luck.

Tommy Luck, who scarred his girlfriend with the point of his knife. Tommy Luck, who kept that ugly wall in his apartment with dozens of secret photographs of Serena-tortured photographs with missing eyes, slashes across her neck, red paint splashed on her body, holes where he had stabbed the images repeatedly with an ice pick. Oh, God, oh, God, why hadn't she kept track? He was in for twenty years, but the more they piled people into prisons, the more they let others out.

He was out. He was back. Tommy Luck. She should have done what she thought about doing years ago, when he first got out of prison. Followed him. Killed him. She could have erased him and erased all the pain for everyone else who wound up in his path. Maggie. Tanjy. Eric. All the others.

Her fault. She should have killed him back when she had the chance.

"You know, don't you?" he asked her.

She was silent.

"I want you to see me for what comes next. I want you to look into my eyes. I'll tape them open if I need to. You're going to watch what I do to you."

She felt the knife again, on her face this time, bruising her cheekbone as he cut away the blindfold. She couldn't help herself-she opened her eyes even when her mind told her to keep them shut. There was only a single bulb lighting up the space, but it was bright anyway after so much darkness, and she squinted and turned her head. He loomed over her, huge and strong, coming between her and the light, a silhouette of evil.

50

They went through his apartment door with battering rams at two in the morning, but Stride knew he wouldn't be there, and he wasn't.

He was using the name William Deed, and the people who knew him called him Billy. Mitchell Brandt and Sonia Bezac both confirmed that Billy Deed was the Byte Patrol tech who worked on their computers, and the store owner who was now seated in front of the computer in Deed's apartment checked his records and told Stride that Deed had handled the setup and firewall for Tanjy Powell.

There was no record of William Deed in the state's criminal justice database, and the social security number he had provided on his employment application was false.

Stride ran both hands through his wavy hair and tried to hold himself in check. His adrenaline raced, coursing through his bloodstream as if he had swallowed down half a dozen cups of strong coffee. His heart was skipping beats; he could feel it stutter every minute. Along with the adrenaline was a coiled fist of dread in his stomach, churning up acid that burned a backward path up his throat. He couldn't think about Serena now. If he did, he would go crazy. He could only think about William Deed and how to find him.

Max Guppo emerged from Deed's bedroom. He was a flatulent, three hundred pound detective, fifty years old, with the worst comb-over in the upper Midwest, and he was also Stride's best evidence technician. They had worked together since Stride joined the force. No one wanted to be locked up in a van with Guppo on a stakeout, but the man was a wizard with latent prints and evidence maps and knew his way around computers as well as anyone from Byte Patrol.

"Plenty of prints," Guppo told Stride. He had a line of perspiration on his upper lip. "I raised the best of them. I'm on my way to City Hall to scan them in."

"Call the duty officer at BCA in Saint Paul, and get someone in the lab to check the database for us right now. If there's no state match, have them send it on it to the feebs and put a rush on it."

"Already done," Guppo replied. "I woke up my buddy who's the top guy in the BCA lab, and he's on his way downtown. He said he'll handle it personally."

"You're beautiful."

"Don't worry, sir, I'll get back to you in less than an hour even if I have to wake up the special agent in charge."

Guppo hustled from the apartment, and when Guppo hustled, the floor shook. Stride knew that Guppo and the rest of the team were working double-time all night on this case. They'd do it on any abduction, but this one was personal. Their loyalty was the one comfort he had right now.

Teitscher arrived at the apartment a few minutes later, and his bloodhound eyes found Stride by the window. His trench coat was wet with snow.

"Anything?" Stride asked, but when he saw Abel's face, he knew it was bad news. His heart misfired again.

Teitscher's mustache formed a frown. "We found Pete McKay's squad car in a downtown parking ramp."

"Did you check it out?"

"Yeah. Look, Lieutenant, I can't sugarcoat this. We found bloodstains in the trunk. But we're not talking about a lot of blood. No one bled out in there, okay?"

Stride needed a cigarette badly. His racing nerves made his fingers tremble. He reminded himself again not to think about Serena and not to dwell on what might be happening to her. Think about Deed. Work the case.

"So you think he switched cars," Stride said.

"Yeah. I also think Serena's alive."

Teitscher didn't explain, but Stride knew what he meant. If Serena were dead, Deed would have left her body in the trunk of the car. "Were there any cameras in the ramp?" Stride asked.

"No, but this guy has one of the purple Byte Patrol vans checked out to him. We haven't found it. We're calling everyone with an emergency ATL on the van. We've got highway patrol staking out all three of the north-south arteries-Thirty-five, Sixty-one, and One sixty-nine-in case this guy tries to head toward the Cities. The Canadian border is on alert, too."

"How about Wisconsin?"

"Yeah, we've got Wisconsin Thirty-five covered. K-2 pulled in off-shift personnel, and we're blanketing the city. The media's on it, too. I know it won't do much good until the morning news programs, but we'll have the public on the lookout tomorrow. We'll get helicopters up when it stops snowing."

Stride couldn't escape the feeling that tomorrow would be too late. "He probably has another vehicle," he said.

"Probably."

Stride shouted at the store owner, who was sifting through the material on Deed's computer. Craig was no more than thirty, wearing gray sweatpants and a red UMD sweatshirt with ratty sneakers. He looked half-asleep. He was tall and thin, with big, frizzy red hair and a lumberjack's beard. "Hey!" Stride called. "Do you know if this Deed had another car? Did you ever see him driving anything other than your van?"

Craig rubbed his eyes. "No, he kept the van overnight most of the time."

"Hiding in plain sight," Teitscher said. "Those vans are so noticeable that no one notices them."

"So maybe we'll get lucky, and he's still in it," Stride replied. "Keep me posted. Check in every half hour."

"I will. Look, Lieutenant, I know this doesn't mean shit coming from me, but I feel bad about this."

"Thanks, Abel."

"I'm also not saying I was wrong about Maggie, but this thing looks more complicated than I thought."

"You played it the way I would have done in your shoes," Stride told him.

"Maggie called and asked me if she could be part of the search. I probably shouldn't have done it, but I said okay."

Stride shrugged. "She would have done it anyway."

"I know."

"Better be careful, Abel, people will start saying you're soft."

"Yeah. That'll happen soon."

Teitscher left, and Stride continued studying Deed's apartment, looking for clues to the man. The apartment building was a drab high-rise near the pawn shops and gun stores on the far south end of Superior Street. Through his sixth-floor window, Deed looked out on a jigsaw puzzle of highway overpasses where the freeway broke apart into the city streets. It was cheap, anonymous, and seconds away from a quick escape.

Inside the one-bedroom apartment itself, there was little to distinguish the man. He ate chicken TV dinners, tacos, guacamole chips, and frozen chunks of walleye wrapped in aluminum foil. The kitchen reeked of fish. The apartment came furnished, and Deed had added little of his own other than a high-end PC. They found no magazines, no bank records, and no receipts. All they had was a description of the man: tall, heavy, strong, early forties, with black hair down below his neck, dark eyes, and a hawklike nose. He wore jeans and denim shirts when he wasn't wearing the Byte Patrol purple T-shirt.

Something about the apartment bothered Stride, but whatever it was waited like a ship in the fog and refused to show itself. The more he tried to focus his senses, the more the feeling became gauzy, as if he were imagining things. There was nothing to see here and nothing to find.

Stride pulled a kitchen chair next to the store owner, Craig, who was clicking the computer keys and staring at the screen through bleary eyes.

"What have you got?" Stride asked.

"Enough to fucking well put me out of business," Craig retorted. "This asshole put back doors and spyware into every computer he touched through the store."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning he could use their Internet connections to log on to their systems, paw through their hard drives, and track every fucking keystroke they made. He knew everything."

"I'm going to need names."

"Yeah, sure, I'll print you a list. They're all going to sue me."

"What else?" Stride asked.

"What else am I looking for?"

"Anything that will help us find this guy. Where he goes. Where he shops. What he does. He's got to have a hideaway somewhere."

"What I've found isn't going to help you. It's mostly hard-core porn. Disgusting stuff, lots of bondage."

"What about local sites? People, places, businesses based around Duluth? Blogs, MySpace pages, anything like that?"

"Not that I saw."

"Did he ever visit a blog called 'The Lady in Me'? Or mention a woman called Helen Danning?"

Craig tapped the keys for a few seconds. "Doesn't look like it."

"What about online bank records?"

"Nope." Craig yawned.

"Am I keeping you up here?" Stride asked.

"It's three in the morning, man. I should be asleep."

"Yeah, things are tough all over. I already woke up a judge in the middle of the night to get a search warrant, and she's not too happy with me either. It's really too bad I yanked you out of bed just because this son of a bitch you hired has kidnapped a woman and may already have raped and killed her. So keep looking and find me something."

"Yeah, okay, okay, sorry." Craig hunched his shoulders and went back to the keyboard.

Stride's cell phone rang, and the song taunted him. He was in a hurry and knew why. He got up and walked to the window again as he answered the call.

"Negatory on the state database," Guppo said. "He's not local."

"How about the feebs?"

"They're working on it right now. They promise it's a top priority."

"Thanks."

Stride hung up.

He straddled a chair and studied the barren apartment again. What the hell was it? There was something here, something obvious that didn't make sense, and he was missing it. He got up and checked the garbage again and looked at the scraps of food wrappers. Bacon packaging. An empty egg carton and broken eggshells. The butcher's paper from a package of ground beef, purchased at a local twenty-four-hour market. He had already sent someone to the store to see if any of the employees remembered anything about Deed. Where he went, what he drove, who he was with.

He was still missing something.

"Hey, Lieutenant," Craig called. "I think you should see this."

Stride stood over the man's shoulder. "What is it?"

"Pictures. Lots of them. Mostly of the same woman."

Craig dragged the mouse and clicked a tiny icon, and a string of thumbnail images scattered across the black screen.

"I can run them all like a slide show," Craig said.

"Do it."

The first of the pictures zoomed out to full size. Stride's heart sank. It was Serena. He recognized the area, which was downtown Saint Paul, in Rice Park near the Ordway. Another photo clicked onto the screen, and this was Serena, too. Near the Duluth courthouse. He forced himself to look at the entire collection. They were almost all of Serena, more than sixty images. Secret photos, taken from a distance. Some were near their own home, on the beach, through their windows.

This guy had been planning to take Serena for a long time.

Stride pointed at an image in the middle, which was nothing more than a flash of white light. "What's that?"

"A mistake," Craig said. "The camera probably went off accidentally."

"Pull it up again."

Craig restored the image to the screen, and Stride leaned in, staring at the photo. The blob of light was obviously the camera flash firing, but he could also make out something else, which looked like brown spots and wavy dark lines.

"What's that?" Stride asked.

Craig looked closer. "I'm not sure."

"I think it's wood."

"Too smooth for that."

"Wood paneling, I mean. Cheap stuff." Stride looked around the apartment. There was no wood paneling anywhere. He checked the bedroom and the bathroom and didn't find any panels there that matched the photo.

"Do you put wood paneling inside your vans?" he asked.

Craig shook his head.

"So where was this taken?" Stride asked, but he was talking to himself. To the air. Thinking that wherever the wood paneling was, Serena was there now. This was Deed's hidey-hole.

While he was running down a mental list of places that had fake wood siding, Guppo called back.

"Tell me you got him," Stride said.

"Yeah, but there's a problem."

"What?"

"The match is perfect," Guppo told him. "He's got records in Arizona, Texas, and Alabama. Drugs, murder, extortion, and two rape charges that were dropped when the women got cold feet."

"Sounds like our guy," Stride said. "What's the problem?"

"The problem is, he's dead."

"Say what?"

"The Alabama authorities claim he's dead. He was a witness in a narcotics trial, and two officers were escorting him back to the state CF in Holman. They ran square into a hurricane, and all three died."

"Did you say a hurricane?" Stride asked, hoping that Guppo had made a mistake and knowing that he hadn't.

"Yeah."

The dread he was feeling mutated and multiplied. Stride knew where this was going. He was there when Serena got the call last fall from the Alabama police and remembered the look of relief on her face. She felt liberated. Free.

"They found the two cops," Guppo said. "The car, too, which was a wreck. No sign of foul play, though. They figured the prisoner washed out to sea."

That was the logical conclusion, and it was wrong. He didn't wash out to sea. He escaped and headed north like a laser beam. Stride remembered how Serena described the dead man who had tortured her past. Brilliant, ruthless, charming, scheming. Exactly the kind of spider who would love to play games with his prey and then eat them. A drug dealer. A blackmailer. A rapist. A killer.

"What was his name?" Stride asked, but he already knew.

"Take your pick," Guppo told him. "William Deed, alias Billy Deed, alias B. D. Henry, alias Billy 'Dog' Ketcher, alias Blue Dog."

51

She was wrong. Terribly wrong. It wasn't Tommy Luck standing over her. It wasn't anyone from her days in Las Vegas at all. This was worse. This was a ghost from years ago, from her childhood, a ghost straight from hell.

"You're dead," Serena gasped.

Blue Dog grinned. "Yeah, I'm like the invisible man. I don't exist."

"The Alabama police called me," she insisted, although the evidence was in front of her eyes. "They said you were killed in a storm."

"You don't know the prison system down South. They've got so many bodies crammed into a cell that one less inside is a reason to celebrate. I'm sure they figured the storm did them a favor."

Serena was flooded by memories. Images she had locked away long ago in a dark corner of her brain broke free like rats bolting from their cages. She was in Blue Dog's apartment in Phoenix again. Fifteen years old. The summer heat was an inferno, her skin so chapped it bled when she scratched it. Cockroaches watched her from the walls. So did her mother, no better than a cockroach herself, her eyes hungry and wild from the coke. Blue Dog's eyes were black and clear; he never used drugs, he just sold. He was grinning as he took her, splitting her open like a nail violating wood. The same grin he had now.

He saw her remember. "We had some good times, huh?"

"Fuck you."

"Oh, yeah, that's the plan. I've spent the last ten years thinking about you. The thought of paying you back was about the only thing that kept me alive inside."

"I've paid the price my whole life for what you did to me," Serena told him. "That should make us even."

"Maybe, but you should have left it alone, and you didn't," Blue Dog said. "You came after me."

That was true. Serena remembered that summer ten years ago. She had to go to Phoenix to get background on a case she was working in Vegas. While she was there, her teenage memories all came back, and she wound up drinking for three days in a dive south of the city and waking up in a motel near the airport with a man she didn't know. Cockroaches were on the wall there, too. She went to a shrink who said she had unresolved issues about her mother and Blue Dog, which was like paying a hundred bucks to hear that you get wet when you walk out in the rain. That was the same therapist who asked if she ever had an orgasm with Blue Dog. The bastard.

So she did her own kind of therapy. She took a month's leave and followed Blue Dog's trail from Arizona to Texas and then to Alabama, where she found him up to his old tricks, running a crack and extortion empire in Birmingham and sleeping with a black girl who couldn't be more than sixteen. She hooked up with the Alabama police, and they watched Blue Dog blow away a street pusher who was keeping some of the product for himself. He shot him in the head, right there on camera, before they could clamber out of the stakeout vehicles and arrest him.

Serena studied him. He was older; you could see it in his face and in the gray streaks in his long hair. He was the same, though. Tall, almost six feet six, and broad like a grizzly. The same ego, too. He still had the need to control the world, the need to make women get on their knees, the need to prove he was smarter and tougher than anyone else.

That was the only advantage she had. She knew him and how he thought. He wasn't a stranger.

Her first job was to stall him. Keep him talking. Serena knew that half the city had to be on alert now, and Jonny would be looking for her everywhere. The more time she gave him to find her, the more her chances increased of escaping alive. She was a realist, though. She knew that she was probably about to die.

"Where are we?" she asked.

She could see that the small enclosure was some kind of shanty with one overhead bulb casting shadows. She saw cheap wood paneling, a sink, a minirefrigerator, and empty beer bottles littering the space. It was narrow, maybe seven feet wide and about twelve feet in length. She saw two windows on the far wall, taped over with gray duct tape. The door on her left had a diamond-shaped window, also taped over. When the wind gusted, the entire frame shuddered.

"Still hoping someone will find you? Don't count on it."

His eyes danced. He was becoming aroused by her naked body. He pulled a chair next to the bed and leaned over her and began playing with his knife on her skin again. Her flesh rippled, having him close to her. She was still freezing, and she hated that the cold kept her nipples hard, which made him leer and smile. He flicked at them with his blade and then leaned over and suckled her, licking off the blood.

Keep him talking, Serena thought.

"If this was between you and me, why did you put so many other people in the middle of it?"

Blue Dog shrugged. "Who, fuckers like Dan Erickson and Mitch Brandt? I told you before, these people are no different than me. They all have secrets."

"How did you find out about them?"

She assessed how she was bound. She was on a low cot, no more than a foot off the ground. Her legs were spread, draped off the bed and tied with duct tape to the steel legs of the frame. Her body stretched two thirds of the way up the length of the cot. Her arms hung down on either side of the bed, and when she pulled on them, she realized that they were tied with cloth, not tape. A stretchy fabric, like a cotton T-shirt, was wrapped around her wrists and knotted tightly, and then pulled back to the other legs of the frame about a foot behind her and knotted again. She had some play in her arms. When she put her hand down, she could rest her palm on the floor. She felt ice-cold metal.

"There was this young computer hacker in Holman," Blue Dog told her. "He was in for molesting boys, a real sick fuck."

He said this without a trace of irony.

"A guy like that's not going to last long without protection," he continued. "I made sure nobody messed with him."

"Yeah, you're a saint," Serena said.

Blue Dog laughed. "Fuck, he was going to wind up giving blow jobs anyway, so it might as well be my cock he sucked."

"I didn't realize you were queer."

Blue Dog's grin evaporated, and he turned his knife on its point and jabbed it an inch deep into the flesh of Serena's right shoulder. She screamed and jerked back. The bed frame rocked. He yanked the knife out and wiped the blood on the mattress. Waves of pain washed over her.

"You better learn to be polite, or this is going to be a long night."

"Like it's not going to be anyway."

"Yeah, that's true. But there's long and then there's long."

Serena closed her eyes. She laid her left hand down on the floor again. The bed had moved. She explored the floor with her hand, looking for anything sharp that she could use to attack the strip of fabric that connected her wrist to the frame of the bed. She felt crumbs and puddles of frigid water that had dripped through the ceiling, but nothing that could cut.

"So what did this guy do?" she asked. Keep him talking.

"He taught me everything he knew about computers. I realized there was a lot more money to be made online than I ever did on the street. The real money is in everything people want to keep hidden."

"Blackmail."

"Sure. I got to town, and I started keeping an eye on you. But a guy's got to make a living. I was in no hurry. I found other ways to let off steam."

"So why come after me now?"

"It's time to get out of the city," Blue Dog said. "The cops are getting too close. But you and I have unfinished business."

Out of sight, under the bed, Serena spread the fingers of her left hand and stretched them as far as she could. She brushed the very edge of a piece of metal, but it nudged out of her reach as she touched it.

Blue Dog reached around behind his back and pulled out a revolver. It was a small-frame, airweight Smith & Wesson that looked like a toy in his hands. Serena mentally took stock of the gun. Light and easy to conceal. Five rounds. She wondered if she would be alive to see the last four.

"I've thought a lot about how to do this," he told her. He put the barrel of the gun to the cap of her right knee. "You know what it feels like to get a bullet right here? Makes you want to die. I thought about doing both your knees, and then poling you after that."

Serena wriggled and tried to move the bed.

"Then I thought, you won't feel me inside you if I do that. I don't want you in so much agony that you can't feel what it's like."

He put the gun to her forehead. The barrel was warm where it had been inside his pants. "I also thought about making you suck my dick."

"You put anything in my mouth, you're not getting it back," Serena said.

Blue Dog laughed. "Yeah, I'm a practical guy."

"You'll never get away with this."

"We'll see about that. You think we're still on planet earth? Let me show you how wrong you are."

He pulled the revolver away from her head and pointed it upward at the ceiling, and without hesitating, he squeezed the trigger. Serena felt the shock waves inside her skull. Dust and paint fell in a cloud, and a stream of water dribbled over her chest like a mountain waterfall from the hole that punctured the roof. The echo screamed in her ears. Her head throbbed as if he had put two live wires to her temples.

No one came running. There were no sounds outside except the constant, whistling roar of the blizzard. Serena shivered as the falling water kept on, soaking her skin.

"See?" he said. "It's just you and me."

Blue Dog stood up. He grabbed an out-of-fashion men's tie from the floor and dangled it in her face. It was wide, with black-and-yellow slanted stripes. "Is this ugly or what? I found it in the farmhouse where I hid during the hurricane."

He strung it around Serena's neck and began to pull the ends tighter.

Blue Dog unzipped his pants. "Remember this guy?"

Serena knew she was running out of time. Her hand stretched again for the metal piece on the floor and missed it. She didn't even know what it was or whether it would help her cut through the fabric that tied her to the bed.

Blue Dog climbed onto the cot at her feet, and the springs beneath them groaned under the weight of their two bodies together. The bed moved a fraction of an inch. He lowered his weight down on her. His shirt dampened as it rubbed against her wet chest. His hands took hold of the two ends of the tie and began pulling them in opposite directions, narrowing the loop that hung around Serena's neck. Below, between her spread legs, she felt him try to invade her.

"I'm going to love watching your eyes," he said.

The sand gathered in the bottom of the hourglass.

Her fingers were flat on the floor. She reached again and this time felt the piece of metal slide under her palm, where she scooped it into her hand and prayed.

It was a fish hook. Sharp as hell.

52

Maggie grew increasingly desperate as she crisscrossed the streets of Duluth. The weather made it worse. Her windshield wipers sloughed aside snow, but the downpour was so heavy that she could see little more than a swirling sea of white powder through the beams of her headlights. She squinted to see where she was going, and the car veered and fishtailed on the unplowed streets. The glowing clock in her Avalanche told her it was nearly four in the morning. They had several hours of darkness left, and even when the sun rose, it would be behind an impenetrable blanket of black clouds. The storm would still be howling, spilling a foot of snow over the city and then billowing it into house-high drifts with a wind that swept down from the Canadian tundra and blinded everything.

No one else was out on the streets, not at this hour and not in the middle of the storm. The cars were mounds of white, pasted over with snow-caps. When she passed a van that fit the right size and shape, she had to get out of her truck and brush off enough snow with her hands to make sure that it wasn't the missing vehicle from Byte Patrol.

As she passed along the south end of Portland Square on Fourth Street, she saw windows of light in a house on the opposite side of the park and realized that it was Katrina's upstairs apartment. She must have had every light in the place turned on, and Maggie knew why. For weeks after it happened, she found herself up in the middle of the night, turning on lights and sitting in the kitchen with her gun in reach on the table. It was irrational, but that was what fear did to you.

She turned left and drove around the square to the north side and parked near Katrina's building. When she got out of the car, the gales almost knocked her over. She fought through drifts on the sidewalk and then ducked into the protection of Katrina's doorway. She rang the doorbell.

Katrina's voice crackled through the speaker. "Who is it?"

"It's Maggie."

"Oh. Hi. Come on up."

Maggie tromped upstairs, leaving wet footprints on the steps. Katrina stood in the doorway with the door open when she reached the second floor. She was wearing an extra-large Minnesota Wild T-shirt that stretched to the middle of her thighs. Her legs were bare.

"Sorry it's so late," Maggie said.

"I was up."

"Yeah, I figured."

Katrina nodded. "I was watching TV. I know what's going on with your friend Serena. Sounds bad."

"It is."

"Is it the same guy who…?"

"We think so, yeah."

"You want to come in?"

"For a couple of minutes, sure."

Maggie took off her coat inside and hung it near the door. She did the same with her hat and gloves. Snow melted and dripped on the carpet. Katrina had the gas fireplace turned on, and it gave off a little heat when Maggie sat near the hearth on the yellow futon. Katrina shuffled to the opposite end, and they stared at each other.

"Look, I suppose I should say I'm sorry," Maggie said.

"Why?"

"Because I never reported what happened. Maybe we could have caught this guy before he got to you."

"It's not your fault."

"How are you? How do you feel?"

"Like an empty milk carton, nothing inside."

"It won't always be like that."

"Did you feel the same way?"

Maggie shook her head. "I was out of my skull. I couldn't stop crying."

"Tell me something. Have you had sex since it happened?"

Maggie shook her head.

"Me neither. Thinking about sex makes me nauseous. I feel like he took that away from me, the bastard."

"Give it time." Maggie's guilt showed in her face again. "I wish I'd said something."

"Let it go," Katrina told her. "You don't owe anybody but yourself."

"Stride doesn't get it," Maggie said.

"He's a man. It didn't happen to him. You can't live your life around what he thinks."

"I'm not doing that."

"No? That's a switch."

"He's my safety net. You know that. When things got bad with Eric, I found myself turning to Stride again. It's safe, because I know he's not interested in me anyway."

"Don't be so sure of that."

"Please. I'm a kid as far as he's concerned. And it's not like I can compete with someone like Serena anyway."

"So start living in the real world," Katrina told her. "What do you really want?"

"I have no idea."

"Bullshit. I think you do."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, there's only one thing you've wanted for the last two years. And it's not Stride, and it's not Eric, either."

"A kid," Maggie said.

"Bingo."

"Well, so much for that dream. Three strikes, and I'm out."

"You don't know that."

Maggie shook her head. "No way. I'm not going through that roller coaster again. Get my hopes up and my hormones up, and then feel like my life is over when I lose it for the fourth time? No, thanks. Besides, I'm missing half the equation now. No husband."

"A husband is like an optional extra."

"It's too soon to think about it," Maggie said.

"You could adopt."

"Oh, sure, a single Chinese immigrant, a cop who was suspected in her husband's murder. I'm going to be tops on everyone's list."

"Just think about it."

"Yeah, I will."

The truth was, she had thought about it already. She had even made some calls.

"You want a drink?" Katrina asked.

"I could drink a whole bottle, but no, I can't."

"Are you working?"

Maggie nodded. "Unofficially, but yeah. We've got most of the force out trying to find this son of a bitch. We just don't know where to look."

"Well, I hope you get him. As far as I'm concerned, they can skip the trial and put him in the electric chair. I'll tell you right where they can attach the electrodes, baby."

"Yeah."

"Do you have nightmares?" Katrina asked.

Maggie nodded. "All the time."

"Me too. I keep reliving it, but it's like I'm watching a movie, you know? Like it happened to someone else."

"I've pretty much blocked it out," Maggie confessed. "Usually, I remember everything, but I've built a wall around that night and what happened."

"Lucky you." Katrina added, "Listen, I never should have done the alpha girl thing. I could tell you weren't comfortable with it."

"That was me. I wasn't going to tell you what to do."

"Yeah, but it was in your eyes, girlie. I should have known how awkward it would be. I mean, I never really figured Eric would be there, you know? Hell, I don't know what I was thinking. It was stupid."

Maggie frowned. "I never dreamed you would go through what I went through. After. When it happened to me, I never made the connection to the club. I feel like I let you paint a target on your chest."

"Big target," Katrina said.

"You know what I mean."

"Hey, the worst part for me wasn't the sex thing or having my face look like rainbow ice cream. It's losing my appetite for fish and chips." She laughed sourly.

"What are you talking about?" Maggie asked.

"Come on, I can't even walk past the fish counter in the supermarket. The smell makes it all come back."

Maggie's face was blank. "I don't get it."

Katrina's face scrunched up with surprise. "You telling me you can still eat fish after what happened?"

"Actually, no, you're right. I haven't been able to stomach it for weeks. But what does that have to do with anything?"

"Wow, you really did block it out. Well, good for you. I shouldn't have said anything. The fact is, the guy's hands smelled like fish. Even through the gloves. It was this dank, briny smell, like he was underwater. Awful."

The memory didn't even knock at the door. It smashed the lock, broke the door down, galloped into Maggie's brain, and suffocated her. Her hands flew to her mouth. Her eyes squeezed shut. She could smell it as if it was happening to her all over again. "Oh, my God."

"Shit, I'm sorry."

Maggie clenched her fists. "No, it's okay, it's okay. This is important. Do you remember anything else?"

"Nope. It was just me and Charlie the Tuna."

Maggie yanked her cell phone out of her pocket and called Stride. He answered on the first ring. "Fish," she told him.

"What?"

"Fish. This guy's hands smell like fish. I'm in Katrina's apartment, and she reminded me that his hands stank. It's got to mean something. Maybe he has a smoker or something, or he works in a processing plant."

There was silence on the line.

"Are you there?" Maggie asked.

"Wood paneling," Stride said.

"You lost me."

"He had a photo of wood paneling on his computer. Like from a camper or something. He had fish in his freezer, too-not from a store, it was wrapped in foil. He caught it."

"He's in a fish house," Maggie concluded.

"Exactly right. That has to be it. He's out on one of the lakes."

"But which one?"

"Tanjy's body was found in Hell's Lake," Stride said. "It's a good chance he dumped her in the same lake where he has his shanty."

"Are you close?" Maggie asked.

"I'm chasing down warehouses near the airport. I can be out on the ice in ten minutes."

"I'll be right behind you."

53

Serena buried the fish hook in the strip of cloth that tied her hand to the bed frame, and it sank into the fabric like butter. When she yanked it down, the cloth screamed and tore. Blue Dog heard it and threw his weight toward her shoulder, but she freed her arm with a single thrust before he could pin her down. She curled her arm around his back, where he still had the gun tucked under his belt, and clawed for the butt of the revolver. It was facing the wrong way, and she fumbled it in her fingers, but then she spun it around and the butt nestled in her palm and her finger found the trigger.

She was right-handed, and the gun felt awkward in her other hand, but she found the hammer with her thumb and cocked it and fired all at once. The gun was pointed toward the muscled, hard flesh in Blue Dog's hip, but he was already moving when she got the shot off. He bellowed in pain and dove off the cot, landing heavily on the floor and scrambling backward away from her. She fired again, but the shot went wild and took out one of the rear windows in the shanty with a burst of glass. The smell of burnt metal and smoke filled the space.

He danced from wall to wall, his hand pressed against his side. A small trickle of blood oozed through his knuckles. She followed him with the gun, but didn't fire. She only had two shots left and didn't trust her aim from her left hand.

"You're good," he told her.

"If you leave now, I won't shoot," Serena said. "Just get the hell out of here."

"I don't think so."

Her head was pounding. The hot spot in her skull where the gun had landed on her temple throbbed and made her vision wobble and then refocus. She wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn't. Something warm ran on her skin, and she realized blood was leaking from her shoulder where he had stabbed her. She could see her flat stomach, too, which was a gooey mess of red streaks, and when she moved, the muscles in her abdomen howled with pain.

She swung the gun back and forth, left and right, until she was dizzy. She couldn't keep this up forever, and he knew it. He was waiting her out.

"Drop it, and I promise I'll make it quick," Blue Dog said.

"Fuck you. Come close, and watch me blow your head off."

"You're bleeding," he told her.

"So are you."

She watched his eyes as they locked onto a shelf in the middle of the shanty, and she saw her own gun there and the magazine of bullets lying next to it.

"Go for it," she said. If he got that close, she knew she could nail him.

He bent and scooped a glass beer bottle off the floor. The cap was still on; the bottle was full. He held the bottle by the neck and made circles with his wrist like he was slinging a lasso. Foam hissed and fizzed from under the cap. Serena gripped the gun tighter and aimed at the shelf, knowing that's where he wanted to go. Blue Dog zigzagged the other way and flung the bottle underhanded at the cot. The glass shot over her head, missing her by inches, and shattered against the rear wall, cascading over her skin in a storm of beer and hail. Involuntarily, she flinched and closed her eyes. It took only a second, but the second was too long, and she heard him dive for the gun.

She had no choice. She had to fire. The gun recoiled, and her bare skin burned. The shot missed Blue Dog, but he had to hit the floor before his hand reached the shelf, and he was smart enough to know he didn't have time to try again without winding up in her sights. He skittered backward like a bug. She kept her eyes open, despite the beer leaching into her tear ducts and trickling down her face. Some of it found its way to her lips, and she lapped it with her tongue.

Sam Adams. Good stuff.

He was at the rear of the shanty again, but he was slowing down. He couldn't keep moving forever, and she couldn't stay conscious forever, and sooner or later, one of them was going to slip.

"One bullet," Blue Dog told her. "You only have one bullet left."

"That's all I need."

But she knew the odds were against her. She glanced around, hunting for another weapon, and her eyes landed on the knife he had used to torture her, which was lying on the floor just beyond the reach of the cot. If she could free her right hand, she could stretch her arm out and grab it. She knew the fish hook was somewhere under her body, and it would be easy to reach around and slash the cloth that tied her down, but that would mean putting down the gun first. She couldn't do that.

He smiled at her dilemma. "You're running out of time."

"You're not looking so good yourself."

His voice was casual, as if they were two friends talking over old times. "Back in Phoenix, I knew you got into it sometimes. A man can tell."

"Yeah, I really got into it. Sure. You stupid bastard."

"Some women get off on it. Like Tanjy."

"She got off on fantasies. I guarantee you, she didn't like the real thing."

"She wasn't supposed to like it. It was supposed to be punishment."

"What?"

He made his move, surprising her. He feinted toward the gun and then jerked in the other direction and dove across the width of the shanty. His fingers clawed at the wall switch. Before she could get off a shot, he slapped the switch, fell back to the ground, and rolled away.

The light went off. She was so blind that she couldn't even see the gun in front of her, and all she could do was listen. Where was he?

The storm was loud, and the wind leaked through the tear in the tape and the broken window at the rear of the shanty. Water kept dripping and falling on her body through the ceiling. She stared into the blackness and tried to remember what it was like in the light, so she could guess where he would go and how he would attack her. She pricked her ears for every creak and groan in the metal floor, but she didn't hear a thing other than the blizzard. He was waiting somewhere. Not moving.

One bullet.

She took a huge risk. If she couldn't see him, then he couldn't see her. She put the gun down on her chest and felt around the cot silently for the fish hook. When she heard a shriek of metal, and felt the shanty sway, she grabbed the gun again and pointed at nothing. He was creeping, moving, getting closer. She didn't have much time. She tried to find the hook, but she realized it must have fallen back to the floor as she struggled with Blue Dog. With the gun on her chest again, she reached back down and skated her fingers along the metal floor and found the hook. Quickly, she slid it into her hand. She eased the gun off her body, so it didn't slide away, and then she craned her body around, trying to stretch her left arm until she could reach the strip of cloth that tied her right hand.

The frame of the cot squeaked. She hoped he didn't realized what she was doing. The distance down to her right wrist was farther than she realized, and her body strained in protest as she twisted. The cut in her shoulder sent out ripples of pain and heat. Glass pieces from the beer bottle cut her skin and sprinkled loudly on the floor. Her head spun, and the darkness turned upside down.

Somewhere, he took two hurried steps, very close by, and before she could take up the gun again, he moved away and she heard the sickening sound of the clip being shoved into the grip of her own gun.

His voice came out of the night.

"Guess what I have?"

She had to move fast. She reached out again, pulling every inch of distance out of the muscles in her back, and her fingers trembled so much that she almost dropped the fish hook. She stretched as far as she could with her right hand in the other direction until the binds pulled her back. She didn't know how far away she was, but it may as well have been a mile. She couldn't get close enough. She couldn't free herself.

Blue Dog fired. The noise rocked the shanty. The bullet missed her head by no more than six inches; she could feel its heat as it streaked by. Bits of metal ricocheted off the wall behind her. She scooped up the other gun again and aimed where she had had seen the flash of the barrel, but she could hear him moving.

"I've got plenty of bullets," he said.

He fired again, and he was gone again, before she could return fire. This time, the bullet seared across the top of her thigh before burying itself in the wall, and she gasped loudly as her leg seemed to catch fire, and the fire spread through her body. He knew where she was. There was nowhere for her to go.

The silence and the waiting stretched out. She tensed, the gun in her hand.

He fired three times more in succession, flooding the space with explosions one after another, raining down metal and snow from over her head. Before she realized he was firing in the air, distracting her, he was already diving across the short distance that separated them. He came from her right side, like a meteor, lightning-fast. His shoulder collided with her left arm, and she felt all her hopes fly away and abandon her as the gun spilled from her hand and skidded away on the floor. He crushed her, all his weight on top of her, embedding glass in her skin. His breath was in her face, and he put her own gun to her head.

"You lose."

She wasn't going to cry. "Fuck you."

She searched the floor with her hand, hoping the gun was still within reach, but she couldn't find it. She almost screamed with frustration, knowing there was a bullet chambered close by that she could drill into this sadist's head, payback for all the humiliation and pain she had suffered at his hands. Ending all the nightmares and memories. But he was right; she had lost.

Reality was too much, and she wished she could find the empty room in her mind in which to crawl for escape. Every sensation pricked away at her sanity. The heaviness and smell of him. The hot circles of pain. The dizziness. The cold, glass, metal, and ice. The blackness, as if it were all happening in midair, disconnected.

Boom, boom, boom.

She heard a deep thumping somewhere in her consciousness, and for a second, she thought it was the panicked beating of her heart, but it kept on like a hammer. This was something real, something unexpected. Blue Dog reared up in shock and spun off her.

Someone was pounding on the door. She could only imagine one person. Jonny. Coming for her.

Blue Dog crept for the door. The floor sagged with his footsteps. She knew he had her gun firmly in his hand. He waited. There was a long pause, and then the pounding continued, as if something heavy were beating on the frame.

She heard a voice. "Billy! Open the door!"

Her heart sank. It wasn't Jonny. The voice was familiar, but it was distant, drowned by the storm. Not a cop. Not rescue. She couldn't see Blue Dog, but she could almost feel him relax and grin. He unlocked the door and pushed it outward, and even the night was brighter than the darkness inside, and a pale triangle spilled through the opening and made him a silhouette. The wind and snow swirled through the shanty.

He started to say something, but he never finished.

Orange flame sparked and disappeared. A shotgun detonated, so loud that the storm was hushed for an instant. The smoke smelled like burnt toast. Serena felt a warm spray across her face, and she realized it wasn't snow this time. It was Blue Dog's blood.

54

Stride cannonaded down a fire road that snaked through the forest toward Hell's Lake. The wheels of his Bronco chewed at the snow. Slender birch trees hugged both sides of the road, and caps of pine trees swayed overhead, making the road like a dark tunnel. He knew he was near the lake, and then the forest opened up, as if he had bolted through the door of a church into the open air. The sky vaulted over him, angry and gray, belching out sheets of snow. His Bronco thumped off the dirt road onto the thick ice of the lake, leaving the shelter of the trees behind him. Fifty-mile-an-hour gales ambushed him and nearly upended the truck. The blizzard was a banshee here, a woman in white stretching to the sky and screaming for the dead.

The fish houses were a ghost town of shadows that appeared and disappeared in his headlights. He had to slow down to avoid piling into them. They were of all shapes and sizes, some barely larger than Dumpsters, others as large as campers, big enough for people to live in and sleep in if they wanted to escape the world entirely. Tonight, they were dark. He made circles around each one and didn't see any cars parked by the houses, because no one wanted to be caught in the tempest if a propane tank went empty or a window blew out in the wind. Stride felt tiny out here, and the world felt huge and violent.

The lake was shaped like an amoeba spread out under the microscope, with rounded fingers of land pushing into the water in wooded peninsulas and a fat, open middle where underground currents left islands of thin ice to swallow up trespassers. It stretched for miles, and from where he was, Stride could only see a fraction of its surface, and in the midst of the storm, he could see even less. He felt as if he were crawling, nudging the Bronco past each snowy hillock where a fish house was hiding.

His phone rang.

"I'm on the lake," he told Maggie. "I came in on the fire road from the southwest."

"I'm coming in from the east," she said. "I'll follow the shore and head your way."

"It's a nightmare out here. Watch out for hot spots."

"You, too. Is the cavalry coming?"

"Yeah, I've got half a dozen cars heading our way."

"Any way to narrow down the search?" Maggie asked.

"Tanjy's body popped up on the south shore, so I'm hoping she went in somewhere around there, too."

"Stay in touch."

Stride threw his phone on the passenger seat. He shot out toward the open stretch of ice, hugging the shore and following the land as it bent around toward the next inlet. The snow blinded him, but when an updraft lifted the curtain for an instant, he saw another scattering of shanties a quarter mile ahead. He steered for them, and in the midst of the blackness, he could make out a yellow diamond of light. Someone was home.

The light shone through the door of an RV, parked like a beached whale off by itself, which the owner could simply drive on and off the ice at will. Stride parked next to the RV and bailed out of his truck with his gun drawn. In an instant, he was a snowman, crusted over with a wet, white layer that clung to his hair, skin, and clothes. He jogged through the powder to the door of the camper and listened, but he couldn't hear anything inside with the wind roaring around him.

He pounded on the door with his fist. "Police!"

A few seconds later, the door slit open a crack, and he pointed his gun at the opening but quickly withdrew it when he saw an old man staring out with surprised, frightened eyes. The man wore a heavy red plaid shirt, baggy jeans, and ratty slippers. His messy gray hair flopped over his forehead. "Who the hell are you?"

"Police, sir!" Stride shouted, because that was the only way to be heard.

"I'm not leaving the lake."

"Can I come in for a minute?"

"How about showing me your badge?"

"This is a blizzard, sir, will you just give me a break!"

"Okay, okay, get inside. You're letting in the snow."

He pulled back the door, and Stride climbed the metal steps. The interior of the RV was littered with food cans, beer, and fishing equipment. A black-and-white television set was perched on a bookshelf, broadcasting a 1950s movie in between zigzagging lines. The air was freezing, and Stride could see his breath.

The old man was barely more than five feet tall. "I'm not coming off the lake," he grumbled. "I don't care about any storm. I've seen worse storms than this."

"I'm not here to kick you out, although you're crazy to be here on a night like this."

"Yeah, so, I'm crazy. What do you want?"

"I'm trying to find a man who may have a fish house on the lake. He's huge, around six foot six, and built like a linebacker. Very long black hair."

The old man nodded. He snorted and cleared his throat as if he were about to hack up a fur ball. "I've seen him. Hard to miss that guy."

Stride was exhilarated. "Where? Where does he keep his shanty?"

"Don't know exactly. It's not in this part of the lake. I've seen that purple van of his heading up around the peninsula to the northeast."

"Still on the south shore?" Stride asked.

"Yeah, I assume so. Not much reason for people to be driving around down here if they're camped on the north side. It's a long way up there, unless you want to go across the belly of the lake and swim." He chuckled.

"Thanks," Stride told him. "Stay safe."

"Not like I'm going to die young."

Stride flew out of the RV and back to his Bronco. He called 911 and gave them the position off his GPS locator and told them where he was headed and asked them to scramble everyone they had. When he got the confirmation from the operator, he threw the phone back on the passenger seat and concentrated on the lake. He abandoned the rest of the fish houses in this inlet and accelerated back toward the open stretch of ice. Sheets of snow blew up from his tires in two waves, as if he were parting the sea. He tried to keep an eye on the dark blotch of land to the east, but the storm grew even worse, shrinking his universe to a few feet in front of the truck. Even so, he pushed the Bronco faster, until his foot was on the floorboard and the chassis was shimmying and wobbling on the bumpy ice. Too fast.

He lost control. The truck spun. He went round and round in a strange, graceful pirouette, and the truck came off its tires and threatened to roll. He felt himself sailing at an angle, airborne, but then the Bronco staggered back and righted itself, falling back onto its wheels with a kidney-busting jolt and drifting to a stop. He pushed the accelerator again, and the truck coughed, clamped down on the snow, and sped up.

He was lost now. He couldn't see a thing and had no idea where he was or what direction he was going. He opened the window and shoved his head out as he drove, but the wind and snow were like knives on his face. The lake, the sky, and the woods were all indistinguishable. He thought he could make out the dark stain of the next finger of land jutting out to the east, and he turned toward it, but he was disoriented by the silver, blowing swarm that was everywhere around the truck. The vision of the land vanished, as if it had been an illusion all along.

He was far out, too far out, before he realized he had gone the wrong way and strayed from the land. Something changed under his tires. What had been two feet of impenetrable ice no longer felt heavy and solid; instead, the ground trembled and moved as he drove. He knew he had to stop, turn around, get out of there. He was skating on a hot spot, trying to walk on water, and when he steered in another direction, the first sharp crack was like a rifle going off under his feet.

The ice was breaking.

The truck lurched.

Stride was thrown forward by the jolt. The nose of the truck shuddered and dipped. He fumbled with his seat belt, pushed open the door, and threw himself outside, where he hit the ice with a cold slap and rolled. He kept crawling, hearing more ice crack around and behind him. He spread his weight out and practically swam through the snow toward the safety of a thicker shelf of ice. He could see the red flags now, warning beacons that he had driven past and missed entirely in the storm.

He stood up. The ice here was strong enough to hold him.

Twenty yards away, he watched his ten-year-old Ford Bronco disappear, carrying his past and his cell phone with it. Spiderlike cracks opened up and widened into fissures. The front wheels slurped into the lake water, which freed itself from its prison like a sea monster and surrounded the truck. The Bronco flailed, fought, and floated, but not for long. Frigid water leached into its body, and steam hissed as the engine drowned. The front end dived, and the back end settled behind it, and then the truck careened to one side and made a gentle splash as it sank between the chunky plates of ice and was swallowed up and gone.

The storm raged.

He was alone in the middle of the lake.

55

Blue Dog staggered back two steps, colliding into the opposite wall. A set of metal shelves collapsed under his weight, and debris clattered to the floor around him. Someone else climbed inside the shanty with them and shut the door. For an instant, the darkness was so complete again that Serena felt as if she were wearing a mask, but then the overhead bulb lit up, and even the pale light was enough to make her close her eyes and turn away.

When she blinked, she saw Lauren Erickson with a shotgun nestled against her right shoulder, pointed at Blue Dog's head. The gun looked oversized in her small arms, but she held the barrel steady and straight.

Lauren's eyes flicked to Serena and lingered. Her mouth was tight with anger and something that might have been guilt or regret. She turned back to Blue Dog, who was clenching his wrecked shoulder with his other hand. His wound was a mess of bone, muscle, and blood.

"You stupid son of a bitch," Lauren snapped. "You had the money. You could have left the city, and everything would have been perfect."

"It was never about money." He nodded his head at Serena. "Me and her, we have a history together."

Serena interrupted them, her voice calm and firm. "Lauren, cut me loose."

Blue Dog jabbed a finger at Lauren's face. "You know you can't do that. If she walks out the door, everything comes out."

"Lauren, I don't care what you've done," Serena told her. "Look at me. Look at me. You could never be a part of something like this."

Lauren stared at Serena tied to the cot. Naked. Her body streaked with blood. "I'm sorry you're in the middle of this," she told her.

"It's not worth it, Lauren," Serena said. "It doesn't matter what you did. We can work it out."

Lauren shook her head. "We're way beyond that."

She shoved the twin barrels of the shotgun into the skin of Blue Dog's forehead.

"Lauren, do not pull that trigger," Serena insisted. "Don't do it. Once you do that, you can't go back. Just call the police. He's the one they want. You can work out a deal."

Lauren took a half-step backward.

Blue Dog's lungs rattled as he laughed. "A deal? You think you can cut a deal? Not after you killed Tanjy."

Serena closed her eyes and swore silently to herself.

"Shut up," Lauren hissed.

"Don't you want Serena to know what an ice-cold bitch you are?" Blue Dog said. He grinned at Serena. "I told Lauren all about Dan's affair. All about Tanjy's rape fantasies. All the sick things they did together. I even had the photos. I just wanted money to keep it quiet, but Lauren here had a better idea."

"Shut up," Lauren repeated.

"She paid me to keep Dan's ass out of the papers, and then she paid me even more. She hired me."

Serena saw a primal horror in Lauren's eyes. The small space swayed as the gales outside pounded the walls. It got even colder.

"To do what?" Serena asked, but she had begun to put it all together.

"To rape Tanjy Powell," Blue Dog said. "She didn't just want to break up Tanjy and Dan. She wanted this bitch destroyed. So that's what I did."

"Oh, my God," Serena murmured.

"She was a twisted little whore," Lauren said, spitting out the words.

"Yeah, and Dan couldn't get enough of her wet, wild pussy, could he? But you fixed that." Blue Dog's grin came back. "Then Tanjy called and said she knew who raped her. That scared the shit out of you, didn't it? If Tanjy knew about me, then she'd find out about you, too."

"Stop it!" Lauren shouted.

"But you knew what to do, didn't you? I bet when you swung that flashlight into the back of her head, you fucking well had the biggest orgasm of your life."

Lauren was lost in what she had done, trembling, furious. The shotgun sagged in her hands. She didn't see Blue Dog moving on the floor, his right hand reaching and scrabbling on the ground behind him. Serena shouted a warning, but Lauren didn't understand and didn't see Blue Dog as his hand emerged from behind his back with Serena's gun. He grinned and fired, grinned and fired, two shots in two seconds, both in and out, one that drilled a tunnel through the flesh of Lauren's elegant neck and one that broke through her collarbone with an audible crack.

Blue Dog came off the floor, his left arm frozen, his movements slow. Lauren turned to run, but her feet were clumsy, like a clown's. He towered over her from behind. Blue Dog wrapped his forearm around Lauren's neck and lifted her bodily off the ground. She flapped like a doll, and she swung the shotgun up as she struggled to free herself. Her eyes bulged out, and she formed an O with her mouth in a silent scream of agony. Blue Dog held Lauren in an iron grip, squeezing the life out of her.

Her finger was on the trigger. Serena followed the wild gyrations of the barrel with horror and found it pointed directly at her chest. She cringed and tried to twist away, but there was nowhere to go, no way to escape. She watched Lauren's finger, which was in near constant spasm, and she could actually see the trigger begin to move. She sucked in a breath but didn't close her eyes. Then the gun was gone, pointed at the ceiling, at the walls, at the door. Lauren kicked and flailed. Blue Dog spun her around, and the gun came up again, aimed at the rear wall now, away from Serena. This time the barrel coughed up a second shell. The recoil jolted them both backward, and Lauren fell from Blue Dog's grasp. The thunder of the explosion made the cot rise up off the floor.

The shell rocketed through the space.

It blew a hole through the metal siding.

With a sharp and terrible ping, like a note played on a badly tuned piano, it punctured the tank of propane gas mounted behind the shanty.

Stride held up his gloved hands in front of his face but could barely see them. He was a yeti, matted with heavy snow, slogging through the drifts on the lake, fighting the headwind that bit at his skin. His long gray scarf was wrapped around his head and ears and then tied around his face and neck. Snow crusted over it and froze. Ice balls dangled from his eyelids. His leather jacket hung stiffly, like cardboard. When he stopped and listened, he heard only the incessant roar of the white banshee and wondered who she was saying would die tonight, whether it would be Serena, or himself, or both of them.

He squinted at the horizon. Once, he thought he saw the tree-lined shore as the storm briefly lifted, but since then, he could have been walking in circles. His footsteps disappeared almost as soon as he made them. He could have been crossing the same tracks, marching himself into the ground in a kind of Möbius strip that went around and around without ever ending.

He almost collided with the shanty before he saw it. When the invading snow soared upward again, he realized he was in the midst of a community towed out to the middle of the inlet, within spitting distance of the forest. He looked for light and didn't see any. He wondered where Maggie was and how close she was to this spot and what she thought when she kept dialing his number and he didn't answer. His phone was at the bottom of the lake.

A rumble of thunder washed over him like a wave. But not thunder. It was a shotgun blast. He spun around, trying to ascertain where the shot originated. He looked for vehicles but made out only ivory mountains.

One hundred yards away, a fish house exploded. The night turned to day, and a willowy cloud of fire roared fifty feet into the air.

Stride ran.

56

An instant later, the tin shack became a holocaust.

Serena felt as if she had launched into space and then fell out of orbit back to earth. The explosion split the shanty in half, and the walls made a tortured noise as they cracked. The diamond-shaped windows on the rear wall blew inward, and flame spat through them like they were the mouths of dragons. Black stains bloomed across the gray metal, which sizzled and popped as it became brittle.

The shock wave split Lauren and Blue Dog apart. The shotgun banged to the floor, empty and harmless. Lauren was thrown skyward, and she slammed into the door and then through it, spilling out of the space and disappearing with a cry. The impact struck Blue Dog square in the back and swatted him to his hands and knees. He swung his head to clear his scattered brain, and his long hair fell across his face like an Afghan hound. He pushed himself up to his feet and swayed, a silhouette framed by fire behind him. His head nearly grazed the roof of the shanty. His left arm dangled at his side, useless, but he still had Serena's gun in his other hand.

Blue Dog raised her gun and pointed it at her head. She could make out the whites of his eyes and his bared teeth. Ash fell into his wound, making him twitch. "Do you want me to make it quick for you?" he asked.

"Fuck you."

The flames licked at his back. "Burning to death is a horrible way to go," he said.

Serena half-wanted him to pull the trigger.

"See you in hell," he told her, and then he turned and leaped through the doorway.

She was alone and trapped. It felt as if she were in hell already, with huge fires and the caustic smell of melting steel to torture sinners. The winter cold vanished, and she felt a superheated burn from a ferocious, merciless sun. The rear wall was almost totally ablaze, and the fire toyed with the wood veneer on the other walls, beginning to catch and streak closer. Smoke choked the enclosure. She covered her mouth and nose with her free arm, but the gray cloud made its way inside her face. She gagged, and her eyes went dry.

Serena threw her weight to her right. The cot rocked on its frame and fell back. She tried again, trying to overturn the cot, so she could get both hands on the floor and find leverage with which to push herself backward and out the door, using the mattress and frame on her back to delay the fire's assault. She rocked again, feeling the cot lift an inch off the floor before slamming down. She made a fist and shoved it against the wall, but the cot stayed rooted to the floor.

The shanty lurched. The opposite end, where the fire was, dipped at an angle, and Serena heard hissing as if she had poked a nest of snakes. She realized now that she was in an ice house out on the lake and that the hissing she heard was steam as the fire burned its way through the tough layer of ice. The shanty was beginning to sink, creating a slushy pool for her to drown in if the fire didn't get her first.

The intensity of the flames shooting through the windows diminished by degrees as the propane tank slipped into the water, but the fire fed on the fish house itself now, chewing into the wood and insulation, exploding empty bottles, surging uphill toward the cot. The first of the fire trails outlined the open door in wild orange and threw a shower of sparks that made black, smoking holes on the mattress. Some of the sparks hit her skin and ate their way inside like hungry rats. She couldn't help herself; she screamed. It was a terrible taste of the fate that awaited her, to die like that, searing away to bone and dust square inch by square inch.

She braced her left hand on the floor in a futile attempt to push herself backward from the onslaught of the fire. Her hand found something hard and cold, and she realized it was the revolver, which had slid around in the commotion and wound up back within her reach. She scooped it up and stared at it.

One bullet. It felt like a cruel joke to find the gun now, when it was useless to her.

Except for one thing.

Serena watched the flames draw closer like an inexorable army. They danced on the ceiling, and chunks of hot metal fell around her. They swirled like bright ribbons on the walls. They charred the bottoms of her feet, as if she were walking on coals. The smoke grew thick as fog and clouded around her face and blinded her. She tried to suck in air, but there was nothing to breathe but ash and fumes, nothing to see but haze, nothing to hear but the death throes of the shanty as it imploded, nothing to smell but the roasting of her own flesh.

She still had the gun in her hand. She had one bullet, and she couldn't miss.

One bullet to escape all at once from the pain, the flames, and the poison.

One bullet to help her find the nothingness room in the corner of her soul, where she had escaped as a child, and make a home there forever.

Serena put the gun in her mouth.

Stride sprinted toward the shanty from the west. Half of the shack was fully immersed in flames, and the lake was slowly pooling around it and drawing it back into its grasp. He could feel the wave of heat from where he was. He had seen these gas fires before, and they were always deadly and complete, reducing metal, wood, glass, and tissue to a flat, smoldering wreck, nothing more than a black rectangle on the ground. It never took long, never more than a handful of minutes.

He shot around the corner of the shack and spied a snow-covered sedan, its door ajar, and the boxy outline of a van parked twenty yards from the shanty door. The wind had blown the snow clear, and he recognized the Byte Patrol logo. It was a caricature of a nerd dressed like a cop, with a laptop in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. The cartoon laughed at him.

Someone half-limped, half-ran toward the front of the van. He was tall and huge, and Stride saw his long hair flowing madly in the wind.

"Stop!"

The man froze and swiveled to look at him. Blue Dog's eyes gleamed with recognition across the short distance that separated them.

"Where is she?" Stride shouted.

The man gestured his head at the burning fish house and smiled. Stride ran for the door of the fish house, which was already a ring of fire. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Blue Dog's right arm coming up, and he reacted by instinct, diving to the ground and rolling as two bullets ricocheted off the ice around him. Stride twisted in the snow, yanked his gun from his jacket, and fired back. His bullets thudded into the side of the van. Blue Dog jerked open the van door, and Stride fired again, four more times, missing the man's head by an inch and turning the window into popcorn. Blue Dog ducked, spun away from the van, and weaved as he ran through the blizzard, using the vehicle as cover as he headed for the trees.

Stride let him go. He scrambled back to his feet and pounded on the steel wall of the fish house. "Serena!"

The heat and intensity of the fire drove him back. His boots splashed in a foot of cold lake water where the ice was melting. The walls of the shanty were beginning to bow.

"Serena!"

He got on his knees and doused his head in the freezing water and lay down so that his whole body was soaked and frigid. Hypothermia was the least of his worries now; he just wanted to slow down the fire from taking hold on his skin. The wind bit at him, the heat burned, and the banshee screamed.

Stride stared into the maw of the devil.

As he prepared to jump through the doorway, he heard something that made his heart stop. Rising above the noise of the storm and the fire came the sharp crack of a single gunshot.

57

Maggie steered for the fire.

As she rounded the jagged edge of a peninsula, she saw the fish house burning like a pagan bonfire, ushering up a sacrifice to the storm god. The fire illuminated the entire inlet. She could see the twisting of windblown snow, the tin boxes of other shanties hunched against the blizzard, and the outline of birch trees like stick figures on the coast. As she navigated around the other fish houses and got closer, she could see a man outside the shanty, and even at that distance, she recognized Stride.

He was getting ready to go inside, and Maggie could see from the monsterlike size of the fire that doing so was no better than suicide. She honked her horn frantically, trying to stop him, but if he heard her, he ignored her.

"No!" she shouted inside the car and banged her fist on the steering wheel.

As she watched helplessly from fifty yards away, Stride took three steps and dove into the center of the doorway, through the flames, disappearing inside.

Maggie didn't see Blue Dog until it was too late. She never even heard the report of the gun. A bullet ripped through her windshield and embedded itself in the headrest on her seat, so close to her head that when she reached up instinctively to cover her ear, she felt blood on her fingers. The windshield held together except for the perfect, circular round hole and a spiderweb of cracks carved into the glass. Even so, she instinctively turned over the wheel, and the truck spun, the rear end leading it around in circles as she tapped the brakes.

When she finally stopped, another bullet screamed through the far side of the windshield, which finally gave up and rained down in a shower of glass. Maggie saw a man running at the truck, right arm in the air, firing wildly. She knew what he wanted-the truck, not her-something he could use for his escape. She grabbed the keys out of the ignition and hunched down, then scooted across the seat and pushed the passenger door open. She spilled out of the Avalanche.

Maggie dropped to her chest on the ice and stared under the truck, where she could barely see Blue Dog's legs through the driving tornado of snow. He was moving carefully and silently, step-by-step, about forty feet from the driver's door. She thought about running, but she wasn't going to do that. Not from this man. Not after what he had done to her.

She needed a weapon. Her pockets were empty, and the only thing in the glove compartment was a tire pressure gauge. In the covered bed of the truck, she kept an emergency radio, a forty-pound bag of sand, a medical kit, jumper cables, bungee cords, and a shovel. The shovel was made of durable plastic, designed to push snow out of the way, and wasn't the kind of blunt object she could use to beat a man unconscious.

That was all she had.

She decided to bluff. "Stop right there!" she screamed, and she saw him freeze in his tracks, trying to pinpoint the faint sound of her voice. "Take one more step, and I'll blow you away."

A long silence followed, then he fired several more times, shattering the rest of the windows in her truck and spraying the snow with bits of glass.

"If you had a gun, I'd be dead," he shouted back.

Maggie crawled quickly to the back of the truck. She hoped he couldn't see the tailgate as she unlocked and lowered it. She reached in and gently slid out the heavy bag of sand, taking care not to rock the chassis.

She squatted down and saw that he was twenty feet away. Cursing silently, she closed the tailgate, put the bag of sand down, and scrambled back to the open passenger door of the truck. She kept low and slid back inside, hoping he couldn't see her as she replaced the keys in the ignition. She backed out carefully, retrieved the forty-pound sandbag, and positioned it on its side under the truck, directly behind the right front tire. She relied on the wail of the storm to cover any noise she made.

Maggie retreated behind the truck bed and crouched down to watch him approach. He veered wide to check the front of the truck and went all the way around to the far side. She dodged backward, staying out of view. She saw him lift one leg and kick the passenger door shut and immediately fire three bullets into the earth. One bullet hit the rear bumper with a metallic clang. She prayed he didn't see the bag of sand hidden behind the tire.

He waited. He had to know where she was-in the back, behind the truck bed. The question was whether it was worth the time for him to track her down, knowing they could circle each other as long as she wanted. She watched him retrace his steps slowly to the front of the truck and back toward the driver's door. He hesitated there.

In the distance, she heard something beautiful. Sirens. Lots of them.

He opened the driver's door and climbed in and slammed it behind him. He turned over the engine, and Maggie pushed herself off her feet and ran toward the front of the truck. She knew he could see her coming in the sideview mirror, but that was okay. She wanted him to rush. He stepped on the accelerator, and the truck ground away at the ice and leaped forward.

Ten feet later, the Avalanche jerked to a stop as the rear wheel slammed into the bag of sand. Maggie reached the driver's door at the same second. She wrenched it open, grabbed him by his hair, and slammed his skull repeatedly against the metal frame of the door. He groaned and fell out of the truck. She looked for the gun, but it wasn't in his hand; she saw it on the far end of the dashboard where he had dropped it during the impact.

She didn't bother fighting fair. When she bent over him on the ground, she realized his shoulder was bloody and torn, and she hammered her fist over and over into the wounded limb until he screamed. She jabbed her fingernails into both of his eyes. He clawed blindly for her with his other hand, and she reached out, took his wrist and twisted it, and bent his index finger back until it broke with a sickening snap. He gave a strangled, gurgling cry.

"Not like last time, is it, you sack of shit," she hissed.

His eyes closed, but she wasn't taking any chances. She reared her left fist back as if she were nailing in a spike and drove it deep into his gut. He didn't move; he didn't open his eyes; but his abdomen lurched, and he began to throw up. Vomit bubbled out of his mouth. He was a limp elephant to move, but she managed to turn him over and make sure he wasn't choking. She slid her belt out from her jeans and used it to bind his wrists together. She got up and went to the truck bed and found a bungee cord and secured his ankles.

Maggie retrieved the gun from the Avalanche and put it in her pocket.

She heard a metal crash boom across the ice, and she looked up and hated what she saw. The shanty was entirely engulfed in flames. The walls were crashing down.

58

Serena heard Jonny shout and realized he was inches away from her, on the other side of the fiery wall. At that instant, she changed her mind. If the fire wanted her, if the lake wanted her, they would have to come and get her. She also realized there was another way to use the one bullet left in the revolver, and without hesitating, she reached her left arm as far across her body as she could, stretched her right hand to the limit of the cloth that bound her, and fired. The bullet tore through the fabric. Her right arm stung with powder burns, but when she yanked her hand, it came away from the bed frame. Both arms were free.

She was dizzy as the fire and smoke choked out the oxygen from the tiny space. She braced both hands against the side of the bed frame and pushed herself up. A scorching wave of heat slapped her in the face. She leaned all the way forward until her fingers grasped her left ankle and frantically tore at the tape that bound her to the frame. She squeezed her eyes shut, unable to keep them open in the face of the heat. The torn tissue in her stomach and shoulder split further, and she felt blood dripping onto her thighs. The duct tape clung as if it were nailed to her skin. Blue Dog had wrapped it tightly, and the tape resisted when she tried to saw it with her fingernails. She couldn't believe she was this close and still imprisoned.

Her air ran out. Black, tarry poison filled her lungs. She gave up and threw herself back down, hoping there was still something to breathe in the lower section of the fish house, but the smoke had descended there, too. She heard herself gasping and wheezing, and it was as if she went outside herself and watched her labored breathing from afar. She knew she would only remain conscious for a few more seconds.

With both hands free now, she grabbed the bed frame and jerked to the right and felt the frame tilt six inches off the ground before teetering and falling back down. Expelling her last breath, grunting with the huge effort, she tried again, and this time, the cot rose straight up into the air and went tumbling over. The cot was a crushing weight on her back. Her bare skin was pressed against the floor, like a piece of raw meat tossed on the grill. Somewhere right near her lips, though, she smelled a trickle of cool air.

She clawed at the floor with her fingers and realized she was over one of the trapdoors that fishermen used to access the ice. She felt a loop of metal catch under her fingernail, and she pried the small door open and nearly sang with joy as a rush of cold air blew up from the lake water into her face. Her lungs gagged, trying to cough out the remnants of smoke and replace them with oxygen. After a few deep breaths, she felt alive again.

The flames were now circling her like wolves. She felt a singeing heat on her back that told her the cot itself was now on fire. She began to think she had saved herself just to die in the worst way.

The shanty took a heavy jolt, and she heard a voice not even four feet away. "Serena!"

It was Jonny. Inside.

Stride took two steps and ripped something off the wall. The whoosh of compressed air exploding in a burst of foam filled the space. The nearest flames fell back and died. He sprayed until the fire extinguisher was empty, beating back the fire and creating a temporary bubble of safety around them.

He attacked the tape on her ankles. Serena saw the glint of Blue Dog's knife within reach, and she grabbed it and waved it in the air. "Jonny, use this! Hurry!"

She felt him quickly cut through the tape where it tied her to the steel legs of the cot. In seconds, her legs came free. He flung the bed frame away from her and pushed aside the mattress, which was smoldering. She tried to turn over but found she didn't have the strength to do so. Her legs were leaden. The blood flowed back to her feet slowly.

"Can you walk?" he asked.

"No." Her voice was ragged.

Jonny squatted in front of her. "Grab onto my shoulders. Hang on."

She wrapped her arms around his torso from behind and clung to him as he pushed himself off his knees. He swayed, holding her weight.

"Don't let go," he said.

Then she heard him say, "Shit."

As the two of them watched, half the ceiling of the shanty collapsed. A wall of fire came down like a steel curtain in front of the doorway. The fish house lurched again, a dying ship slipping under the water. The lake spread in a deepening pool across the floor. Steam and smoke mingled. There was no way out.

Stride squatted down again and eased her back onto the hot floor. She hid her face under the trapdoor. There was still fresh air blowing below the shanty, but the ice was weakening, and the pool of water was rising and threatening to flood inside. When she looked up, she saw Jonny with a wet scarf wrapped around his face. He kicked furiously at the tin wall behind them with the bottom of his boot, but the metal hung tough. Sparks landed on his clothes and started to catch fire. He spotted a gas-powered auger in the corner and lugged the three-feet steel coil to the wall. He pulled the crank cord, and the motor coughed and sputtered. The shanty swayed; it was sinking fast. The fire raced over their heads. He yanked it again, and again, and finally the whiny engine roared to life. Stride plunged it against the wall, and the metal screamed and gave way, and then he pulled it back and punched another hole and twisted his body to drill a jagged tear down to the bottom of the wall. When that was done, he brought the drill back up and cut sideways and down, until the gap in the metal formed a three-feet square.

He threw the auger down. He kicked again, and this time the wall yawed and bent, and the flap of metal pushed outward toward the open air. The rush of new oxygen fed the fire, and the flames closed in on them. He didn't need to tell her what to do; she grabbed hold of his waist, and he squirmed through the gap in the wall, dragging her behind him. He fell out of the fish house and splashed into frigid water, and he kept snaking forward until Serena spilled out behind him. She let go and fell into a foot of slushy water, but there was a sheath of ice below her.

Stride clawed out of the shallow pool and reached back and pulled her out beside him. The snow froze her wounds with an awful sting. She wanted to lay there forever, but he was already moving. He stripped off his jacket and made her put it on, then hoisted her onto his back again. Next to them, the fire spat through the hole they had made in the wall. The rest of the ceiling collapsed with a roar, and the walls caved in over the space where they had been only seconds earlier. A new tower of flame rose and fell, consuming what was left of metal and wood, until there was nothing left of the fish house.

She couldn't walk, but she knew that Jonny was near to breaking. In the distance, though, she saw rescue. Maggie ran toward them, waving madly. Behind her, only a quarter mile away, half a dozen squad cars converged on the scene.

Jonny saw them, too. He sank to his knees, unable to go any farther. She felt both of their bodies shiver and tremble, but she repeated over and over to herself that it wouldn't be long, that help was coming, that warmth and blankets and morphine were minutes away. She prayed it wasn't a mirage.

Someone else saw the police cars coming, too.

Nearby, the snow-covered Lexus sedan near Blue Dog's van came alive. Windshield wipers pushed aside the snow. Its tires spun, and it shot off away from them, away from the police, away from the wreckage of the shanty, heading straight out toward the belly of the lake, where the blizzard quickly swallowed it.

"Who the hell was that?" Jonny murmured.

Serena didn't answer. She was already unconscious, and in her dreams, the pain went away, and she was warm.

59

Lauren was in a white cloud, unseeing, with the storm blinding the night and the lake as big and open as the ocean itself. The wheels of the Lexus churned silently at a hundred miles an hour across the ice. She could have been flying.

She had no illusions of escape. She was dying. You could only lose so much blood and stay alive. Her heart kept pumping, and the red river soaked into her blue shirt and turned it purple and puddled on the leather seats of the Lexus. Dan would hate that. He could forgive almost everything else, but he'd be standing over her grave asking why she couldn't have died in the snow and spared the custom interior. That was Dan. Love was sex to him, but money was love.

It didn't matter to her to die out here. The infuriating part was that no one would understand. It was never about money or power or exposure. She didn't swing the flashlight into Tanjy's head because she was afraid of the truth coming out. She did it because Dan was in love with Tanjy.

Lauren willed the knowledge of Dan's other affairs out of her mind, because in the end, he came home to her and relied on her for everything. If he wanted to sleep with trophy girls who thought they had a chance of displacing her, she didn't care; she just didn't want to know about it. Sex was never of much interest to her, so she let Dan do what he wanted. She was the one who loved him, who created him. Their partnership was more important than anything else.

Until Tanjy.

Until that perverted, beautiful bitch destroyed their lives.

She didn't understand how Tanjy and her vile fantasies turned Dan inside out and made him forget what Lauren had done for him. People called Lauren an ice queen and made jokes about the cold face she showed everyone else, but they were so wrong. When that huge, awful blackmailer named Billy Deed showed her what was going on between Tanjy and Dan, she became obsessed with punishing Tanjy. Erasing her. Obliterating her.

It wasn't just the photographs, although she couldn't believe Dan would be so reckless. Any one of those photos would have brought their world tumbling down, ruining everything. But there was more. Blue Dog had e-mails, too. Those were the things that scared and enraged her. Dan telling Tanjy how much he loved her. How she aroused him. How he never stopped thinking about her.

How he was talking to a lawyer about divorce.

No lie. She checked his calls and his calendar. He was meeting with a divorce lawyer in the Cities. Divorce. To throw over someone like Lauren, who had made him everything he was, who had built her entire life around his career, for a deranged child like Tanjy Powell. Lauren wasn't going to accept that.

If Tanjy thought rape was so exciting, let her see what it was really like.

She felt like a stone watching Tanjy suffer in the park, her naked body strapped to the fence. Later, as Tanjy was crucified in the media, Dan finally broke off the affair, and Lauren was exultant. She was in control of the world again. She ramped up her efforts to land Dan a lucrative job far away from Duluth and far away from Tanjy Powell.

Everything was going perfectly until Tanjy called that night. Begging to talk to Dan. Claiming to know who raped her.

Lauren became deadly calm. She was at a crossroads. She wasn't going to let the truth come out, and she wasn't going to let Tanjy lure Dan back under her spell. She told Tanjy that Dan was at their lake house, and she knew Tanjy would drive out there that night, to talk to him, to seduce him. Lauren went to meet her instead.

To kill her. Not just to keep the secret, but to wipe her from Dan's mind once and for all. She knew she could do it.

Tanjy. That young, stupid little fool. The irony of it all was that Tanjy was wrong, but when she saw Billy Deed pulling up in the Byte Patrol van behind them, it was too late to go back.

So Lauren told her.

"It was me, you sick bitch."

As Tanjy turned to run, Lauren let out all her rage with one swing. Just one, that was all it took. Tanjy dropped and died. Cold-blooded? Never. She was on fire.

But there was always a price to pay. That was what her father told her. Her father knew about cutting corners, making deals with the devil. Justice always found a way to even the scales.

Like now.

At least she felt no pain. Not anymore. The doctors would say it was a rush of endorphins as the body got itself ready for death, but the peace as she drove was almost blissful.

She didn't feel anything even as the Lexus sped past the warning flags onto one of the hot spots on the lake, didn't feel anything as the nose of the car broke through the thinning ice and the car jerked and spun to a stop and the air bag deployed. Nothing.

She noticed that as the air bag deflated, it was stained burgundy, as if she had poured a bottle of red wine over it.

The Lexus settled lazily into the water. It was virtually soundproof, and she could barely hear the ice spindling into fragments, giving way. Near-freezing water seeped in at her feet, and she didn't feel that either. She knew she should open the car door, but the signals from her brain didn't travel to her limbs anymore. It occurred to her that Tanjy had come out of the lake, and now she was going into it. Balancing the scales. Body for body.

The water reached her waist. Her stomach. Her breasts. Her neck. She was floating. The car dipped below the surface, and the lake and the storm and the snow disappeared from view, and there was nothing but the cold, wet hands of the devil taking hold of her. Her lungs rebelled, as if wondering why they should die just because the rest of her was lost, but soon enough, they gave up to the inevitable, too, and she took a breath that was no breath at all.

She had a fleeting thought that the ice would close over the top of her by morning, and she wondered if anyone would ever know what happened to her. She would simply be gone.

Poor Dan. He would miss the car.