The Angel Maker

"He's stealing organs, Phil. At least three kids are dead. The deaths are a direct result of his work, and that makes it multiple manslaughter, at least. How many more are there? I thought that was the point of Homicide. Three weeks."

"So it's hardball, is it?"

"Is it?"

"I want you back. That's no secret. I suppose that's half the problem," he said, allowing a rare smile. "But I'm not going to deal like this."

Boldt interrupted. "What a crock! You make deals like this every waking hour."

Shoswitz's face turned red and his nostrils flared. "Two weeks and that's final. Is this the new you?"

"Maybe it is," Boldt admitted. "I'm not feeling real 'new' at the moment, actually. Babies tend to make you feel ancient."

"You don't even have a formal complaint, do you? Is this on the books as a crime?" "I'm complaining," Boldt said, carefully avoiding the second answer. "The problem with you is you only see your side of things," Shoswitz said in a frustrated voice. "Now you're sounding like Liz."

This elicited a smile from the lieutenant, and Boldt could feel he had won. Shoswitz glanced over Boldt's shoulder. Boldt saw a flicker of distraction in the lieutenant's eye and knew before turning that it would be Daffy. He turned to see her coming at them like a freight train-no stopping her. A beautiful freight train at that. A nice engine. She opened the door without knocking. In a desperate voice she said, "A friend of mine's been kidnapped. I need your help." Pamela Chase climbed into her car, having decided on a drive because it was raining again and she couldn't stand it another minute inside her apartment alone. The occasional round-trip flight to Vancouver airport that she performed for Tegg did little to assuage her overall feeling of emptiness. Begrudgingly, she lived alone. Alone with her weight problem-with what she had come to think of as her ugliness.

A low ceiling of thick storm clouds blotted out the night sky and dumped more rain onto the drowning city. Four years of drought, now this! She didn't know exactly where she was going, but like a dog on a scent she followed her instincts away from the deafening drumming of the rain on her small balcony with its plastic fern and blown-out lawn chair. Another few minutes and that rain would have driven her right out of her mind. She pulled up to a red light and studied her reflection in the windshield. Mirrors were not popular in her apartment. She searched her face, trying to see it as beautiful, as Elden claimed to see it. She ignored the heavy checks and the squinty black eyes, the lifeless hair and spotty eyebrows. She saw someone else entirely. She briefly forgot all about her childhood-her parents' malicious remarks about her weight problem, her being left behind to "study" when her family went on social outings, the kitchen cabinets being locked, her being fed different size servings and different food than her siblings.

The neighborhood changed. Suddenly she left behind the stores and fast-food chains, the plastic marquees and 49-cent, LETTUCE signs, and was surrounded instead by towering trees, manicured shrubs, and elegant homes.

This was familiar territory to her, not unlike her childhood neighborhood less than a mile away. This was where the money lived, the professionals, along the lake shore, away from the noise and exhaust.

The Teggs owned three cars. Since they had only a two-car garage, and his was the one always parked in the driveway it was easy for her to determine Tegg was not at home. She drove by here often, waiting for the hours to pass, waiting for work. She lived for business hours. For Monday through Friday. For late-night emergency calls. For something more than the boredom of that apartment.

She tried the clinic next, but he wasn't there either. The place was locked up tightly and the security was on. So where was he? Out at another of his social functions with her? The ballet? The opera? Out with the big names and big money? He loved that world.

The more she couldn't have something, the more she wanted it. just like peanut butter. There was one way to make sure of his whereabouts. She pulled over at a Quik-Stop, bought herself a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and ran through the rain to a phone booth, getting soaked in the process. She thought about the voice she would use: Elden had taught her about image, about role-playing and acting. She summoned a convincing desperation, which wasn't too far from the way she felt anyway. The phone rang several times, which she knew from experience meant it wasn't the baby sitter answering, because the baby sitter always either occupied the phone line, keeping it tied up, or sat close enough to answer an incoming call on the first ring. The multiple rings confirmed her suspicions: The wife was home, Elden was not.

The wife answered: "Hello?" she said in that snobbish accent she had perfected. "Mrs. Tegg, this is Pamela calling for Dr. Tegg."

"Oh, hello, dear," she said, now in a patronizing tone that implied a warmth between them that didn't exist. It came out of the fact that this woman was friends with Pamela's parents and felt obliged to a pretense of a certain degree of amiability. Resentment was more like it-the two of them had squared off on several occasions. "He's not here, I'm afraid." "We've had an emergency call at the clinic nothing too bad-and Dr. Tegg isn't answering his pager," she lied in her most appropriate voice: concern without alarm. "He's out at the farm, dear. Working. Incommunicado, I'm afraid. That's what he loves about being out there, you know? You'll just have to refer this emergency elsewhere," she said in a not-so-subtle tone of disbelief, Damn her, Pamela thought, it's getting so I can't fool her. The farm! Working? Without me? "Right," she managed to squeak out, strained though it was. She thanked the woman-she hated thanking her for anything-and hung up.

It was a long drive out to the farm, tonight even longer because her mind wouldn't rest, filled as it was with the force of her substantial insecurity driven to discover what he was up to without her. Once off the Interstate, one road blurred into another. Trees. Darkness. The ceaseless rain hung in front of her like a curtain. Headlights flashed her windshield with silver. Taillights like animal eyes.

The farm was located far off the beaten track in a section of national forest that had been given over to timber lease some years before, the only access a series of unmarked, twisting, hard-pack roads.

She negotiated her way over these unmarked roads, across the narrow bridges, and finally pulled into the rutted lane that led to the property.

To look at it, you might guess the place abandoned, except for the barking that emanated from the Quonset hut-the kennel situated fifty yards down a sloping grade to the right of the old cabin and driveway. A light was on in the cabin. He was here!

She parked and hurried through the rain. Her wet blouse glued to her chest. Her jeans absurdly tight-were soaked from just below her crotch to her knees. Her hair was matted and a mess. She twisted the handle-it was locked. She crossed around to the cellar entrance and in doing so passed two glowing basement windows that had been painted over from the inside. She didn't need to see through these windows to know he was working inside. Now drenched, she approached the thick wooden door and pounded on it loudly. A moment later, he called out, "Who's there?" When she answered, he opened the door, The hall was dark, though to his left the impromptu operating room glowed brightly beneath the surgical lamps. He stood in shadow, his face partially hidden. She slicked back her hair and shook the water off her, Behind her, the loud barking continued inside the kennel. She glanced into the operating room where a sedated woman lay stretched out on the operating table, green surgical cloth covering her. Pamela experienced the horror of exclusion. He was prepared to do a harvest without her! Unthinkable! "So," he said in that grating voice of his, "you've come."

The fear of abandonment penetrated so deeply that she felt paralyzed, unable to move or speak.

But he touched her elbow and steered her into the cabin's basement room-his operating theater and shut the door. The ceiling of exposed floor joists hung low over their heads, woven with a network of old pipes and electrical wiring. He had created a false ceiling by stapling a thick clear plastic to the underside of the joists. He had done nearly the same thing to the stone walls-had placed a series of two-by-fours around the perimeter of the room and had fixed the transparent sheeting to them, creating plastic walls. This room was kept immaculately clean even the plastic was wiped down with disinfectant following every surgery. He was a cleanliness fanatic-you only had to look at his hands and nails to see that. And although in terms of equipment they got by with only the bare necessities-anesthesia, lights, autoclave, and various monitoring devices-it was all state of the art. There was even a backup generator in case the power failed. Tegg was overly cautious with every aspect of his surgery. obsessive. She considered him a great teacher. The overhead lights burst with enough candlepower to light a small stadium.

Only his eyes were visible above the surgical mask as he studied her. He glanced quickly from her to his patient on the table. He seemed briefly confused. She couldn't remember ever having seen him with this particular expression-as if he had been caught in some wrong. Perhaps he knew how much such a discovery would hurt her. Perhaps he could sense even that.

Her eyes welled with the tears of rejection. He didn't need her.

He had deliberately excluded her. just like her parents! just like everyone! But then he raised and dropped the green cloth as if it meant nothing to him, as if discarding his patient, and stepped toward her with a renewed confidence, strong, even mesmerizing. "My pager must be broken," she said to him in a dispirited voice, looking for some excuse. She knew it wasn't broken, but she wanted to offer him a way out. Even now, she felt obliged to protect him.

He replied, "No, your pager is not broken. I didn't call you." Only now did she notice that he held a scalpel in his gloved hand. Devilishly sharp. Dangerous. "I didn't want to ... bother you." These were the words he spoke, but it was not the message carried in his voice. This contradiction confused her. "Bother me? You never bother me. I'm always available for you. For any reason. Anything at all."

She strained again to see the patient on the table, but he stepped into her line of sight and placed the scalpel flatly against her cheek. He clearly didn't want her looking.

She glanced into his familiar eyes and saw something new there.

Her legs trembled. She felt herself flush a crimson red as sexual excitement rushed through her. Here? Now?

He stepped closer to her and ran the scalpel down her neck to between her breasts. "Elden?" she asked, her heart racing furiously.

One by one, he cut free the buttons. "Is this all right?" he asked.

She nodded. "I guess so." Keeping his mask on, he kissed her then for the first time. He took her pouty lips between his masked teeth and bit down hard in a way that both thrilled and terrified her. She felt powerless next to him. "Is it all right?" he asked again. "Hmm?

She hesitated. "You want this, don't you, Pamela? I know you do. Tell me you do."

Her shirt fell open. He pulled it back and studied the long scar below her rib cage. He touched it and hummed softly. "Tell me," he repeated. She thought she might faint. He used the scalpel to cut her bra. it too fell open, exposing her. He didn't look. He held her eyes. He said, "This is what you want, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Good." He ran the flat of the blade over her breasts. A penetrating, exhilarating chill raced through her. The danger that blade represented ... He then held out his empty hand and offered it to her. She kissed his gloved fingers then, one by one. She drew each of his fingers into her mouth, suckling them and curling her warm tongue around them, ignoring the odd odor of the latex. All the I while, Tegg continued to stare into her eyes. What did he see? What was he after? He withdrew his fingers from her mouth, glanced once quickly nervously?-over his shoulder at his patient, then quickly back at her and said, "You won't need these." He tugged her jeans away from her soft middle and drew the scalpel all the way down one pant leg, then the other. Her jeans came off like a pair of chaps. Her head swam, feeling his hand touch her there.

All at once she could smell her own excitement, and it embarrassed her. It mixed with the musty and medicinal odors of the cellar. "You'll like it," he said, reading her thoughts. He pulled the severed blouse from her and left it on the floor. He led her-underwear, running shoes and peds-to the end of the operating table.

He positioned her facing him with her back to the patient, standing between the unconscious woman's bare feet. She resisted the urge to cover her tried not to think of the way her flesh must belly, look in the glaring light. His eyes glowed behind the operating mask. She could hear his coarse, exciting breathing.

She felt dizzy, almost drunk. This wasn't how she had imagined it. He was scarcely himself. is this how men were? She ached with longing and fear. He reached past her and moved the patient's feet out of Pamela's way, clearing a small space between them on the operating table.

Suddenly, he scooped Pamela up and planted her sitting in this space on the end of the high operating table, centered between the patient's ankles. He took one of her hands and placed it on her raised knee, then the other, so she held herself open for him. He spun the scalpel before her eyes. Light glinted from its edges. He lowered it. He nicked the waistline of her underwear, and then threw the scalpel to the floor. He placed both hands on her underpants, and tore them open.

He asked, "Are you sure?" She nodded, unable to speak. "We can stop," he offered. "No." He touched her with his gloved hands. She rocked her head back and stared open-eyed into the harsh, sterile light. Her left leg cramped; she wanted to let go of her knee, but she didn't dare do anything. This was all so new to her, not at all what she had imagined. Better in some ways. Worse in others. He felt removed and distant, and yet his touch was intense and knowledgeable. She wanted him to want her.

He unfastened his belt. She grew light-headed. He took her legs and pulled them toward him, drew her to him, causing her to plant her arms and lean back, her head nearly touching the patient, her legs wrapped around him, her body half on, half off the metal table. The farther back she leaned, the easier it was to support herself, but the more contact she made with the woman behind and beneath her. Humming one of the operas that he played during their surgery, he penetrated her. A sharp pain. She cried out. She could tell by his reaction that he liked it, so she didn't try to stifle the sounds that shuddered through her with each of his thrusts. He went after her with a frenzy.

Her body went numb as all of her senses focused, instead of on herself, on him. His eyes closed. He smiled! He liked this!

Then nothing. He stopped. Was it over? He withdrew and shoved her away from him, back onto the table.

She was filled with a vague longing for something soft-muted light, a pillow, a kind word. "Was it any good?" she asked. "You can't answer that yourself?"

"It was wonderful!"

"There, you see?" Then he said mechanically and without emotion, "Now put on a smockthere's work to be done. She won't stay under forever."

Pamela went into the adjacent storage room, cleaned herself off and changed into a smock, remaining naked underneath. The sensation thrilled her. Everything about this night thrilled her. With her clothes as they were, she would have nothing but the smock to wear for her drive home. Wild! She giggled with the thought.

When she returned, he seemed nervous, almost frantic, not at all himself. He kept checking his watch. She joined him at the table alongside the patient and the stainless steel tray of hemostats, scalpels, and needles.

Only then did she notice: "She's not prepped!" She blurted this out without thinking. "She isn't shaved." Their eyes met then, and she saw panic in his, so foreign a sight that it was made all the more obvious, like a virtuoso missing a note, or an actor forgetting a line. He had neglected to prep her. Inconceivable! Elden Tegg? He never forgot a single detail of any operation, large or small. Had the sex been that good? She didn't know this man. He had treated her so differently this evening, done things she had always wanted but had never dared ask for, that it was almost as if she was with someone else. "You're right," he conceded, "she's not properly prepped."

Elden Tegg admit a mistake? He never made a mistake! What was happening?

He instructed her, "Get what you need and prep her." When she failed to respond, he commanded harshly, "Go on!"

She didn't like that voice. It wounded her. A few minutes later, as she was soaping the patient's side and abdomen, she noticed that the surgical cloth covering the patient was damp in the center of her chest. It had been dry earlier, when Pamela had left the room. She shaved the woman, but her eyes wandered the room curiously and she spotted a surgical sponge stained with Betadyne resting on the edge of the sink. This too was new since she had been out of the room. She put the two together: The Betadyne had earlier been used to prep the epidermal for surgery, and then the patient's chest had been washed clean of it while she was out of the room.

A heart? Impossible! He wouldn't do that. They had talked about that recently. A lung perhaps. "All set," she said to him. All set? Her hands were shaking, her knees weak. Her eyes fell upon that sponge across the room. She thought about the sex, what he had done to her: Out of desire? Or had it been to distract her? To keep her attention off this patient. She glanced over at him. She felt a distance between them. If this was a scheduled harvest, why hadn't she been notified? Who was the courier if not her?

"All set," he said, his eyes dancing nervously, his hands trembling slightly-hands usually as steady as the steel he held. Yes, another man entirely.

He leaned over the patient, his dark eyes trained on her.

Slowly, carefully, he lowered the blade. "Her name is Sharon," he said to Pamela. "Thank you, Sharon."

This was part of his ritual-every donor had a name, every donor was thanked for the contribution about to be made. He insisted on this. "Thank you, Sharon," Pamela echoed in an unsteady voice that betrayed her inner thoughts and caused Tegg to glance up at her briefly. But not for long. Only an instant. The sharp blade came in contact with the woman's skin. The first drop of her blood seeped from the incision. Pamela lifted a sponge. There was work to do.

As Elden Tegg began the invasive surgery for the kidney harvest, thoughts swarmed inside his head like angry bees. The problem lay in the fact that Pamela would never approve of a heart procurement-the procedure for which this woman had been prepped prior to Pamela's intrusion. There was no predicting what she might do if she found out about it, hence the charade-the lovemaking, the distraction, the ruse that he had forgotten to prep him!-and now an unplanned kidney harvest. Worse, Maybeck was due shortly, hopefully to inform Tegg that Wong Kei's wife had been successfully admitted to the Vancouver hospital, and then to act as courier for both the harvested heart and the other organs once the various procedures were completed. A single kidney harvest wouldn't interfere with any of that-this donor wouldn't need any kidneys where she was going, that was all part of Tegg's plan-but Pamela's curiosity was sure to peak if she encountered Maybeck. Maybeck delivered donors, and he returned them to the streets, but this was too soon after surgery for a pickup; she would have to wonder what he was doing here this time of night. Pamela Chase was no idiot; she would figure this out in minutes. And then what?

There was one possible excuse, he realized, and he congratulated himself for thinking of it. On rare occasions they performed a "private" harvest, selling an organ directly to a friend of Tegg's, a transplant surgeon in Vancouver-as opposed to shipping it off to the Third World market. Patients on the low end of transplant waiting lists became desperate, and this surgeon in Vancouver-along with Tegg was willing to do something about it. For a fee. This heart was a "private" arranged through the same man. Although Pamela had previously delivered the "privates," there had been talk recently that perhaps Maybeck should do it, and this provided Tegg his out.

He paid particular attention to his work, for he continued to see this woman's body as a treasure trove, a chalice from which to draw life itself. Several lives. One begets many: it was almost poetic! He felt a small twitch in his neck but paid it no mind-just nerves.

He worked more quickly than usual, and Pamela did a good job of keeping up, of anticipating his every need. He wanted this finished. He wanted the kidney packed, readied for travel, and Pamela on her way before Maybeck's arrival. if Maybeck said the wrong thing, he could screw this all up. Tegg glanced up and looked around the room to rest his eyes. The plastic walls and ceiling gave the room a strange metallic sheen, reflecting the bright light like dulled mirrors. Again, the muscles in his neck and shoulder twitched; again, he fought it off.

"Doctor?" she asked. He had actually blanked out for a minute, caught up more in his thoughts than his actions. His eye rest had gone on a little too long. He returned to his work, talking as he did. "Clamping the renal artery. Renal vein." He prepared to sever both. "Scalpel." She slapped it into his gloved hand before he completed the first syllable. She snatched it back just as quickly, and he knew she had spotted a possible problem. It was a tangled mess in here. He wormed his fingers around the various veins and arteries, double-checking to make sure his clamps were properly placed. What had she seen that he might have missed? Together they had successfully performed over thirty such human kidney harvests, and yet they treated each as if it were their first. He carefully followed the clamped artery to its source, confirming it was the renal artery and not the superior mesenteric, which for a moment she had obviously feared it might be. Satisfied, he reestablished his clamp and found the scalpel in his hand once again. He glanced into her eyes. Even with a mask covering most of her face, he could tell she was smiling. She enjoyed this precision teamwork as much as he. Too bad she would miss the heart. "Tying off," he announced. He cut both vessels and tied them securely, testing first the vein-by carefully removing the hemostat-and then the artery. This artery carried over forty-five percent of the body's blood to the kidney. The pressure to the suturc was significant. They both studied the two closures, alert for any leakage. Pamela reached in and sponged thoroughly, Tegg's dexterous fingers at the ready. "Looks fine," he declared, and went about severing the lesser vessels. Pamela washed the area in a steady stream of saline and antibiotic as Tegg continued his work. Several minutes passed. "Forehead," he warned. She mopped some perspiration from his brow. This tiny room lacked adequate ventilation, sealed in plastic as it was, and the intense heat from the light overheated it quickly. "You know," she commented, "the heat is a lot more tolerable like this," referring to her nudity under the smock. "I just bet it is," he said, close to having the kidney free and clear. "It was nice."

"What we just did will carry more significance, mean more, if it is not discussed."

"Message received."

"I didn't mean-"

"Yes, you did." She added, "I'll live."

He glanced at her again. He didn't like to see her angry at him like this; he had come to expect that look of reverence in her eyes. He had come to like it. "Here we are," he announced, as he slowly extracted the cherished organ from the retracted incision, cradling it in his cupped hands like a newborn infant. "Saline!" he commanded.

She presented the chilled stainless container to him. The clamped, pink organ sank down into the cool water. She added some saline to completely cover it and returned the dish to the bucket of ice where it had been waiting. "Let's close," he said, pleased with their success. The organ in that dish represented a saved human life, and it was the product of the work of his hands. No such feeling of accomplishment could ever be properly explained, he thought, still looking at it. No one, not even Pamela, could fully understand the magnitude of his happiness at such moments.

They returned to their teamwork, four hands working as if controlled by a single brain. And maybe they were, he thought in a moment of conceit. Maybe this woman at his side was a far greater part of him than either of them understood. It had begun to feel that way of late. And why not? What was wrong with that?

As they closed the various levels of muscle and tissue he instructed, "There's a UNOS container in the back room." This transplant container, one of many stolen by Maybeck from the trash bins of the University Hospital, had been intended for the heart. It was a good size for the heart, slightly smaller than the ones they normally used for the kidneys. "Make sure you triple-bag the organ-use Viospan, as always-check for leaks, don't forget and don't scrimp on the ice! We received a complaint the last time!"

"I always check the ice!" she protested. "It was the cabin temperature. It wasn't us. There's nothing we can do about some old pilot who insists on flying in a sauna."

"Just make sure."

"I will. You know I will." She then inquired, "What flight am I on?"

Tegg spoke quickly. "This is a private. Maybeck's delivering."

He awaited her reaction. He didn't dare look at her, she might see something in his eyes. To cover himself he added sternly, "We talked about this. Hmm? I think it's better this way. You said so yourself: You don't like delivering the privates."

She didn't say anything. just right. He didn't approve of the continuous stitch, subcutaneous closure he had performed. He removed it and began again, this time in silence. "Forehead," he warned. She caught the perspiration in time. This contact between them seemed to settle her down some. The remainder of their work went flawlessly.

He oversaw her efforts as she packaged the organ in the Viospan.

She did a splendid job of it-he could have done no better. When the small Styrofoam container with its bright orange label was sealed and ready to go, Pamela retrieved her sliced-up jeans from the floor.

Tegg added quickly, attempting humor, "It's a good thing Maybeck's handling this one. After all, what would you wear?"

She forced a smile; she wasn't pleased with any of this. But hers was a role of obedience. Five minutes later, she was gone.

Like most of the rooms in the small cabin, the kitchen was in disrepair from years of neglect. Maybeck entered shaking off the cold, looking like a biker with lockjaw-he had the remarkable ability to talk most of the time without showing his grotesque teeth. "We got trouble."

Problems? Tegg wondered. He was proud of the way he had improvised with Pamela. The only problem he could conceive of had to do with transporting Wong Kei's wife to Vancouver. "She died?" he gasped. "Connie, says a cop was nosing around Bloodlines yesterday. Had that girl Chapman's name. Knows she's in the database."

The police? The room suddenly seemed to be without air. "Calm down," Tegg said, though rattled himself. The guy was pacing faster than a hungry pit bull, rubbing his thumb and fingers together like he was trying to remove something sticky from them.

The police? Now? He felt broadsided. Maybeck said, "We're gonna shut it down, right? You got plans for shuttin' it down, right? That's what you said before."

Tegg found it difficult to think with Maybeck circling the table like a predator. "Sit down!" he instructed. When issued this order for a second time, Maybeck sat. "We are gonna shut it down, right?" Maybeck repeated. "We can't shut it down," Tegg informed him. "We have Wong Kei to think about. I took an advance payment. He's counting on us. You know what that means as well as I do." Tegg had his own personal agenda, his own reasons for wanting to see this heart harvest to completion, but he wasn't going to share them with a little person like Maybeck who would never understand. Maybeck would respond better to his fear of the Chinese mafia than to Tegg's needing to right his own past mistakes. "What advance?" Maybeck asked.

Tegg decided to play to the man's greed. "Don't forget: You have fifty thousand dollars coming to you from this heart harvest-if there is a heart harvest. No advance for you until the job is completed."

Maybeck brooded. Tegg needed to settle him down. He offered, "I have some vodka."

"Gimme some."

"Not too much," Tegg warned.

"There's still work to be done."

He poured him a glass, no ice. Tegg seldom drank. He put the bottle away. A thought occurred to him: If worse came to worse, he could always tell Maybeck that he was closing up shop. He could courier the organs himself, if absolutely forced to. But with possession nine-tenths of the law, he would rather have Maybeck do it.

No more work to do tonight," Maybeck corrected, spinning the warm vodka in the glass as if it were cognac. "Word from up north is that the old bitch barely lived through the flight. The Chink said that the doctor says we gotta wait at least a week. He mentioned next Friday."

"Next Friday? But that's insane!" Tegg protested loudly. "We've already abducted her. She's lying on my table downstairs right now!" He felt dizzy. "Fuck her! It's the cops I'm worried about. We gotta shut this down, Doc. We gotta do something fast!"

"Whom do you fear more, Wong Kei or the police?" Tegg let the question hang there.

Maybeck drank half the vodka, swallowing it like water. He cringed and then coughed out an appreciative, "Ahhh." He answered, "The Chink, hands down. Goddamn gooks'll kill you for pocket change. I hear what you're saying, Doc-I hear ya, all right, but I don't know. I just don't know."

Tegg marveled at the incomplete mind of a little person. Most of all, little people wanted the answers decided for them. He debated several possibilities and said confidently, "I suggest the following: First, we explore the extent of their knowledge. Police muck about all the time. Doesn't mean they're necessarily onto something here. Hmm? Connie keeps us up to speed on everything that's going on at Bloodlines. Her time has come to perform for us this is where she earns her bread and butter."

"She gives us the database updates-that's how she earns her bread and butter."

"Don't toy with me, Donald," Tegg warned, a mixture of anger and paranoia sweeping through him. The police?

Maybeck killed the vodka and looked around for the bottle. Tegg edged the glass away from the man using the back of his wrist-he wanted a glass with Maybeck's fingerprints on it in case he needed it later for damage control. An ounce of prevention ...

"The point being: if the police remain interested in Bloodlines, then we must know about it. You have to arrange this with Connie. No telephones, you understand, unless it's just a signal of some sort-no discussions on the telephones! That's imperative! Even a person like you can understand that. Hmm?" He didn't care if he insulted the man. He was beyond caring about such things: It was the police he was concerned about now. That and a successful harvest. Maybe he could up the schedule-a week seemed an interminable time-he'd have to look into changing that. "If the cellular worked from out here, I'd call the man right now," Tegg said. "But as it is, we'll just have to wait on that."

He wrestled with the next thought that came into his mind because it was more something that Maybeck would think to do, not Dr. Elden Tegg; and yet it persisted, nagging at him, refusing to go away. They needed time. They needed to distance themselves from the police. There were ways to buy insurance that little people like Maybeck understood perfectly well.

He said, "You understand what kind of trouble youlre in, don't you? You personally? After all, it was you who made the contacts with these donors minors, don't forget. it was you who delivered them to me. You who arrange to steal . You who paid them. You who put them back onto the streets."

It was both of us," Maybeck complained. "Oh, no, not at all.

Think for just a moment-if you're capable of thinking-think about what I've just said, and I believe you will see that I'm correct. Hmm? Yes, I can see it in your eyes."

"It was you who sliced them open, Doc. What I done ain't nothing compared with that."

He wanted to encourage the man without directly giving him an order. "If Connie poses a problem for us, we should take care of her. She's the only direct connection between you and Bloodlines. Perhaps I can advance the schedule. Another week and you could have your fifty thousand," he reminded, /'and be out of town."

"Take care of her?"

"Is this stupidity an act of yours?"

That inflamed the man. Good. Tegg wanted him angry. Intense anger was a precursor to violence tegg felt this same anger himself at the moment and violence was perhaps required of Donnie Maybeck. "You're saying we zoom Connie?" Maybeck asked incredulously, trying to appear smart. "I didn't say anything of the sort. I merely pointed out that you're in a hell of a lot of trouble if this investigation goes ahead. We can't stop the police from investigating, but we can stop them from having any luck. Things just might work out if Connie took a two-week vacation. Hmm?"

"But what if she freaks out?" Now he was catching on.

Tegg remained silent. "Oh, I get it," said Maybeck. He smiled.

Those teeth were anybody's nightmare. "Yes, I think you do, Donald," Tegg encouraged. "I think you're finally catching on."

Michael Washington was lost. He had followed the old railroad grade for most of Saturday, had slept near a marsh that wasn't on the topo-map, and now was stuck in a thickly wooded, second generation forest. A moment before, having climbed high into a treetop, he had spotted a small cabin and Quonset hut poised in a remote and secluded clearing. He consulted the map once again, hoping this old homestead, a few of which appeared as small black squares on the map, might serve as a landmark and help him to determine his location. Nothing doing. He couldn't find anything like it on the map.

The problem was not the map, he thought, but him. For the better part of the morning he had been consumed with trying to debug a software subroutine, all in his head, while hiking the old railroad grade. He worked as a programmer for Microsoft in a division developing a database program that remained a closely guarded company secret. Weekends, he backpacked alone, exploring new territory-this part of the country was sure a hell of a lot different from Cleveland!-working out problems in his head, de-stressing. It left him mentally refreshed and physically satisfied by Monday morning when his twelve-hour, work-a-day world began again. Not infrequently, these sojourns left him briefly off-trail-lost.

This was not his first venture into this region. Through trial and error he had explored quite a piece of the South Fork of the Tolt and areas south toward Snoqualmie Falls. Even the old railroad grade was no stranger to him-it provided sure footing and a slightly elevated trail to follow. Each weekend, he expanded his knowledge of the area as he mentally ticked down imagined lines of source code in his head, searching for solutions to various problems inherent in the program. He was something of a superstar in a company of superstars. He didn't think of himself this way, but he knew that others did. Probably because he was Afro-American. If you had any brains at all, if you made it up even one rung of the ladder, coworkers and supervisors took notice. You were the exception not the rule. If you solved all the problems that stumped the Golden Wizards, they considered you a genius. Unwittingly, Michael found himself in this strange, even burdensome position. Now he was expected to solve the more difficult problems.

His immediate problem was to find his way to his car. By his calculations he was still a good two or three miles from where he had parked it, and none of this looked like familiar territory, especially the cabin and Quonset he had momentarily glimpsed. About all he could do now was to ask directions or try to connect with a dirt road that might eventually lead him to an identifiable landmark. It would be dark in another three or four hours; he couldn't afford too much more "exploring."

Despite the numerous NO TRESPASSING signs he encountered, Michael Washington walked in the direction of the buildings. He respected other people's right to privacy as much as the next guy, but lost was lost. Although it wasn't exactly an emergency, these people would have to be sympathetic to a person being lost.

Surrounded by thick forest, his only indication that he was nearing the small farm were these posted threats which occurred with an increasing frequency. When eventually he met with a sign that read PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK, he began to wonder what kind of people these were. He was no stranger to the occasional news story of the survivalists, racial extremists, and psychotic killers who hermited the woods of the Northwest. The warnings were quite explicit; perhaps it was a better idea to just move on and avoid the place. Obey the signs. But Michael Washington was too practical, too logical to pass up a chance to establish his location. He wasn't after a ride. He didn't need help. All he needed was the slightest indication on the map of where the hell he was. He stood in front of this final warning for only as long as it took the light rain to start up again. That did it! He was going to find his way out of here if it was the last thing he ever did.

It was.

The structure was thirty feet long and about as wide. At the far end, rain leaked in across the poured-cement floor. The canopy of corrugated metal that arched overhead reminded the woman of an airplane hangar. Rain beat down on it like hailstones. Her ears rang from it. She had awakened in a cage-a dog pen, she now realized by looking around. Constructed of chain-link wire mesh and galvanized pipe, the cage appeared to be about eight feet long by four feet wide, and too low to stand up in. There were dogs in nearly all the cages. She was naked, lying on a brown burlap sack. She had no idea what time it was, who she was 'where she was, or what had happened to her. Some kind of nightmare. The reality of her situation slowly seeped in. She remembered the two men in her house. She remembered the needle in her arm. She tried to sit up. Pain screamed from her side; her arm tangled in an I.V. tube. She recalled a devastatingly bright light and another warm surge of drugs. Again, she tried to sit UP, the pain even more intense. Her hand fell to her side, and she felt the bandage there. Panic overcame her. Dogs. A cage! Naked. There was a bucket behind her, a roll of toilet paper alongside of it. Against the wall, an automatic waterer. The IN. bag was clamped to the overhead wire of the cage. Drip, drip, drip: She could see it feeding her. She rolled to get a better look at the bandage. It was several inches long, redness seeping into the skin around its edges. She felt overtaken by a sudden burst of nausea, rolled to her side, and vomited.

Had she awakened before this? She couldn't remember. She felt completely disoriented. There was nothing here that fit into her reality. it was almost as if this were happening to someone else. She really had believed it to be some kind of intense nightmare at first, one of those in which everything is too real, tactile, painful, and emotionally all-encompassing. But there was no question as to the reality of her situation. If she had awakened prior to this, her situation had not taken hold. Only now, as the dogs began stirring in their cages, as the pain in her side reached an excruciating level, did she begin to grasp her circumstances.

She began to collect herself. There were eight adjacent cages against each of the Quonset hut's two long walls, a cement aisle separating them. The building's only door was to her right. Her cage was sandwiched between two others that were empty. At the far end of the building, to her left, a cage was stacked high with sacks of dog food. Across the aisle to her left a gas heater suspended from the high ceiling emitted a warm wind which blew directly onto her. Perhaps, she thought, that heater explained her placement in this particular cage.

She counted twelve dogs. Some of them carried partially healed scars. She felt dizzy at the sight of those scars. A kennel? She sat up, slowly, overcoming the pain, driven by the need to get out of here. There was a weight on her neck. She grabbed for it, tugged, but it was thick and heavy. A collar of some sort. Only now did she realize all the dogs were also wearing such collars. Big collars, with a heavy black lump attached. She knew what that lump was-a battery; she understood the purpose of these collars. She pulled at it again; her fingers touched a small padlock-it was locked around her neck! She panicked. She crawled on hands and knees over to the chain-link door and grabbed hold. Her collar sounded a brief electronic alarm. It failed to register on her mind as a warning, instead, invoking further panic. She shook the cage door violently.

A jolt of electricity flashed from her neck to her toes like scalding water. Pain as sharp and severe as any she had known. She let go, fell back, and cried out at the top of her lungs.

The dogs leapt to their feet in unison and barked so loudly, so vehemently that it deafened her. Sharon Shaffer clasped her hands to her ears and screamed again, tears pouring from her eyes. The dogs roared on.

Perhaps this was hell, she thought. Perhaps she had died and gone to hell.

As Michael Washington tentatively entered the clearing that held a cabin and a Quonset hut, he heard a sickening cry that cut him to the core. A woman' It was immediately followed by the vicious barking of dogs, but he felt almost certain that he had heard a woman. Perhaps it was nothing more than his active imagination, he thought. He had, after all, only minutes before been thinking about the weirdos who lived in places like this. One of the newspaper stories that lodged in his mind was that of a father and son who had kidnapped a woman backpacker, keeping her in chains, raping and torturing her until authorities finally raided the camp. Had he merely projected the terror of that story onto what he had heard?

Or was there a woman trapped in there with a bunch of dogs?

He broke into a run. A minute later he reached the far end of the structure. The building's only door held an enormous padlock. Locked, with dogs inside? Why? He banged loudly on the door and pressed his ear to its cold metal.

There were so many dogs barking it was impossible to be sure exactly what he was hearing. And yet that sounded like a woman calling for help.

He abandoned his pack and ran toward the cabin, stopping abruptly before he reached it, because it occurred to him that if it was a woman's voice, then whoever was inside that cabin was responsible for her being there.

He returned quickly to his backpack, scooped it up, and made for the woods. He hunkered down and took a minute to collect himself. By all appearances the cabin was unoccupied, but the car tracks in the mud indicated this place was frequented often; and by the look of several of the tracks, recently.

How long would he have to check this out? He left his backpack in the woods, returned to the structure, and circled it fully. Only the one door. Hinges on the inside. You'd need a stick of dynamite to break that padlock. He circled again, beating on the walls to check their construction-too stout to hope to bust up. At one point, he thought he heard that voice again-he was sure of it-but those dogs were so loud! The frustration drove him to a frantic circling of the building. Around and around. He finally caught himself and stopped.

He had to get help. That was all there was to it. He ran along the very edge of the primitive driveway that led to the farm, alert for any cars ahead of him, prepared to hide in the woods if he saw any. The driveway-the road-was the most obvious route to follow: Somewhere out there was civilization, and this had to be the fastest way to it.

The more he ran the quicker his pace, driven by adrenaline, driven as if pursued by someone.

The driveway, a half-mile long, joined a dirt road challenged on its edges by weeds. He followed this road to the right, convinced not only that town was this way-the sun lay to his right; he had to be running south-but also that his car was parked somewhere in this general direction.

He tried to think this through. Whoever lived in the cabin was gone. He decided that if a car approached from in front of him a car returning-he would hide. But if a car or truck happened to approach him from behind-a car headed south, a car headed out of here-he would flag it down. He prided himself on his logic; the fact that he was able once again to think clearly restored some of his confidence and helped to calm him. He pumped hard and continued to run.

As time wore on, he considered flagging down any car he saw.

He encountered an intersection and then immediately another one.

Here finally was an obvious landmark, but he had left his map in his pack! He sized up the dim glow of the retreating sun and continued south toward eventual civilization.

Elden Tegg was on his way to the farm to check his patient when he first spotted the boot prints coming down his road. These tracks stretched in a length and stride that indicated a hard run. His heart began to beat frantically. His cabin and kennel were at the end of this dirt track, nothing else. Nothing else! Fresh tracks at that, he realized.

Maybeck's warning of the night before echoed in his head. "The police!"

He drove quickly, skidding to a stop as he reached his property.

The boot tracks led directly from the kennel!

For a moment he found it hard to catch his breath-him, Dr. Calm!

He leapt from the car, following the prints like a trapper, his fingers groping for his keys. Self-control was all-important. His strength. He settled himself and observed the scene before him.

Whoever it was had stopped in front of the kennel door, but there was only the one set of tracks: He he hadn't made it inside. Tegg lost the prints in or s the grass around the side of the structure. His mind through a dozen possibilities, but he didn't race like where any of them led: back to those tracks.

He unlocked the door, hurried inside and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw his captive in her cage, locked up tight. Bewildered, she didn't utter a word before he left and locked the structure again.

How old were these tracks? Minutes? Hours? He had not seen anyone on the road, but there were dozens of roads out here. Was he too late? Had the intruder taken a different road than he?

He jumped back into the Trooper and headed down the road as fast as the car would safely take him.

He followed the tracks on the edge of the road like a bloodhound.

At the end of the lane they turned right. So did Tegg.. These boot prints dragged on for what seemed like miles, the distance between each print narrowing and after a while indicating the hiker was walking. Good, Tegg thought, walking is slower. He was still extremely nervous, once nearly foreign condition for him, but one that was beginning to seem familiar. He took long, deep breaths and calmed himself.

He reached the double-triangle intersection, where the aqueduct crossed the South Fork, and saw at once why he had not passed the hiker on the way in: He had followed the roads due south, but had taken the fork that eventually wound its way east to the reservoir. There was a lot of open road out here. Tegg drove faster, worried now. There might be people at the reservoir. He didn't want this hiker reaching anyone.

He rounded a long, sweeping corner. A hundred yards ahead of him, he spotted the hiker.

As the hiker heard the vehicle, he-a black man-turned and waved his arms frantically. Tegg felt the blood pounding in his ears. He slowed the vehicle and rolled down his window. The hiker was young and handsome, with anxious eyes. "Please," the young man pleaded. "I need a ride. I need some help."

"Help? Are you in trouble?"

"Please!" Tegg said, "Hop in," releasing the car's power door lock, wondering how next to handle this. As the boy climbed in, Tegg felt charged with a keen sense of power. He couldn't weaken.

He couldn't allow his fear to show. He asked his passenger to buckle up. He took control. "Where are we?" the young man asked. "Are you lost?"

"Among other things. My car's out here somewhere."

"Engine trouble?"

"No." The boy hesitated. He asked carefully, "Are you from around here?"

Tegg considered this briefly. A test. "No," he answered. "I have some work out at the reservoir." He pointed. "The reservoir is this direction?"

"'Yes, it is."

"Stop the car!"

Tegg slowed. "Problems?"

"I have to go the other way." He shook his head.

"Oh, man, did I ever fuck up."

Tegg slowed the car to a crawl. "Can I help?"

"Could you?"

"Well, I wouldn't exactly feel right about abandoning you out here. What exactly is the problem?"

Hysterical, Michael Washington ranted and raved about being lost, about dogs, a woman's voice, and needing help. Something linking sexual perverts to backpackers. "Calm down a minute," Tegg said, trying to convince himself as much as his passenger. He pulled to the side of the road. Stopping the car won the boy's full attention. Little people were so predictable. "I'm telling you, there's a woman up there who needs help!"

"You saw her? " Tegg wondered if his heart could endure this. The wheel was slippery from the sweat on his palms. He let go of the wheel.

An expression of doubt crossed the young man's face. It dissipated quickly as he reminded himself emphatically, "The barn was locked."

"A barn?"

"More like a small hangar. A Quonset hut. There were dogs."

"A kennel?"

"It was a woman, I'm telling you."

Tegg explained, "Well, we can be at the Sheriff's in about thirty minutes. Or we could call." He pointed to his cellular phone. "I can get a clear signal a few miles down the road. But you better have your story straight."

"Meaning?"

"Your name?"

"Michael."

"Michael, have you ever heard a cat at night? Hmm?

Have you ever heard that peculiar screaming of a cat during fornication and thought you heard a woman?" Now Tegg's hitchhiker looked puzzled. "Don't get me wrong-Im not telling you what you heard. I wasn't there. You're the one who'll explain it to the Sheriff, but you mentioned dogs and that made me think of cats and how much they can sound like a woman. A woman screaming. Cats fornicating. A mountain lion can sound that way. What was it you said you heard?"

His passenger didn't answer at first. Then he stated emphatically, "I heard a woman scream."

Tegg added, "I don't know how you feel about involving the cops, but they're not my favorite people. Were you on private property? Was that property posted? Did you have the owner's permission to be there? They ask you things like that. Don't forget that."

"I know that. I also know what I heard."

"And you're prepared to deal with them? Fine." Tegg went through the motions of pretending to engage the car. "You ask me, cops are stupid. They're little people."

"What choice is there? I have to do something." He added, "And what about those dogs?"

Tegg nodded. The important thing was to remain in control, to give this person the sense that he, Tegg, had all the answers, even though he was making this up on the fly. The key to such manipulation was in allowing the other person to believe that all the good ideas were his. To fill in gaps that were never left in the first place. For so many animals in the wild, the key to survival, the way they snared their prey, was through convincing camouflage. Tegg knew his most effective camouflage was to appear to be this man's friend. How quickly we place our trust in those we like. And Tegg could be quite likable when he tried. "Listen, if you're saying I should go back there with you," Tegg suggested, "I suppose that makes some good sense. It's a good idea. The police are certainly more likely to believe the two of us, aren't they? Of course they are!" He didn't wait for an acknowledgment; he had the boy right where he wanted him: confused. No one likes to disclaim authorship of a good idea. He turned the car around. He would have to pretend he didn't know the way.

It was strange how long the ride seemed to take. In reality it was only a, few minutes, a couple of miles. For Elden Tegg, attempting to work this out in his head, those minutes passed slowly. Another complication. This heart harvest had brought him some bad luck, but he wasn't going to bail out. Not with Wong Kei's money in hand. Not with a donor all lined up. You seized a problem by the throat and you squeezed until it died. It was as simple as that. Problems left breathing came back to life. You killed them the first time, or you suffered the consequence.

Michael directed Tegg through the turns that lead Tegg onto his own property. Tegg remarked convincingly, "I've been coming up these country roads for years. Never knew this place existed." "Me either," Michael said. "You're on foot, are you?" Tegg asked, needing as much information as possible. His hope was to discourage this person, to convince him he had heard wrong, send him on his way. But if this failed, what then? Where was a person like Maybeck when you needed him the most? "Hiking." "You're a long way from anywhere." He added, "I was under the impression this is mostly private land out here." It was all privately leased land now-timberland owned by paper companies. The hiker had been trespassing-probably knowingly and this seemed useful ammunition. You preyed on a person's vulnerabilities. It was always the weakest link that broke first.

When his passenger failed to respond, Tegg said, "The thing of it is, the police may wonder what you were doing up here in the first place. Especially if it turns out to be a wild goose chase-a couple of cats fornicating. You say you were hiking? Are there trails up here?"

"There's an old railroad grade," the young black man snapped defensively. "I don't care what the police say!" Tegg knew all about the old railroad grade, about the Nature Conservancy's attempts to purchase much of this land. He remembered the tree spiking. The radicals who chained themselves to the trees.

He glanced over at his passenger, who seemed so righteous, so determined. Tegg rolled down his window and fished for air. What next? He thought of a possible way out. "We won't have any trouble with those dogs you mentioned," he said, once again getting the other's attention. "At least we shouldn't. Hmm? Did I tell you I'm a veterinarian?" There it was, the biggest risk to take, but if offered as an asset he hoped it might be accepted as such. "No shit?" the young man asked. "The rangers keep a couple horses out here," Tegg lied convincingly. "Out at the reservoir," he added, keeping his story straight. He glanced over at his passenger-was that relief he saw? He explained quickly. "I have my kit in the back. If the dogs give us any trouble we'll be fine."

"It's just up here," his passenger informed him. "Did you speak to anyone in the house?" Tegg asked as they rounded the bend in the road that revealed the cabin. He felt in more control now, though his adrenaline was still pumping. He felt slightly giddy with anticipation. "Are you kidding? I mean, what if someone is in the house? What if there is a woman locked up in that hangar?"

"There isn't," Tegg said, asserting some authority. "There are some strange people back in these woods."

"I know that."

"I mean really strange."

Tegg pulled the Isuzu to a stop. The dogs barked ferociously.

With one eye on the cabin Michael stated, "Leave it running. If they're armed ... if there is someone here, and they turn out to be armed, we should be prepared to leave in a hurry."

"Agreed." They both climbed out. Tegg felt suddenly enlightened-what a perfect idea. "You've given me an idea. I just happen to have something that might help us." Feeling stronger now-himself again-he returned to the car, opened the back door, and rummaged in his veterinary supplies.

One thing was for certain: If he made it through this, a few things were going to change. He would leave Felix uncaged, free to patrol the aisle. Free to attack if a stranger opened the door. And he would muzzle the woman. The Bitch. No more screaming. "This ought to help us," he said, showing it to Michael Washington. "A gun?"

"A dart pistol. Armed with something called Ketamine. Quite effective, I assure you. Now, let's have a listen." He motioned the young man over to the structure. "Over here. I heard her over here," Michael said, indicating the north side of the structure. "We won't hear anything with this barking," Tegg said. "Maybe if we just sit here," Michael Washington said, "they'll calm down." He seemed nervous about the possibility of somone coming from the cabin. He checked it, continually. "I haven't got all day, young man. Hmm?"

"If we could get a look inside."

"It's locked up tight.

We've already trespassed. You don't want to add breaking and entering to that, do you? The police treat all crime the same, you know. I for one want nothing to do with breaking any more laws." Tegg felt a strange lightheadedness. The air seemed crystal clear. He knew what had to be done. He checked the dart gun.

Once again Tegg attempted to discourage him. "I for one have other things to do. What about you? I thought you said you were lost. Won't this delay of yours be noticed?" He tested, "Are you with anyone else?"

"me? No. But I understand what you're saying. We can't wait around here forever. Maybe it was just a cat."

The dogs quieted. Tegg lifted his hand like a preacher and they waited in silence as the last of the barking stopped completely. It surprised him they should stop so soon; sometimes they went on for hours. "Nothing," he whispered.

Michael stepped toward the building. He raised his arm, preparing to bang on the wall! "Without actually breaking inside," Tegg added, stopping the man, "there's not much more to be done. We're sure as hell not going to break that lock." Tegg's finger slipped onto the trigger. Despite the isolation, Tegg had no desire to do this out in the open. He had made a similar mistake once before in his life, and he was not prone to repeating mistakes. "Helllppp!" came the distinctive cry of a woman's voice from inside. It was quickly buried in barking, but there was no mistaking it.

The hiker exploded into a frenzy. "What did I tell you?" He ran for the door.

The pistol was no good for moving targets; Tegg was no marksman.

He hurried after him. Above all, he wanted them both inside before he used the dart gun. It would take anywhere from thirty seconds to several minutes for the Ketamine to take effect. He needed the man contained for this period, not running wild. Shoot him inside the kennel, then get out quickly and lock the door until the drug took effect.

in a calm, almost serene way, he examined his options. What was left? There could be no trusting this man. The threat was too great. Even if Tegg were to move the woman, his research laboratory was here in the basement of the cabin. Could he give it all up on account of one lost hiker? Problems tended to breed like rabbits. Solutions required quick decisions. "Something has just occurred to me. What about a hidden key? A spare key for this shed? People always hide a spare. I certainly do. it shouldn't be too hard to find." Tegg said this as he fingered the appropriate key in his pocket. "You're right!"

"All we have to do is think like him. Hmm? Where would you hide a spare key? I'll take this side, you take that."

it took Tegg only a few seconds to separate the key from his key chain, although he had to set the dart gun down to do so. He turned over a rock so that it would look as if he had found it there. Then he announced loudly, "I've found it!"

The man named Michael came running. Tegg retrieved the dart gun and led the boy to the door. He inserted the key and turned. The padlock snapped open. "You first," Tegg said. "This was your idea." He added, "I'll back you up," and displayed the loaded dart gun.

The door swung open. They were greeted with a penetrating darkness, and foul, bitter odors. The dogs barked wildly. Michael Washington checked silently with Elden Tegg. Encouraged by him, he began a slow, tentative walk down the darkened aisle. The white teeth of the dogs, bared and snarling, challenged him at every step. The shock collars sang with warnings, and the dogs cried with pain as they threw themselves against the chain link walls of their cages.

Elden Tegg, dart gun in hand, followed a few steps behind. With each cage Tegg passed, the dog inside went silent. Michael Washington took no notice, made no connection, his attention instead riveted on the inhabitant of the cage up ahead on the left. On the bare back and buttocks of the woman crouched into the far corner.

She glanced over her shoulder briefly, her arms tucked tightly, covering her breasts, looking first at Michael Washington, then at Elden Tegg. She hid her face. "I was right!" Michael Washington proclaimed triumphantly, turning toward Tegg. "But you'll soon wish you hadn't been," replied Elden Tegg, who was waiting several feet away, dart gun raised. He squeezed the trigger. The gun went off with a crack. Tegg had never fired a dart gun at a human. He had hesitated an instant too long. A shocked and stunned Michael Washington reached down and pulled the dart free.

Eyes filled with rage, he charged Tegg, who would be no match for the younger man.

The dogs' barking was deafening! Te's mind worked furiously: the shovel! Leaning against the near wall, it offered possibility. He lunged toward the wall, jumping left toward the shovel as his charger misjudged his intentions and crashed into the door, slamming it shut. A drugged Michael Washington got out of his own way then and managed to crack the door open as Tegg seized the shovel and swung it in a long, unforgiving arc toward the other man's head. The shovel dropped quickly, only grazing the black man's arm. Washington caught hold of the shovel, and hand-over-hand drew Tegg closer-both of them struggling for possession. Tegg saw the man's pupils then, and he let go of the shovel, surprising Michael Washington, who staggered back, shovel in hand. Tegg witnessed the first major seizure in the man, a ripple of muscle contraction that ran from his feet to his shoulders.

Michael Washington fought it. With great difficulty, he managed to move one heavy step forward. Fear belied his intentions.

Tegg watched, catching his breath. He smiled. "There's no use fighting it now," he said. Washington's entire body tensed as a second contraction hit him. He collapsed. Tegg stood over him, watching. Studying. He had never seen such a severe reaction to Ketamine. As a doctor, he found it fascinating. In higher doses, it was lethal." Oh, no ... " the drugged man groaned. "Oh, yes," answered Elden Tegg, another smile forming on his lips.

Boldt was driving his Toyota, Daphne riding with him. He had been warned that it might be days or even weeks until he could draw a vehicle from the pool. He didn't have an office cubicle yet, either. In many ways he remained the outsider, his return to the department more technical than actual.

A few miles passed. The Emerald City receded in the rearview mirror. He could see out across the Sound. Lush green islands like jewels. More pleasure craft than on the weekdays, their sails catching the brilliant sunshine like sun-starved flowers. Ferries like big bugs, back and forth, back and forth. The waterways came alive on weekends when the sun shone. His eyes refocused. OBJECTS CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR read the message stenciled across the outside mirror. "No lie," thought Lou Boldt, studying Daphne's profile. "You don't have to be so mad," he said to her. "We should have done this yesterday." "You did speak to her yesterday. It couldn't be official for twenty-four hours."

"That's a stupid law. Twenty-four hours?

Sharon could be anywhere by now." She added, "And don't give me the statistics sermon! You'll see. Once you have spoken to Agnes you'll be convinced. I know you. I know you will be. Sharon did not take off somewhere. Those goddamn statistics weren't made for people like her. And don't hand me that crap about her having been a runaway. That's all behind her. I could have popped Shoswitz for that. He's a misogynist, you know that?"

"Lamoia's running the surveillance on the Bloodlines employee, Connie Chi," he said, trying to distract her. She was worked up for nothing-they were almost there. In the police department nothing moved at the pace you wanted. Investigators learned to accept it; psychologists-turned-investigators suffered for it. There was a long silence. "So how are things?" he asked. "Things?" she questioned. "What things?"

"You know," he said. "My sex life?" she asked bluntly. "Am I getting enough? Something like that?"

He felt himself blush. "Sorry." He wasn't asking about her sex life, but her happiness, though he felt helpless to explain. "I'm on hold at the moment," she answered. "There was someone for a while, but I handled it all wrong. I wanted too much too soon. It wasn't even that I wanted it, I expected it. The truth is I don't know what I want, and that doesn't work in a relationship."

They stopped at a light, but Boldt didn't look at her. She sounded so damaged. "You seem happy," he said optimistically. "I'm in therapy. It's fantastic! That's what I mean about being on hold. I'm working a little too much. Surprise! But it fills the hours. You know? And the therapy is helping a lot. It's nice to have some control again."

A single evening they had spent together. A dinner that had run out of control. Boundaries crossed. Honesties voiced. And now, strangely, as if it never had happened. "Well, you look great," he told her, feeling stupid to have said it. "Thanks." She hesitated. "No regrets. You?"

"None." He felt her look at him, and he warmed all over. "I'm glad," she said.

Sharon Shaffer's housemate, Agnes Rutherford, was five feet tall with silver-blue hair that gleamed like silk and perfectly brilliant ice-blue eyes that belied their inability to function. Agnes Rutherford was blind. She wore a cardigan sweater littered with dandruff and a skirt that was losing its hem. Leather slippers worn shiny on the sides from sliding her feet along, like a person wearing boots on ice.

When Boldt and Daphne were only a few feet inside the door, Agnes Rutherford asked him, "How old is your child, Mr. Boldt? Or am I supposed to call you by your rank?"

Boldt looked over at Daphne in astonishment. She touched her nose in pantomime. "He's six months," Boldt replied. "Still a baby."

"And do you smoke, even with a child in the house?"

"Smoke? No. Not me. I'm a musician. On the side," he added, though he wasn't sure which side anymore. "A night club." He sniffed at his coat. "It's probably my coat that smells like cigarettes."

Agnes Rutherford grinned, proud of herself. Her teeth were too perfect to be hers.

Daphne repeated what she and the woman had discussed a day earlier. "Hasn't been home, either," the blind woman said in a troubled voice.

Boldt asked, "Why is it you think something happened to Sharon?"

"Oh, something happened all right. Why else would that man have lied to me?"

"Which man?"

"You can hear it in a person's voice when they're lying. Did you know that? He was a very tense man. What a voice he had-like fingernails on a blackboard. Nervous. Not just because I surprised him which I did, mind you but out of fear. Strange as it may seem, he was afraid of me. Me!"

Daphne suggested calmly. "Why don't you start at the beginning, Agnes."

"I heard voices through the wall. Two men talking to Sharon. And Sharon was scared. Plenty scared. I couldn't hear the words, you understand, but I A didn't have to. She was good and scared."

"Voices ... " Daphne repeated. "Yes, so I came in through the kitchen. We share the kitchen. My rooms are just off the back side there. Came in to make sure she was all right. That's why I say the man lied-he told me Sharon had gone out for a minute and that he and his associate were also leaving. But the other one-the one with the halitosis-I think he dragged Sharon out. I heard something dragging on the carpet. She had been sitting in that chair, right over there. That chair squeaks. I heard it. I heard her voice, too, though not her words, not what she said. Not exactly."

"Do you remember what was said?" Boldt asked.

Agnes Rutherford nodded. "Thereabouts. As I rounded the corner the one with the hard voice asked the other. "Who the hell is that? "Those exact words?"

"Yes. He didn't expect me. And then there was a long silence. Then the other dragged her out, I think. At the time, of course, I didn't know what was happening, but that's what I think was going on."

"And you didn't call the police?" Boldt asked, dumbfounded. "I was-I am-afraid of you. I spent a good many years of my life avoiding you. Hiding. On the streets, you understand. Would anyone have believed an old, blind, bag lady, Mr. Boldt? Would they have? You don't believe me now. I can hear it in your voice. You can't believe an old blind lady can survive the streets but I did! Daphne believes me, I bet, but only because she knows me." She added, "I didn't call the police, I called The Shelter. I called Daphne."

Daphne glared at Boldt then. He was trying to see this through the eyes of the law-Phil Shoswitz, or prosecuting attorney Bob Proctor-and he didn't like what he saw: There was no proof of a crime. No matter what,Agnes Rutherford believed she witnessed, she had not seen it. Police work was as much practicality as it was instinct. Sharon Shaffer's history was that of a runaway.

This would not be an easy sell, despite the cooperative relationship between the police and The Shelter. The prosecuting attorney's office was another realm entirely.

Boldt examined the room. He remembered the Stevie Wonder line: Her clothes are old, but never are they dirty. That was how this room looked: pieced together from yard sales but clean to the corners. Vacuumed recently. He asked Agnes Rutherford, "Is this room still pretty much as it was?"

The woman answered, "Oh, yes. Exactly. I haven't touched a thing. My rooms are back there. I don't fool with Sharon's things."

Boldt walked slowly and carefully over to the table and chairs.

The cop in him understood the significance of what, to untrained eyes, might have looked like nothing more than dust on the table. It wasn't dust. Tiny particles of shredded paper perhaps. He studied the table top and then, using his handkerchief so he wouldn't leave fingerprints, applied pressure to the back of the chair. It squeaked. "That's the one," Agnes said.

Boldt told her, "The house had just been cleaned." He made it a statement. "She had vacuumed the carpet that morning."

"Now just exactly how did you know that?" Agnes Rutherford asked.

Daphne asked Boldt, "Lou?" Boldt didn't need any more convincing, he was standing amid a pile of evidence. There were drops of blood on the arm of the chair. "Call the lab," he said. "And tell them to bring a lot of lights."

"Lights?" Daphne asked. "For the carpet," Boldt explained. Variations in the nap of the carpet allowed him to see a pair of scuff lines and the perfectly formed impressions of shoe prints.

Boldt enjoyed watching the ID Unit -the Scientific Identification Department-at work. Educated as scientists, they didn't think like other cops. They worked as a team, speaking in half-sentences, using techie jargon unintelligible to the layman. With their nerd packs and a language all their own, these men and women remained on the social fringe of the police fraternity but played an increasingly important role in any investigation. The star witnesses in an investigation were no longer the boyfriend or the observant neighbor but these ID Unit technicians. Convictions relied on a foundation of incriminating scientific evidence. A jury, even a judge, preferred believe a computer-generated enlargement of work from an electron microscope rather than a woman like Agnes who had heard voices through a wall. You didn't bother Bob Proctor and his band of PA's unless you had,a file full of stats to support your case.

The only thing about ID that really irritated Boldt was how slowly they went about their jobs. If Sharon Shaffer had been abducted, which he now believed, he could only imagine how terrified she must be at this moment-providing she was still alive. No ransom call, no notification whatsoever. Impatience nagged at him.

The ID Unit continued its meticulous examination of the crime scene. The first round involved the detailed photographing, in varying degrees of enlargement and detail, of all angles and aspects relevant to the possible crime. Several general shots were taken, followed by increasingly specific studies of the carpet, the chair Sharon had apparently sat in, the table top, and the fixtures.

The area was vacuumed next-excluding the carpet-for fibers, using small, hand-held, filter-specific vacuum cleaners. Each filter was removed and labeled and then bagged in a white paper bag. Plastic bags were rarely used by Hairs And Fibers because of their static charge.

While several of the team continued to measure and photograph the "impressions" in the carpet, others began carefully dusting surfaces with dark and light powders using soft animal-hair brushes. Any developed prints were first photographed and then "lifted" using wide strips of transparent packing tape. The powder, print and all, came up with the lift, which was then mounted on card stock, labeled, and set aside.

All this while Boldt, consulting Daphne, wrote up a detailed first officer's report, describing the scene exactly as he had found it, his suspicions, and his findings. The report came to two single-spaced legal pages written longhand. They both signed and dated it for the specific hour.

Bernie Lofgrin ate too much and exercised too little. He had the coloring of an Irishman and the temper of a Scot. He wore glasses as thick as ashtrays and suspenders with full-frontal nudes hand painted onto them. When Bernie tugged them this way and that, the nudes did a belly dance. Everyone called him the Professor. He ran his squad like a Scout leader and put away more beer at The Big joke than an alumnus on homecoming weekend. Over the past year he had become a regular during Boldt's piano sets. He had joined the Boldt-Dixon jazz record exchange-taping each other's albums. Bemie's collection leaned toward drummers and trombone players.

Boldt knew that with this being a Sunday it should have been only a skeleton-crew ID unit. But Lofgrin had come himself and had brought additional overtime help as a personal favor.

As he approached, his thick glasses were aimed at Boldt like unfocused binoculars. He seemed to have eyes the size of fried eggs. "One of the two suspects wears a shoe size eight-and-a-half wide. Maybe D, maybe E. The other suspect, some kind of running shoe. The way the nap in the carpet stood up for us, these guys might as well have left us plaster impressions. We might even have a make on the manufacturer of those running shoes by sometime tomorrow. Wee got a distinctive, triangular tread pattern in a couple of takes. Size thirteen, by the way. Big Foot. Fibers on the table vacuumed up just fine. Crisp paper by the look of it. We got another small piece under the table. Light blue ink on it reads"USA/ as in 'printed in. ' " "Was that what the guy was waving a microphone over?" Boldt asked. "You jazz guys think anything with a wire running into it is a microphone. That device measures low-level radioactivity."

"A Geiger counter?"

"Like that, yeah. The reason being that I suspected it was the paper covering to a Band-Aid or gauze, something like that. That paper has a distinctive look. That Geiger counter-as you call it picked up a charge consistent with my suspicions."

"Radioactivity?"

"It's how they sterilize them. Band-Aids, gauze, nearly every selfcontained disposable item in a hospital-they zap 'em with lowlevel radioactivity after they're packaged-that way they can guarantee sterility."

"Live and learn."

"Stick with me, kid. Evidence points to two possibilities: real careful junkies-doubtful; or a doctor-more likely."

"A doctor?"

"We've got some real obvious residual fluidsdried up you understand-discovered both on the arm of the chair and beneath the table. We got a good photo of the drip pattern. My guess is it was squirted. Size of the droplets suggest-"

"A syringe." Boldt interrupted. "Either that or this guy is the original needledick and he came all over that chair." He smiled. "We'll get all this shit off to the state lab. Might have that blood you found typed sometime tomorrow," he said, answering Boldt's thoughts before he could voice them. "Mr. Eight-and-a-half-wide was carrying some kind of flatbottomed case, fourteen' by eighteen inches."

"Like a doctor's bag?"

"That's my guess, yes." Bernie went on. "Big Foot, the guy with the running shoes, was carrying a laptop computer. He set it down next to the chair and gave us enough of an impression for an educated guess that that's what it was, although you can't take that one to the bank. If you bring in these two in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, I may be able to lift some of these carpet fibers from the edges of their shoes. It's a cheap synthetic, loose weave, real prone to shedding. The static should hold the fibers on the shoes for a while. As to your idea that maybe the person in that chair was dragged out of the room, it's possible but we're not likely to prove it. Something was dragged-I can testify to that-and it had two legs or feet or posts, but that's as close as we'll get. Our other vacuum samples could give us a hell of a lot more to work with. Stay tuned." He slapped Boldt on the arm and returned to his crew.

Boldt looked around at an anxious Daphne, who had just returned from interviewing the neighbors in the apartment houses. He waved her over. "Nothing," she said. "Fourteen families of people and no one saw a thing!" He asked her to call the city's 911 dispatch, Sharon's doctor, ambulance services, and the two closest area hospitals, inquiring whether on the previous day Sharon had sought medical attention. "What's UP?"

"The Professor has uncovered some evidence that points to either a drug deal or a doctor."

"Not drugs, Lou. Not Sharon. I know her past says otherwise, but I know the woman."

"Would I have you calling hospitals if I suspected a drug deal?"

She eased noticeably. "But if she didn't call an ambulance, then a drug deal is easier to believe."

"Not for me it isn't."

"Daffy, somehow two people convinced a streetwise woman to open her door for them. How? It also now appears that somehow she was further convinced to roll up her sleeve for them. You know Bob Proctor's reputation. It's going to be our job to disprove any street-drug connection. The state lab will have a lot to say about that. But if we found her admitted to an area hospital, we'd all feel a hell of a lot better."

"That's not the way Agnes reports it. She says she was kidnapped."

"I know that, Daffy."

"Lou?" The Professor, Bernie Lofgrin, called out, kneeling by one of the chairs. Boldt joined him there. "You're the quintessential king of no coincidences," Lofgrin said. "Am I right?"

"So?"

"So we did the lab work-up on the Cynthia Chapman clothing-Matthews' runaway. "Kay?"

"Okay." Boldt felt his pulse quicken. Why would the Professor bring up Cindy Chapman now?

Lofgrin, who was wearing a pair of jeweler's loupes clipped to his already thick glasses, found a magnifying glass in a bag and handed it to Boldt. "Get a load of this," he said.

He pointed. Boldt focused the glass onto the spot indicated. A clump of animal hairs clung to the fabric of the chair. Under the glass they looked like pick-up-sticks. "What do you see?" Lofgrin asked confidently. "Animal hairs," Boldt replied. "A pile of them."

"Notice the extremely long white ones? See how much longer they are than the others? They're unusually long. We lifted similar hairs off Chapman's clothes." He made a face at Boldt. A lab guy like Lofgrin would never use the word identical. In the scientific world, identical rarely existed. "What we've got here is a visual cross-match."

Lofgrin's magnified eyes looked like two ventilated beach balls.

Boldt studied the hairs once again, blood thumping in his ears.

Cindy Chapman and Sharon Shaffer connected? Abducted by the same man? Both runaways, one present, one past. Overlaps. Mounting coincidences he couldn't buy. He asked, "Any way to prove such a connection?" Evidence as ubiquitous as animal hairs was unlikely to hold up in court, but Boldt temporarily ignored this.

Lofgrin smiled; the Professor loved a challenge. "We'll sure as hell try." Daphne kept a close eye on Boldt as he hurried her off the telephone, took it from her, and started dialing.

She protested, "Hey, it was you who wanted me to make these calls."

"Priorities," he replied.

He avoided looking at her because she was the kind of person to sense something was wrong. He didn't know the number, so he called information. "Seattle," he said. Coincidences, he was thinking. "Bloodlines," hoping he had spoken quietly enough not to be overheard, but as he turned around, there she was, only inches from him, wearing a puzzled, frightened expression.

The woman who answered connected him to a man named Henderson, because Verna Dundee, the managing supervisor, didn't come in on Sundays. Boldt reintroduced himself and presented his case, Daphne listening in. He cupped the receiver and protested to Daphne, "Can't a guy get some privacy around here?"

"No," she replied, fear and irritation flashing from her eyes.

Boldt spelled Sharon Shaffer's name for the man. "I doubt it's a recent file. I'll wait," he said in anticipation. As he assumed, he was placed on hold. He would have to check central processing using another-line. "Lou?" Daphne asked, eyes squinting, lips pale.

Boldt felt impossibly hot. The seconds grew into minutes. He thought: I should hang up right now. I should leave this for others. I should stick to my family and my piano playing, because if it turns out ... It was Henderson telling him what he didn't want to hear. He wouldn't need the results of the Professor's tests. Not now that he had this. He felt sick to his stomach.

Daphne had desperate eyes. She had already guessed. "Lou?"

How did you put something like this to Daphne? Why, as a cop, were you always the bearer of bad news? "Sharon Shaffer is in the Bloodlines database. Three years ago she was a regular donor."

Daphne gasped. "I think the harvester's struck again." He looked over at Agnes Rutherford, her blind eyes steady and untracking. "And she's our only witness."

Sharon Shaffer looked on as the black man in the kennel next to hers came awake for the first time. She remembered the terror of that moment and could do nothing to warn him of the horror he was about to experience, nothing to lessen its effect. The dogs started barking; she knew he would awaken-it had been the same for her. She couldn't remember exactly when. Had it been just yesterday? It seemed more like forever.

He looked around. Surprise. Astonishment. Terror. He clearly noticed then the chain-link cages; and a moment later, his own nakedness. She knew that his head ached miserably from the drugs just as hers had.

He spotted her then. She tried her best to communicate with her eyes, for her jaw was now held in a modified dog muzzle made of nylon webbing, one strap of which ran across her mouth, keeping a gauze rag stuffed into place to prevent her from crying out, as she had to this man. She felt responsible for his being here. She was responsible. His jaw was secured in a similar muzzle, although the gag had been omitted, probably because the doctor feared he might vomit on coming awake, which he did, repeatedly. She had to wonder: Was it the effects of the sedation or from looking at her? She could only guess at what she must look like. A bandage glowing a lurid pink at the edges. She had pale skin the color of cigarette ash. Her hair was matted flat. Or perhaps that expression of his arose from the dogs and their horrid smell. The deafening barking at the slightest instigation. It would take him a while to adjust to their situation, but she needed him to adjust-to settle down.

To help her escape. She was going to get out of here, with or without him.

She thought that if only she could stop him from what he would do next, she could spare him some pain. But the muzzle and gag prevented her from speaking; she could only grunt and gesticulate. And that, only quite weakly. She had little strength, drugged as she was by whatever was in the IN. It felt like a combination Valium-Demerol to her. She was experienced enough to know. When she thought about it, it brought on resentment and anger, rage and indignation. She had spent the last three years of her life learning to live sober. Now, forced on her, she found herself drugged up again-enjoying the feeling, wanting more. She looked up at the precious drip, drip, drip of the IN. Worst of all, she couldn't bring herself to disconnect the tube. If anything, she wished it would flow faster. She could take more.

She had always been able to take more ... Despite her efforts to warn him, her neighbor reached out and touched the chain-link door of the 4, cage. He actually laced his fingers into it and shook it with his considerable strength. He must have heard the collar sound its electronic warning-the buzz-but like her on her first time, he didn't associate this sound with the pain that would follow. And like her, he would learn soon enough.

She watched as his fingers met the cage, as a blinding pulse of electricity stung his neck, and literally knocked his knees out from under him. She heard his head thump against the cement as he wilted. His bowels loosened and he fouled himself. He lay there staring up at her, flat on his back, the pain, fear and terror so great in his eyes that she felt herself break into tears. A maddening frustration stole through her, and briefly she found enough strength to sit up, to sit forward and be as close to him as possible.

As his strength returned, he reached for the shock collar, and despite her shaking her head in discouragement, he tried, in vain, to rid himself of it.

How clearly she remembered those first few minutes; they seemed so distant now. He would deny his situation at first. She knew. He would think: This can't be. This is impossible. Then, as reality sank in, as his muscle strength returned, as he began to assess, to realize the hopelessness, he would recoil. A minute later he sat in the center of the cage, wrapped in the fetal position, sobbing and mumbling incoherently. "Impossible What did I do? Can't be ..." He mentioned God, he mentioned his parents. He glanced over at her several times, but seemed not to see her. He retreated.

She sat back onto the burlap and waited. In time he would come around. Given time, he would come to realize they were a team now and that their only chance of escape was to work together.

Her one single hope remained that he would come up with a plan.

After all this time here, she saw no way out. Like the IN. in her wrist, she was stuck here.

Not long after that-she could not determine the passage of time because of the drugs and the suspended states in which she found herself-the ground rumbled. A car! The dogs paced restlessly inside their cages.

She turned quickly to her neighbor, charged with adrenaline. She shouted at him through the gag, able to win his attention but unable to communicate. She resorted to an archaic pantomime, pushing her hands along the cement as if to say, "Clean up!" Demonstrating that he should scoop up the vomit and excrement and get it into the bucket left as a toilet. When he failed to respond, she twisted her face angrily and screamed, shaking her fists, and then pointed to the door. "It's him!" she mumbled. She grabbed hold of her collar and shook it. That reached him. He sat up with a jolt. Again she motioned that he must clean his cage. Her panic contagious, she drove him to it. He worked quickly, glancing over his shoulder all the while, both at her and the door he expected to see opened any second.

Miraculously, he got most of the mess into the bucket at the last possible moment.

The door rattled as The Keeper fumbled with the lock.

The dogs erupted into barking once again. Sharon covered her ears. The door opened. The Keeper was dressed in a business suit. He was smiling. "Good morning," he called out, sounding more like Captain Kangaroo than the madman she took him for.

Elden Tegg walked down the narrow cement aisle that separated the two sides of the kennel, carefully inspecting the inhabitant of each cage. He knew the medical history of each of these animals. He had grown to love them. Each and every one despite-or perhaps because of-their nasty dispositions.

"Time to eat," he said, pushing the wheelbarrow to each cage, the bag of dog food precariously balanced. At the end of the run, he reached the two newcomers, Sharon and Washington.

Sharon was huddled modestly in the corner, looking at him through the muzzle he had cleverly rigged out of nylon strapping. Her contempt for him never left her eyes, although he intended to correct that by harvesting her right cornea. "Come on," he said to her, encouraging her to show him her incision. When she failed to obey, he reached for the remote device that controlled her collar, threatening to use it. Use of this device had the same effect as coming in contact with the wire-it triggered the collar. She sprang into action, obediently duckwalking toward him, paying careful attention to her I.V. She clung to modesty by keeping folded up on herself. "Let the doctor see," he instructed, enjoying the title. He could care less about her nudity: It was the incisions that held his interest. His insistence on leaving the two of them naked had no basis in voyeurism. A determined person could hang himself with clothing. He couldn't afford to lose her, that was all. He waved the remote again, and she turned herself for him. The skin around her bandage was slightly pink but not bad.

He motioned her back into the far end of the cage and let himself inside, the shock collar's remote "wand" constantly in hand, constantly a threat. He changed her dressing, removed the muzzle, took her temperature-ninety-nine and change, nothing to worry about-and replaced her I.V. of Ringers solution with a fresh one supercharged with Valium, a dash of Demerol and a higher dosage of antibiotics. He gave her new gauze for her gag, returned the muzzle, and handed her a bucket of a Quaternarybased disinfectant they used at the clinic. He stood by and watched her as she scrubbed the pen's floor. He directed her to a few missed spots and then took the bucket back, convinced of the pen's cleanliness. Locking her inside he told her, "Cleanliness is next to godliness."

He turned and faced Washington. "Welcome," he said. "You're insane," Washington whispered. Tegg went rigid. His first temptation was to shock him, but he resisted. He had never felt clearer. "Sticks and stones," he answered. "She needs medical attention."

Tegg shot back dismissively, "What do you think I just gave her?"

Sharon grunted at her companion, waving him off, asking him to stop.

Tegg added, "Perhaps you need some medical attention."

"Perhaps you do," Washington protested.

Tegg understood that such charges, if left unanswered, gained validity in some perverse way by simply having been spoken. He picked up the "wand" for this man's collar and reminded him with a short little zap! Washington responded with a spasm of pain. "You are out of your element. I would watch my accusations if I were you."

Washington backed into the corner. "Don't do t is."

Tegg objected, "Do what? You don't even know what this is about.

This is about basic needs. This is about life and death.

That's fairly simple, isn't it?"

He clearly wasn't getting through. Tegg paced the center aisle.

He couldn't describe his present feeling. The air seemed to be vibrating, his thoughts precise-as in the middle of an operation. He felt righteous and angry-why was he forced to defend such obvious logic?

He checked his watch: eight-twenty. From the top of the hill closer to town, the cellular would operate. He could call Pamela. She could reschedule some of the morning appointments and be out here in a little over forty minutes. Why waste a specimen like this? he thought, pausing by Washington's cage. Make the most with what you've got. "Some lessons," he told the young man, "are better learned first-hand." He returned the shock collar's remote device to its hook on the cage, clearly confusing his captives. "Remember our little skirmish yesterday? I certainly "won't allow that to happen again." It wasn't a confusing situation to Elden Tegg: With a strong specimen such as Washington, the dart gun was clearly the only way to go.

"This is my son Miles."

"Hello, Miles." Dr. Crystal Light Horse, a transplant surgeon on the University of Washington's-the U-Dub's-medical staff whom Dixie knew through his lecture series, wore an oversized lab coat and a laminated name plate that included the hospital's insignia. She seemed young for a practicing surgeon, mid-thirties. She was a Native American with laughing eyes, barn-wood brown. She pursed her lips whenever Boldt spoke, her attention focused on him as if she were looking down a gun sight.

Boldt wondered at all the social obstacles she had overcome to get here.

He said, "We tried Miles in day care for about three days, but we noticed this look in his eyes," he explained. "Do you have kids?"

it Two. "Then you know what I mean."

"No."

"You see that look?" Boldt asked, pointing at his son. "That sparkle? Well, that's him, you know? And after day care," he waved a hand in front of his own face like a magician, and acted out the transformation, "gone. just this glazed look like no one was home."

She bristled. "Both my children went through day care, and I never noticed any such thing." "As a surgeon," Boldt asked, "have you ever had to remove a person's foot from his mouth?"

That won a smile. "Thankfully, no." She added, "It's a good thing you're a policeman. It looks as if you have a kleptomaniac on your hands." Miles had stolen a fountain pen off her desk-expensive by the look of it. Boldt wrestled it free and returned it. Miles promptly grabbed it again. His father stole it back and fed him a Bic.

Her office was buried in books and papers. He worried that she might be one of those more-diplomas-than-you-can-count type-A educators, quick to lecture, short on substance.

He explained, "I need to throw a hypothetical situation at you.

I'm involved in an investigation that is really more your field than mine, and I'm at a loss for specific leads to follow."

"A scent."

"Exactly."

"I'll do what I can."

"Let's suppose you're a transplant surgeon which you are-who, for one reason or another, finds herself in need of a great deal of money." "You're broke."

He nodded. "You're broke and you hear that overseas or maybe right here in this country, this city, people are willing to pay big money for certain organs."

"There's no evidence that in this country-" He raised a hand, interrupting; he didn't want her getting ahead of him. "Now as I understand it, in transplanting something like a kidney, you would want the donor to be blood type O."

"Not accurate: You would prefer the donor organ to match the recipient's blood group exactly."

"But to sell?" he inquired.

She bristled again. "Type O might indeed make it easier to sell," she agreed. "Type O is the largest, most common blood group, and Type O organs have the lowest rate of rejection in transplants into any other blood group."

He suggested, "So, if you put yourself in the roll of the harvester-"

"The procuring surgeon," she corrected. "We don't like the word 'harvester."' "Nor do I" He completed, "How would you, as the procuring surgeon, locate a potential donor with blood type O?"

"The procuring surgeon is looking for cadavers.

I suppose the first resources I would draw upon would be the hospital morgue, the Medical Examiner's office, and any of a number of mortuaries."

Boldt took notes. Miles took his pacifier out and threw it across the desk at Dr. Light Horse, who scooped it up, brushed it off, and offered it back to him. Miles liked that. He accepted it gladly and sucked noisily. Boldt asked, "And if those resources weren't available to you or were exhausted for one reason or another, what then?"

She offered him a cold and puzzled look. "You're not suggesting?"

"What am I suggesting?"

"Someone living?"

"It's possible, isn't it? I've read about Egypt, India ..."

"But those people are desperate for money.. "There are people desperate for money in this country as well-in this city as well."

"But it's different there," she protested, clearly upset, "in terms of professional health services. It's true that some Third World countries have limited resources, limited access to technologies such as dialysis. The reason for the high prices, for the whole transplant mess in these parts of the world is that without those transplants people die. It's different here. Much different."

He admired her vehemence. She was morally and ethically undone by what he was suggesting. "Which means that your market is overseas, if I'm reading you right."

"Now you're scaring me."

"Good." He wanted her scared, because he felt scared for Sharon Shaffer, for whoever else was scheduled next for the knife. "Here in Seattle?"

"You can't quote me on that," he said.

She thought long and hard. "Blood type? Depends what kind of resources you have, I suppose. You would need computer access, of course, but what comes immediately to mind are hospital records, the Red Cross, the insurance companies. Any of those databases would be likely to list blood type. / "A plasma bank?" he asked. "Just exactly how far along in this investigation are you?"

He handed her several autopsy photos of two of the incisions.

"Dixie suggested you have a look at these."

She studied them thoughtfully. "Anything special?" he asked.

She continued to look them over. "Perfectly competent closures.

Although the incisions are a little large."

As Boldt wrote this down, one of his notes caught his eye. "What kind of team does he need? How many assistants?"

"It depends on which organ we're talking about and which procedure." "Kidneys," he said. "Harvesting kidneys."

"For a kidney procurement it's helpful to have an assistant. But again, I'm thinking in terms of cadavers," she corrected herself. "A live procurement? An anesthesiologist, a surgeon, a nurse or two." "Could it be done with less?"

She nodded. "A surgeon and an assistant at the bare minimum." She added, "You'd be busy."

Miles was getting restless. Boldt contained him, but lost his train of thought. "Have you thought about where this would be done?" she asked. "A location?" Then in a professorial tone of voice: "I see problems with this premise of yours. First, when a procurement is done in a hospital, the organ becomes part of the system. There's an airtight system in place. There has to be, because of the public's wariness about the whole transplant process. It's called UNOS-the United Network of Organ Sharing. The procuring institution assigns the organ a UNOS number. The recipient of that organ is assigned that same number. It all has to match. There is a paper trail a mile long the moment an organ leaves a body-hearts, kidneys, livers, marrow, it doesn't matter. The procuring surgeon lists an organ's destination as part of that paperwork the name of the hospital or organ bank. The paperwork follows that organ everywhere. The organ is transported in specially sealed and labeled ice chests. It's all computerized. UNOS does an incredible job. I just don't see how someone could get away with what you're implying."

"And if the procedure was not done at a hospital? Could I get an organ into the system?"

"That's just my point. You can't without a UNOS number. No surgeon is going to touch an organ without the proper paperwork. At the end of every year UNOS follows up on every single organ procured or transplanted. Numbers have to match. If your numbers don't match, you come up for review-you're in deep trouble."

"And if it's not done in a hospital?"

She thought about this for a long minute. She nodded and nibbled at her fingernail, eyes on her desk. Boldt looked out the window at the weather. He felt tigbt-throated and hot. It was growing dark out there. More rain. She didn't say anything. "You look puzzled." Frightened was more like it, he thought. "The thing of it is," she said, "it's possible. You're right about the Third World. market. If I'm the procuring surgeon, I don't want to mess with UNOS-they would catch something like this. I don't want to get anywhere near the system. I'm telling you, the safeguards in this country are just too established. But overseas? A kidney is good for sixty hours these days, that's plenty of time to reach any foreign destination. And the money-the money would be phenomenal, I should think. You hear about prices like fifteen- and twenty-thousand dollars a kidney. Cash, no taxes. No questions. A couple of those a month, and you're doing just fine."

Excitement stole into Boldt so that his writing was illegible.

He slowed and took down the same notes a second time. Miles snatched his pen and threw it to the floor. With the boy in the harness, Boldt couldn't lean down to reach it. Dr. Light Horse handed him a replacement. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something. He checked his notes once again. "So he does the harvesting outside a hospital?"

"Absolutely. This makes much more sense. But there would be a high risk of infection. Hospitals invest hundreds of thousands-millions-of dollars on their surgical suites. Filtered air, double doors, regular cleaning. You can't duplicate that on your own unless you have more money than God."

Her fear fed his excitement. These were leads to follow, ideas to pursue. The more they talked, the more he saw an investigation developing. He now saw the investigation dividing into several areas: Connie Chi, the Bloodlines employee, these technical leads, and the bones that Dixie suggested might have started it all.

She looked even more frightened when he asked, "Could I lease such equipment?"

"The scent you were talking about ... something to follow?"

"Yes. "Not my field. But I would guess that you could."

"What about transporting the organs? How difficult is it?"

"Technically, it's not difficult at all. You can use anything from Tupperware to stainless steel. Some Viospan. Ice. Depending on the organ, it'll keep anywhere from a couple of hours to several days." She added, "Ice chests igloo coolers or Styrofoam-are the most common ways to ship them. One of those small picnic coolers. UNOS uses disposable Styrofoam coolers with bright red labels sealing the joints. If you're going to walk a transplant organ through airport security, you're going to want a UNOS container. Now there is something you could check on." She brightened. "Stolen UNOS containers or labels. Air-freight cd organs are usually handcarried by the pilot or another member of the flight crew. The legal ones are. But a passenger could do the same thing if he or she could get through airport security."

Boldt wanted to grab for the phone. He wanted to rush out of here and put a team on it immediately. He wanted to reach across the desk and kiss this woman. This was the exact information he had hoped for: a different angle. A different point of view. If they couldn't trace the victims to the harvester, perhaps they could trace the movement of the organs: a courier. He said, "My feeling is that you overrate airport security. As long as an object doesn't appear to be a weapon or a bomb, they're not going to stop it."

"You're probably right." She picked up the autopsy photos and studied them intently. She was getting caught up in this as well. "That's a large incision for a kidney. Did I mention that?" "Large?" Boldt asked. "Is that significant?" She had mentioned it, he realized; he'd even made a note of it on the top of the page. Was the surgical method unique? Would it provide them with a "signature" that they could later use to prosecute a suspect? He caught himself holding his breath, waiting for her.

She appeared so deeply in thought for such a long time that he wondered if she had forgotten his question. She tested her coffee and avoided his eyes in a way that prevented him from interrupting.

Miles was being a real pain in the ass. He wouldn't hold still.

Boldt tried to occupy him with a plastic ring, but Miles wasn't having anything to do with it. He wanted some floor space. He wanted some moving room.

She finally said, "This incision is larger than necessary. These closure techniques are antiquated. It's doubtful that this is the work of a contemporary surgeon. A retiree is more likely. Unless the surgeon simply doesn't care how it comes out. But cosmetics are an important part of any surgery: Keeping the scar small. The subcutaneous closure is a continuous-interlocking stitch. It's an unusual stitch, but very strong."

Boldt wrote down in large letters: STITCHING. Retiree? This meant something, though he didn't know what. More to investigate; more to work with. Impatience stole into him-a cop's biggest enemy. Where was Sharon Shaffer at this moment? What had they done to her? What did they have planned for her?

Dr. Light Horse glanced at her watch, and Boldt took his cue.

He packed up Miles, put his notebook away. As she walked them to the elevator, he stopped and said, "Let me ask you this ... If type O is the best blood type for transplants, why would this harvester want someone with type AB-negative?"

Bloodlines had provided Boldt with Sharon's records that included her blood type. The Professor had confirmed that the blood found on the chair in her apartment was also AB-negative.

She appeared puzzled. "Is this person soliciting organs?" He explained, "We believe he's kidnapped a woman. She's blood type AB-negative, not O." Her face tightened. "What is it?" he asked. "AB-negative is an extremely rare blood group."

"So I'm told. But what's that mean for a transplant?" She led him over to a string of seats by a Coke machine. He felt nervous, worried about Sharon. She obviously felt this would require some explanation.

Miles liked the lights of the Coke machine; he seemed mesmerized.

She explained, "The human body is blessed with an immune system to fight disease. The technical aspects of transplant surgery were pretty much worked out twenty years ago. Haven't been improved much since then. The main avenue of research has been into convincing the body's immune system not to destroy the transplanted organ. The body will reject any organ to some degree, unless it is from an identical twin. Blood is a tissue. A transfusion is the simplest example of a tissue transplant. Are you with me?" Boldt nodded. "We all belong to certain blood groups, and many of those blood groups are incompatible with one another. An organ is made up of both a blood type and several different tissue types, making matching-for the transplant surgeon-even more complex. The focus for the last twenty years has been to suppress the body's immune system far enough to accept a transplanted organ, but no so far as to allow infection. That's a fine line. in the past five years, drugs have come a long way in helping to accomplish that. One day soon, immune suppression may be a thing of the past. But for the present, in the more critical organs-the heart, the liver, the pancreas-you need an organ not only the right size but also the best possible tissue match. The closer the match, the less rejection; the less you have to suppress the immune system, the less chance of a fatal infection. Okay? We talked about kidneys. It is true that type O organs transplant well because O is accepted more easily by the other blood groups. The body puts up less of a fight. If someone is selling organs, as you suggest, it makes sense to procure type O-it's your biggest market; not only the largest blood group but a good second choice if you don't have an exact blood-type match. Type ABNEGATIVE is less than four percent of the population. In the major organs, if you had an AB-negative recipient, you'd want an AB-negative donor to have any chance at all."

"A custom job, is that what you're saying?"

She cringed at the term. "It's a specific match. That is what I'm saying. A special order."

The elevator opened. Dr. Light Horse caught it and held it for Boldt and his restless passenger.

She walked him to the front of the building. She walked quickly, expecting him to keep up.

As they stopped to shake hands, she said, "The implications of what you're suggesting are horrible, of course. The medical community as a whole and surgeons in particular are just beginning to address ways of more closely monitoring the donor crisis. If more people donated their organs at death, we wouldn't be seeing any of this. If you're looking for a possible candidate," she continued, "I would start with surgeons reprimanded by the AMA-someone suspended and out of work. Frustrated. Angry. I assume we agree this person is deranged, and such thinking could easily distort the Hippocratic Oath. As doctors, we're sworn to save human life wherever possible. He or she reasons that the donor can get by on one kidney, that the recipient will die without that replacement organ. You have three dead, you said. Three out of a hundred or three out of five? That is how he is thinking. He may be playing percentages, I'm sorry to say." She touched his arm. "All this is just the long way of saying that it could be anyone disturbed enough to convince himself that what he's doing is not only acceptable, but ethically sound. He may see himself as an angel of mercy."

Mention of the word "angel" triggered vivid images from his youth. He remembered playing in the snow, lying down and fanning his arms and legs so that the impression he left behind resembled that of an angel. Only now he saw things differently: Inside that impression lay the bleached white bones of a skeleton. He said, "An angel? Hardly. An angel maker is more like it."

It gave Pamela Chase a sense of importance to be summoned at a moment's notice out to the farm. He needed her! Perhaps he would make love to her again; perhaps his calling-her out here had nothing whatsoever to do with work, as his phone call had implied.

A low, mid-morning smoke-gray fog hung over the area where the farm sat, running from the ground to the tops of the tall trees that rimmed the ridges behind it. She spotted the fog only briefly before disappearing into it, and this made her wonder whether you ever saw things for what they were while you were inside them, a part of them.

The fog forced her to drive more slowly, and it gave her a few minutes to think. Seemed like all she did was think-that's how a person all alone spends her time, she thought, trapped inside your thoughts and dreams as this car was trapped inside the fog. Moving slowly. Crawling. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for the workday to start. Waiting. Always thinking ahead, never really being where you are, but somewhere you hope to be. Strange way to live your life.

She parked alongside his Trooper and watched the mud as she climbed out, because she had been on her way to work when the phone had rung and wasn't very well prepared for the conditions out here. She loved the man-that was her problem. He knew it, too, which put her at a disadvantage because there was little she wouldn't do for him, and he made the most of it. With sex now part of their relationship, she wondered where it might lead next. Either it would turn magical or sour-no telling which. If those tics of his were any indication, then it was going sour. She wasn't sure where they had come from, but it gave her an incredibly creepy feeling each time one happened, and they were getting worse. No doubt about that.

She trudged around to the basement door and knocked. It was colder in the fog. She was shivering by the time he answered.

He locked the door securely behind her and started giving orders before he even said hello. "Run the blood tests, will you? Then scrub up and prep him please. Right kidney and spleen." "Both?"

He stopped, turned, and looked her in the eye. "Are you questioning me?" It was just a flicker, just something passing across his eyes like a reflection on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, but it ran her blood cold. There was an implied threat behind this question of his. There was someone else someone she didn't know-behind his eyes. just a flicker, then gone, like the tics when they had first started. "Right kidney and spleen," she repeated obediently. "Good," he said, turning his back on her. He had one of those tics then. His head snapped violently toward his lifting shoulder, remained pinched there, intractable, and finally relaxed. She wanted to offer her hands to him-to rub the knots out of his back. She knew the pain of these tics because she had witnessed his face recently all the muscles twitching and distorting like some kind of Halloween mask. It just had to hurt. A short backrub was just the thing for him. But she didn't offer it. They didn't talk about the tics; they both pretended they never happened at all.

She had to think: Was that the way their moment of intimacy was to be as well? As if it had never happened at all? It had happened right here in this room, and now she was to go parading about her work as Pam the Helper. Pam the Lover was apparently lost in the shadows. Burned to a crisp along with all the other contaminated waste.

He was starting to give her the creeps, the way he was so silent over there.

The donor was a black male between twenty-five and thirty. He was naked, face up, eyes open from the Ketamine, which paralyzed him but didn't actually render him unconscious. She was used to those eyes now, but at first they had really terrified her. Elden used Ketamine on all the donors, despite the dangers, because of its effect on memory. On some, he followed this up with electroshock. She didn't approve, but she understood.

That was how she felt about much of this. Elden's strength, his power of conviction, left little room for argument. She noticed this man's upper arm then, and like so often in her life, words came babbling out before she could control them. "My God, Elden! What happened to his arm?"

"His arm! Did Donnie do this to his arm?"

"Donnie?"

"It's a mess.

Lacerated, bruised. It might even be broken by the look of it."

"Yes, I noticed that. Perhaps we can help. But not now. Hmm?

Right kidney and spleen, Pamela. Are you ready for me or not?"

The image of him, framed against the silvery plastic wall, was something surreal, something not of this world. It seemed fitting somehow, for a man of such talents.

She collected herself and asked, "Do you want me to dress it?"

"Prep him," he instructed. He never did pay much attention to what she said. He was in a mood today. More and more so in the last few days. You couldn't reach him when he was in a mood, so she gave up trying. She drew several samples of blood, labeled them, started the HIV test on one of them, the hepatitis A and B test on another, and placed the third in the waist-high fridge. There were a number of drugs missing from the door of the fridge. She was about to mention this when she caught herself. Antibiotics mostly. Some Demerol and Valium, too. The thought briefly crossed her mind that perhaps Elden was experimenting with the drugs himself; perhaps this helped to explain his recent erratic behavior. But not Demerol and Valium, she corrected herself. If anything, he seemed wound up and agitated of late, more like on an amphetamine high.

Donnie had probably stolen them; he was always sneaking drugs.

Elden knew it, just as she did. They both did their best to police their supplies, but Elden never called Donnie on it unless he caught him in the act, and then he barely slapped his hand. A strange relationship existed between those two that she would never understand; why Elden would tolerate a man like that was beyond her.

She soaped and shaved the black man's side. Elden helped her to roll him over and she continued the procedure on his back.

"I made all the necessary arrangements," he said. "That is, Maybeck did," he corrected her. "You'll be back by this evening. I've written it all down." He hurried over to the work area and returned with a note written in his own handwriting, not Donnie's. Donnie could barely write at all. Elden never made the flight arrangements. "You'll meet Juanita at the gate. The regular flight to Rio. Same as always."

"All right," she said, accepting the itinerary from him; but it felt wrong. Everything about this felt wrong. Was it just her? she wondered-expectations carried over from their encounter Saturday night? "Now then," he said from over by the sink. He doused his hands in antiseptic and then snapped on a pair of surgical gloves. He turned his back to her to have her tie his mask in place, which she did. "All set?"

"I'm worried about you," she said softly to his back. She placed her hand gently on his shoulder. It was something she could never say while facing him.

There was a long, heavy silence in which she could hear the deep breathing of the man on the table behind her. She heard the plastic ceiling crinkle as it warmed. Neither she nor Elden was breathing. What she had said had stopped them both.

Finally his head bobbed slightly. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs completely, and said in a ghostly whisper, "It's him I'd worry about." The way he said it frightened her. "Elden?" His voice returned; he reminded her, "The patient always comes first."

L L They rose above the city, climbing an on-ramp at the end of Columbia that connected to the viaduct, then headed south toward the docks and Boeing Field. You could see the next wave of rain out over the water, hanging above the stunning green of Bainbridge Island-a mare's tail stretching down, a light gray mist feathered beneath charcoal clouds. If you didn't mind rain, it was a beautiful sight. If you minded rain, you didn't live here in February and March. Boldt turned on the wipers to fend off the spray from a van ahead of them.

Daphne crossed her legs and leaned over to check the speedometer.

"I don't like driving fast," Boldt explained. "That's an understatement," she said. "At first I thought there was something wrong with this thing." She had asked to come along with him at the last second. Boldt had warned her it might be a long meeting, but she had persisted. He'd been wondering when she would tell him whatever it was that couldn't wait.

Finally, his patience ran out. "So what's up?"

"I hate being wrong," she complained. "It doesn't come easy."

"You, wrong?"

"I had that talk with Cindy Chapman. I wanted to run Agnes Rutherford's descriptions of the two men by her-the grating voice, the bad breath. There are tricks you can play with the mind. Subtle ways to make it safe for a person to remember something they would rather not remember." Boldt asked, "Where the hell is the toxicology report on Chapman?

The blood workup? "Are you interested in this or not?"

"Go ahead."

"She remembers Sharon and me tending to her at The Shelter. She's very clear on that. I worked with her on the events before the surgery. Could she remember being abducted? Could she remember faces, voices, surroundings? A week before, a day before, an hour before? As it turned out, you were right about the money." She added, "That's what I mean about my being wrong. I was convinced you were wrong about that."

His hands were sweating against the wheel. He rolled down the window for some air. "They paid her for the kidney?" he asked. "It was a business arrangement. They offered her five hundred dollars." "Five hundred?" he asked incredulously. "I thought the going rate is fifteen thousand. That's quite a mark-up." "And there's no proof she ever received it."

"Well, it fills in a few blanks," he admitted. "It helps to explain why we never received any formal complaints against the harvester. If you're a teenager and you've cut a deal to sell your kidney, you don't turn the guy in. It also means there were-are-probably a lot more donors than we know about. The lucky ones lived to spend their five hundred. it may also explain the use of the electroshock."

"I don't think so," she interrupted.

"Not the electroshock. Dixon's three victims-Blumenthal, Sherman, and the other one, Julia Walker, showed no sign of electroshock. If a few days had passed, that might be more easily explained, but in at least two of the cases-the deaths caused by hemorrhaging-those bodies would have been seen by the medical examiner rather quickly, wouldn't they? And that would indicate that those victims did not show signs of electroshock." "You have something going," he said. "I can hear it in your voice."

"What if only the dissenters receive the electroshock the real serious memory blocking? What if you're right about there being a lot of others? A runaway, hard up for money, cuts a deal. Arrangements are made; the surgery takes place. They're paid up and returned to the streets. What if a person like Cindy Chapman gets cold feet once she looks around her and sees the reality of what she's gotten herself into? If you're the harvester, what then? You take the kidney anyway-you've probably already promised it somewhere-but you make damn sure your donor won't remember anything about it." She let the idea hang there. "You don't like it," she said. "It makes sense," he admitted. "It doesn't mean I have to like it."

"So okay, let's say I'm right. Then why did they take Sharon?" she asked. "Except for her past, except for her Bloodlines connection, she doesn't fit the donor profile at all: She's not broke, she's not out on the street, she's not desperate. At this point, she's even a few years older than the rest of them."

He didn't want to tell her about Dr. Light Horse's theory that Sharon might have been taken for a custom procurement. If they were after a major organ, then Sharon was most likely already dead. "And what have they done with her?" she added.

Boldt was spared giving an answer. He turned into the driveway of the Army Corps of Engineers and searched out a parking space.

The Seattle district office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers occupied an enormous brick structure a few miles south of the city on Marginal Way.

Boldt was hoping that as Dixie had suggested these bones might offer them a chance to identify the harvester. Locating the rest of the bones was the first, and most important, step in that process. The homicide victim was the last living witness to the crime and could tell an investigator much more than the murderer believed possible.

The receptionist greeted Boldt and Daphne warmly and made a quick phone call announcing their arrival. A few minutes later, a wiry man in his mid-forties bounded down the stairs and extended his hand, introducing himself as Harry Terkel. He had bright, enthusiastic eyes, and a lot less hair than Boldt. He wore khakis, black Reeboks, and a plaid shirt without a tie. He lacked the nerd pack of pens in his pocket that Boldt had expected of an engineer., He shook hands with Daphne and motioned upstairs. "I'll lead the way. it's kind of a maze."

At the top of the stairs they turned right down a corridor past scores of office cubicles.

They walked and walked and walked, finally reaching Terkel's enclosed office, where they took seats around a conference table. There was a Wipeit bulletin board at the far end of the room, covered with math equations written in blue marker.

Terkel sat across from Boldt, rather than taking a place behind his desk. Boldt appreciated the gesture. He said, "Joe tried to explain this to me. Maybe I had better hear it from you."

Boldt explained, "Six months ago, a hunter recovered some human remains in the Tolt River. We have been unable to locate the source-the burial site-despite some exhaustive foot searches. The rest of those remains are important to our investigation, to our possibly identifying the victim and therefore the killer. The man I spoke with offered to set up your computers to help predict where the bones might have dislodged from the bank." "Joe Webster. That's right." He added, "There's a book on this that might interest you," Terkel said. "Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology. River movement. River meandering and material deposits. Sediment actually 'cements' together-if you will-and moves downstream as a whole. Our job is the quantitative determination of water flow. Tracking flows. Predicting the sedimentation process. Erosion, deposition."

Boldt was wondering what language this was. Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology? Nice bedtime reading. Terkel recited like a student, "Material eroded from one bank will deposit on the same bank one to two bars downstream. That's two to four bends," he informed Boldt. "And that's a fact. That's something we can bank on. Pun intended. That's where the HEC computer can help us." Terkel saw Boldt's puzzled face. "HEC-the Hydraulic Engineering Center-runs the modeling computers."

"Maybe we should talk to them," Boldt suggested.

A few minutes later Boldt and Daphne were sitting alongside a Japanese woman, Becky Sumatara, staring at a color screen that offered a menu of choices. Joe Webster, a stocky man in his late forties, towered behind them.

Becky Sumatara said, "When we received your request, we updated our Tolt model for current flow notes, slope, sediment size, distribution, and areas of erosion based on our present data.

That's what took us a couple of days. The updating is a lengthy process."

Boldt apologized, "When it comes to computers, I'm a technopeasant."

The screen changed to a graphics aerial view of a map of King County. "Bodies of water, in all shapes and sizes, are represented by various shades of blue," Becky Sumatara explained, her red fingernail Pointing out the Sound, reservoirs and rivers, "depending on volume. The darker the shade, the more volume. Elliott Bay and Puget Sound are a deep navy, while some of the smaller creeks are almost white. You're interested in the North Fork of the Tolt."

"Yes," Joe Webster answered for Boldt.

She dragged a blinking box to the area in question, bordering the box on Carnation, Monroe, Sultan, Skykomish and Big Snow Mountain. With two clicks of the mouse the screen filled with an enlargement of this area. "During enlargement, color reference is modified. You'll see the Tolt is now navy and its various tributaries are lighter according to volume. Also," she said with another click as the river, streams, and creeks turned various shades of red and pink, "we can view according to rate of flow-how fast the various volumes of water are traveling both Q V in terms of quantity and"-the water all turned -"as regards land speed. All factors shades of green in erosion and flood control."

With the enlargement, a dozen smaller creeks had appeared.

Daphne withdrew the topographic map from Boldt's briefcase. The exact locations where the bones had been discovered were marked. ji Becky Sumatara studied the map with Daphne and then narrowed the computer's target area yet again, creating a corresponding enlargement. "You're up into Snoqualmie National Forest there," she said, stepping the computer through maneuvers. "Rugged country." ' Yes."

"What does this tell us?" he asked. "We have two views of each stream flow," she explained. "Aerial and lateral. This gives us a visualization of lateral erosion as well as a cutaway of stream bed depth, Using the computer, I can increase or decrease volume and rate of flow as well as access any date in the past for visualization. Unfortunately, we've set this up only for the Tolt's stream bed profile, not the tributaries."

"The Tolt's our baby," Joe Webster said. "We have gravel moving one to two bars downstream. We'd like a look at those upper bars. That's all."

"The high-water mark for the Tolt reservoir should give us a fairly reliable benchmark for checking downstream erosion." She put the computer to work. Boldt felt some of the tension leave him. Finally, they were into it! On the left of the screen, she changed a date at the top of a table of numbers. The screen paused before redrawing. "I'm going to ask the computer to compare this projection with one a month prior. it will color-code areas of the most severe erosion, red to black, red being areas of greatest damage." As she described all this, various images appeared and vanished. An arrow raced back and forth across the screen under her direction. "You must keep in mind that this is all speculation. Without field reports we can't be sure of any of this. A fallen tree, a landslide, and we would have to start all over. This modeling is only as accurate as the data it's fed."

"The data is good," Joe Webster said defensively.

Boldt looked on as Becky Sumatara pinpointed some river bends that were bright red. "The computer takes soil composition into consideration," she explained, "which is one of the reasons it's of value to us in a situation like this. You or I could look at a map and circle the tightest switchbacks a river makes, but erosion is dependent on composition, and it's not uncommon for a stream to jump its banks on a straightaway where the soil is soft and relatively uniform. Stream beds generally make turns because the water encounters some form of natural obstacle, whether a rise in elevation, or a rock formation. A barrier.

You could run your search party from turn to turn and never find this grave. My guess is that with flows like this, we're going to see a stream bubble-out well away from the turns. Although Joe may be right about the upstream bars."

"I'd like to see those upstream bars, if we could. I'd like to start there," Joe said. "One thing to keep in mind," Boldt advised, "is road access. Our experience tells us that she would have been buried within a hundred yards of existing roads."

"That's a grisly thought."

Daphne fiddled with the ungainly topographic map. "There are logging roads in this area, even some old homesteads." Joe Webster said, "There were hiking trails until they closed them down. I remember all that a few years back."

Daphne indicated the logging trails, one eye straying to the screen anxiously. "This will help," Sumatara said, referencing the map and comparing it to the screen. She made several small adjustments. The screen redrew itself each time. Boldt caught himself holding his breath again. As if from a descending bird's-eye-view, the screen showed an increasingly magnified area with each new redraw. She pointed convincingly to the screen. "Here are the two upstream bars you're after, Joe." The upper curve of the river was a deep blue; the cutaway of the stream bank showed as a bright-almost neonred, clashing with her nail polish. "It's severely undercut." To Boldt she said, "That's why the search teams missed it." She became distracted then, as the screen seemed to call to her. Again she worked the mouse. Again the screen redrew several times. "You're lucky." "How's that?"

"These most recent rains haven't yet caused the Tolt to reach the high-water level marked last fall, which means there hasn't been any additional undercutting." Now her fingers flew through a volley of commands. Boldt looked over to see both Daphne and Joe Webster glued to the screen. "Uhoh," she added, punching keys furiously. "Becky?" Boldt asked, sensing from her sudden silence that they had problems. "You had better get someone out there quick," she said, pointing once again to the screen. "The projected flow for the Tolt will pass that mark in less than forty-eight hours." Daphne asked, "Would you mark the area for us, please?" But Becky didn't seem to hear, still consumed with working the computer. "And there's something else," she said, the screen changing colors once again. "You're wrong about the depth. About the grave being shallow." She switched to a lateral view that depicted an overhang of brown earth and the animated blue of the river water well below it. "According to this, the undercut is at least six feet below grade-below the surface. Those bones were buried deep."

"He knows what he's doing," mumbled Boldt. "It is a doctor," Daphne let slip, a look of horror on her face. "A doctor!" coughed Becky Sumatara. "You never heard that," instructed Boldt. He looked Sumatara in the eye, then Joe Webster. "In fact, if it's all the same to you for the time being ... you never heard word one of this. We can't afford any rumors, any leaks."

Joe Webster nodded, suddenly a shade paler. Sumatara didn't seem to hear. "There's a doctor killing people?" gasped the woman, staring back into the glowing screen with its pulsing colors.

The red no longer appeared neon. To Boldt, it seemed the color of blood.

Sharon Shaffer had a hard time thinking through the drugs. It was like trying to write with her left hand-she knew the letters that were supposed to appear on the page, but they never came out looking right.

A car had arrived about an hour ago. It had left about forty minutes later. Forty minutes by her way of thinking.

The man was in the kennel pen next to her. He had two fresh bandages. Seeing this, she felt sick to her stomach. The Keeper was a butcher.

She didn't remember her neighbor having been returned, although there he was, and the collapsible wheelchair The Keeper used to move them was folded up and leaning against the wall. She must have fallen asleep again. She kept nodding out this way, which was one of the reasons it was so difficult to measure any passage of time.

She glanced to her right and literally jumped when she saw The Keeper in the pen next to hers. He had hold of her I.V. tube and was injecting a drug into the tube using a syringe. Separating the two of them was only the smallest amount of chain-link wire. Wire that would bite back if she so much as brushed against it. The intense look on The Keeper's face terrified her.

Felix, the biggest dog of the group, the alpha male, wandered freely in the center aisle. Pacing. Panting. Hungry and anxious. He was the sentry, the jail guard. He was there to prevent any chance of another intruder, any chance of escape.

The Keeper said softly to her, "I've canceled my morning appointments, but I'm in a bit of a hurry." With the muzzle, she had no chance to respond. She was thinking, "Morning appointments!?"

"When you awaken your right eye will hurt. it will be carefully bandaged. Under no circumstances are you to toy with this bandage. Do you hear me? Do you understand? Nod, if you understand. Good. Now you're crying. Why are you crying? Do I scare you.

She nodded, though somewhat reluctantly. "Me? You needn't be scared. Stop that crying. I'm a doctor." She couldn't. The more he said, the more terrified she was.

"Please," he said childishly.

She wrestled with her emotions and brought herself under control.

She was shaking now, the crying turned inside. She wanted to see him as insane, but she couldn't. He seemed so professional in everything he did. So calculating. It made the chance of escape seem all the more distant. "You will cause yourself an enormous amount of pain if you cry later. Hmm? The saline in the tears. You understand? You must not allow yourself to cry. You must apply no pressure to this bandage, none whatsoever, so be careful how you place your head when you sleep." He waited a moment and asked, "Are you listening?"

She managed to nod her head yes. "Because of you-because of your cornea-some poor soul will be able to see again. Hmm? You will be giving someone the gift of sight. Can you imagine such a thing? A miracle is what it is, and without you, none of it would be possible. Hmm? How does that make you feel?"

Like escaping, she thought. Now, more than ever, escape was all she could think of. The drugs he injected brought a hazy fuzz to her eyes. Would she ever see again? Would she awaken? She glanced one last time into the eyes of The Keeper.

Perhaps, she thought, blindness wouldn't be so bad after all.

Boldt had a dozen thoughts crowding his head while staring at his phone. Following a morning with his father, Miles had been dropped off with their neighbor Emma, who was becoming something of a nanny to the boy. The phone wasn't exactly his, just as the coffee room wasn't exactly his office, but until they assigned him a cubicle he used both as if they were his own. People now knocked before entering the coffee room. In practice, Boldt had a bigger office than Shoswitz. @Z: He was sitting in a fiberglass chair under a cloud of cigarette smoke left by a former visitor. Someone had stolen today's date off the Gary Larson day-at-a-glance calendar, so Boldt had to keep checking his watch to remember the date. The trash can was filled to overflowing because to save money the offices were being cleaned only every other day and Saturdays.

Unable to reach Dixie earlier by phone, Boldt had resorted to the newly installed electronic mail-asking a younger, more computer-literate uniform for help. He dictated a memo detailing his discoveries at both the Army Corps of Engineers and the details of his interview with Dr. Light Horse at the university, and suggested that Dixon follow up on some of Light Horse's recommendations, which included examination and study of the surgical techniques used to close Cindy Chapman's incision. With the push of a button, his memo-supposedly-flew across town, bleating like a lamb on some secretary's screen. "Sarge?" John Lamoia called from across the room, a phone cradled between neck and chin. He waved some papers at Boldt. Lamoia, who was heading up the surveillance of Connie Chi, the Bloodlines employee, was in an office rotation while other detectives watched their suspect. He was tall, with brown curly hair, and wore pressed jeans. He was a cocky, vibrant womanizer; everyone on the force liked him, male, female, uniform or suit. "The AMA printouts," Lamoia said.

Boldt crossed the room quickly, his own expectations increasing with every step. It was possible-in fact, more than likely-that the name of the harvester was somewhere on this printout. He took it from Lamoia. He scanned it quickly. And scanned. Page after page. His heart sank.

La Moia had anticipated his reaction. He hung up and explained, "Six hundred seventy-five surgeons. Discouraging, to say the least. Last page," he instructed. Boldt flipped forward. "By category it's a little better. Any of them could probably train to do those harvests-that's what I'm told-but if this guy is sticking with his specialty, then we've got thirty-one in thoracic, ten in urological. In general surgery we have," he honed in to read, "sixty-eight; thirty-four at the UDUB. I wrote a total there: one forty-three."

The job before them was overwhelming, though not impossible-given a huge task force, which Shoswitz seemed unlikely to grant them. A careful interview would have to be conducted with each Quiet inquiries about bank accounts and surgeon credit limits and life styles. of schedules, phone calls and travel itineraries. Through this, they were to attempt to narrow this enormous list down to the one harvester-all without making him the wiser.

Reading his thoughts, Lamoia, who had reached the office and was still reading over his shoulder, suggested, "Are you thinking about bringing them in here one by one?"

"Thinking about it, but not very seriously. One: Doctors can make the kind of noise that finds the ears of the top brass. Two: Word would spread too quickly, the harvester would shut down shop, and that would be the end of any incriminating evidence. One of the difficulties here, don't forget, is that the law is hazy about all of this. If we're going to bust this guy, we're going to have to practically catch him in the act. We give him a week to clean -guaranteed. If we're right up his act, and he'll skate about this, this guy has been in business at least three years, which means he's extremely well organized and knows what he's doing. Who knows how many harvests he's done? He hears that we're coming after him, and he'll clean up so well that we'll never find so much as a needle out of place. We need the operating shears that connect Blumenthal to those bones. That would be some decent proof."

"So what are you suggesting?" Lamoia asked. Lamoia could piss him off when he got like this. The coffee room phone rang. It could have been any number of things. Besides interviewing Cindy Chapman and Sharon Shaffer's elderly roommate, Daphne was working with her contacts at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit to come up with a possible psychological profile of the harvester. Bernie Lofgrin owed Boldt more complete lab reports on both Chapman and Shaffer. It might even have been Dr. Light Horse at the University, or Ms. Dundee at Bloodlines, both of whom had agreed to call if anything else pertaining to Boldt's case occurred to them. But above and beyond all of these, Boldt hoped it might be someone-anyone-calling to tell him that Sharon Shaffer was safe and sound, or that some doctor had just turned himself in.

The call was from the surveillance team assigned to Connie Chi.

Twice, the cellular phone from which the call was being placed went dead, and twice Boldt waited impatiently for the return call. The first news he heard, after the team identified itself, was, "We got a problem here ..." The second time the voice asked, "How much of that did you get?" Boldt could tell by the ambient sound that the car was moving. "You rolling?" he asked. Again, the line went dead before he received an answer. The third time he answered, the phone remained in the clear, although he found himself rushing sentences in anticipation of another failure. "Everything we're seeing here indicates she wants to lose us," the man said, referring to Connie Chi, the Bloodlines employee. "She made you?" Boldt asked. "That's just the thing: I don't think so. But she's sure as hell acting like she did. We called in Danny and Butch. They're in the jeep. We've been trading her off. I gotta think she thinks she's lost us. Way she's acting makes me think someone told her what to do. Know what I mean? All jitterylike. Constantly checking her mirror and shit like that. An amateur. It got a little hairy when she tried to ditch us in Nordstroms, but I gotta tell you: This gal is no criminal. Or if she is, she's the kind every cop loves /cause she's so damn nervous that she sticks out like a sore thumb. I gotta hand it to ya, Sarge: You now how to pick 'em."

"Keep me posted. I'm on my way."

As he steered through traffic in an attempt to intercept the surveillance teams, Boldt heard over his radio, "I've got her, Butch." The voices surfaced only occasionally, rising from a sea of electronic hiss. "Okay, good, we're falling off her.

Keep us posted."

Mobile surveillance presented its own special logistical nightmares. To be effective it required an enormous number of vehicles, a central dispatcher coordinating them, and a lot of luck. juggling the same two or three cars for an extended period usually failed. You either lost, or were spotted by, the mark. Boldt wondered what the hell was keeping Lamoia, when all of a sudden the man's voice crackled over the airwaves. Lamoia was like that: just when you were about to lose faith in him, he came through. He seemed to constantly push everyone, everything, right to the limit. With him rolling, they were up to four cars. They had a fighting chance. "She's turning right on 119th," announced detective John C. Adams, or J.C., as everyone called him. "What the hell is she driving?" Lamoia asked. "A red Saturn," came the reply. "But she ain't driving it. Some other woman is." Lamoia asked for the license number and was given it. "I've got them," he announced. "Turning again- 19th, now headed north on Greenwood. Go ahead and pass them."

Boldt ran two stop signs and a light and pulled to within a few lengths of Lamoia. "I'm with you, John, if you need me." "Roger."

"Who's the Saturn registered to?" Boldt said. "One Su-Lin Chi," Lamoia announced. "Same last name," someone said. "For the sake of the radio," Boldt announced, "We call the passenger"Connie' and the driver, 'the Sister.'"

"Affirmative," came the various voices. "What about Connie's car back at Nordstroms?" Boldt asked. "Did it occur to any of you goons to have it watched?" The resulting silence disturbed him. "This could have been some sort of drop, you know? Did it occur to any of you that maybe someone wanted us to follow her, to lead us away from the drop?"

J.C. offered, "We've always got a couple of patrol cars hanging around the mall. You want me to put dispatch on it?"

"We'll take care of it from here," came the voice of Phil Shoswitz over the radio. He had been monitoring the exchanges. It caught Boldt-and the others-completely by surprise. It was extremely rare for this particular lieutenant to listen-in with the dispatcher. He didn't like field work.

The red Saturn signaled and changed lanes. "I've got it, John," Boldt said.

Lamoia pulled past, leaving the Saturn and Boldt to turn off.

"They're slowing," Boldt announced. He added, "Maybe it's only a gas stop. I'm going to pull past."

His adrenaline rush was immediately replaced by disappointment as he saw the car turn right into a gas station. "I'm pulling up short," said J.C. Boldt drove around the block and parked with a good view of the station. Lamoia coordinated his and the remaining car-a blue jeep containing Butch Butler and Danny Wuto cover either of two cross streets.

As Boldt looked on, he sensed that the driver of the Saturn was stalling. He announced this over the radio. The young Chinese woman filled up the small car's tank impossibly slowly, and only after it was , filled, while looking around anxiously and consulting Connie Chi in the passenger seat. There was also a kid of about eighteen across the street who was looking on from over by a Dumpster. Boldt assigned Butch Butler to keep an eye on him, so his own attention wouldn't be distracted. A self-service gas station was an easy place to steal a car-too often, drivers neglected to take the keys with them. Or perhaps the kid was a runner-someone paid to make an exchange with Connie Chi. Whatever his purpose or intentions, the kid was a variable that Boldt didn't particularly like.

From down the street, a dark blue, slightly beat up van approached at a pace uncharacteristically cautious for Seattle drivers. Boldt sat up in his seat, one hand grasping the radio's mike. The driver was nothing but a dark shape behind the silver impulse of the sky's reflection on the windshield. Boldt punched the button on the mike and said quickly, "Butch, Danny incoming, right behind you!" He watched from a distance as the two detectives turned rubbery and slipped down in their seats so that as the van passed, the jeep would appear empty. Slipping lower in his own seat, Boldt said, "I think we may have something here. Butch, you watch the kid. Lamoia, run the van's plates. J.C., if they break quickly, you take the Saturn with Lamoia. Danny, Butch, and I will take the van."

Donnie Maybeck drove past the gas station once to make sure the Sister's red car was parked there as it was supposed to be. When he confirmed this, he drove fully around the block looking for guys eating donuts in the front seat of their car: cops. Seeing none, he pulled in and parked next to an unleaded self-service pump. He climbed out and went through the process of filling up. In this way, he was able to carry on a conversation without ever looking at her. All of it had been the Doc's idea. Fucking genius. On cue, Connie's sister left for the bathroom. "Tell me about the cops," he said to Connie. "What is it now?" When the shit hits the fan, he thought, it really spreads around fast. "They asked about a woman named Sharon Shaffer. She's the AB-negative I gave you last week!" Involuntarily, he squeezed the pump so hard that gas bubbled out before the nozzle shut off. "And Verna's been asking me about my computer time. What's going on, Donnie? I don't even know what it is you do with that database. Some extra money, that's all. That's what you said. I got a feeling I don't want to know." She paused, then contradicted herself: "What do you do with it?"

He tried to keep calm. When he got uptight, he tended to do stupid things. Same thing all his life. His big temptation right now was to lose her-to turn the hose on her, light a match, and watch her fry. He had stolen some plates and bolted them on before coming here-he wasn't that stupid. He could lose the van if he had to, torch it as well. Burn, baby, burn. If he had ever had a tattoo, that's what it would have said. Nothing he liked quite so much as seeing something burn. Except of course the sight of money. Cash. Or ass. He liked that a lot, too.

Squeeze goes the handle, poof goes the match. Zoom goes Connie.

Her hair would go first, then her clothes. if she was wearing synthetics-anything stretchy or elastic-they would stick to her skin. She'd be staring at him screaming, bald from the flames eyes beginning to swell in their sockets. "You don't have to worry about that," he said, answering her question. "I'm scared," she replied.

Fifty grand. Fifty! A fucking fortune. A Harley. A trip somewhere. Who knows? "What I want you to do ... " he started, trying to think like the Doc, but losing his train of thought to anger. His temper was the problem. It had always been the problem. It ran away from him. As a kid on the streets-he'd been alone on the streets since he was thirteen-he had learned how to play tough. Tough, combined with a bad temper, meant violence. At fifteen he'd killed his first person-a junkie looking to roll him. He got pissed off and cut the guy with a bottle and then left him to bleed to death. At seventeen he killed a prostitute-after the act, which had been his first because he didn't have the money to pay her. That had been Spokane. He left because her pimp was out to zoom him. In Seattle he'd been arrested for purse snatching. He served six months in a J.D. reform, and the offense was kept off his record. He was eighteen when he got out, and the state arranged vocational training that eventually led to a job with Norwest Power and Light. For nearly two months his life had been real." And then that day doing shit work on the top of a newly installed high-voltage tower-he saw the Doc digging a grave: The Secret. A chance at some real money. Things had been different since then. "Can you take Sharon Shaffer's name out of that database?"

"What about the police?" "I asked you a question." This was how the Doc dealt with him, and it felt good to pass it on. It felt real good. "Can you erase a file? Erase a file for good?" He pulled the hose from his tank and replaced it in the pump, still wondering if it wouldn't be smarter to hose her down. "Erase a record from data processing, you mean? I don't know if I can. I suppose it must be possible. But I've never tried."

"I want you to try. The Shaffer file. it's important.

You understand." He gave her a look then charles Bronson on a particularly bad day. Maybe Brando. How would the Big Man handle this one?

She hesitated. It pissed him off. Her sister was hovering around the candy counter looking impatient. He decided to pay up. He opened the van's door and took the keys. He left the door open because she answered just then.

"I'll try."

"Damn right you will." He gave her one last look and walked away looking tough. I am tough, he convinced himself.

When he reached the station, he looked away as her sister passed because he didn't want her getting a good look at him. You had to keep your options open.

He had to climb a small platform to pay at the cash register.

The gas cost him over twenty bucks. That pissed him off as well.

When he turned around, his added elevation gave him a view of two guys sitting real low in a jeep parked down the street.

Cops! Connie had fucked up; she had led them here! Or was she in on it?

The panic hit him as hard as if he'd been slugged. in the gut.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught some quick movement.

Some punk kid was headed for his van at a sprint. @e reached it, leaned in, and came out with Donle, s laptop computer. The fucking laptop! The Doc had warned him to never let it out of his sight. The database! The kid took off at a run. Donnie shouted after him. He chased after him, one eye on those Cops. if the cops got hold of that laptop it was all over.

The Doc would see to that.

"Trouble," J.C. Adams announced over the radio. Up until that moment, Boldt's full attention had been on the driver of the van, but now in his peripheral vision he caught sight of the juvenile crossing the street to the gas station and, a few seconds later, leaning into the open door of the van. When, on the end of that kid's arm, Boldt saw a laptop computer, he sat up so quickly he hit his head on the downturned visor. The Professor had found carpet impressions that suggested that one of the two men who had abducted Sharon Shaffer had been carrying a laptop computer. With Connie Chi's connection to Bloodlines, and Bloodlines' connection to Sharon Shaffer, this had to be more than coincidence. "Butch, Danny, you grab the kid. He's coming right at you," Boldt radioed immediately. "J.C., you've got the Saturn. John, you take the van driver on foot-I'll play backup. And listen up: I want everybody brought in, including that laptop. Okay. Go!"

As Boldt watched his team spring into action, Shoswitz came on the radio. "Lou?"

"How about a couple of radio cars, Lieutenant? We're losing this thing," he warned, as he saw their bust go south. Butch and Danny sprang out of the jeep, weapons drawn, and took off after the kid. Displaying lightning-quick reactions, the kid veered down a driveway and vanished. Procedure would have had one of them pursue on foot, the other in the jeep, but procedure didn't matter now. In the heat of the moment, they had both run after the kid, and the likelihood of catching him seemed slim. Boldt barked into the radio, "I need those backups now! Suspect proceeding on foot, northbound between 68th and 69th. If he gets into the park, we've lost him."

The dread of further failure choked his throat as he saw the red Saturn drive quickly out of the gas station, with none of his own cars following. Blocked by a recycling truck, J.C. Adams was forced to go around the block. Boldt punched the button on the radio mike to announce he would switch with Adams, but released it as he saw Lamoia going after the van driver on foot.

Misjudging the situation, Lamoia elected to take a shortcut cutting behind the nearest house. But when the driver of the van saw Butch and Danny, guns drawn, he pulled an abrupt aboutface, leaving Lamoia taking a shortcut to nowhere. This, in turn, made Boldt responsible for the van, which roared off, cutting in behind the slowly moving recycling truck and forcing Boldt to follow. Boldt was no fan of highspeed driving. He not only didn't care for it, he was no good at it, and he knew it. At the first intersection he braked for the stop sign, slowing considerably-out of habit. He should have been calling in his position and situation over the radio, but he needed both hands on the wheel. He was sweating; his scalp itched. He should have been all but ignoring stop signs, but his right foot kept betraying him and tapping the brakes.

The van remained in sight, but just barely. It was suddenly making big speed. it ran two lights and negotiated a series of quick turns. Boldt managed to keep it in sight, but at this rate he knew he wouldn't keep up for long. On a brief moment of straightaway, Boldt reached for the radio to call in his position. just as he grabbed hold of it, a skateboard shot out from between parked cars. Fast on its heels was a boy of about twelve. Boldt jerked the wheel sharply to the left and slammed on the brakes. The car swerved in a squealing of rubber. A pencil skidded across the dash and disappeared down the defrost. The driver-side sun visor slapped Boldt in the forehead and forced him to duck beneath it in order to see. The front right tire crushed the skateboard.

The bumper missed the boy by inches. Boldt kept his foot on the brakes. The van continued on up ahead, growing smaller. It turned right. Boldt checked the rearview mirror. The boy was okay. In his right hand he discovered the radio microphone, its coiled wire disconnected and dangling like a stretched spring-he had ripped it out of the radio housing. He had lost all communication with dispatch.

He took the same right, following the van's route. Three blocks ahead of him, he saw it turn north onto Aurora, State Highway 99. A four-lane road with occasional lights, the traffic was typically congested and unpredictable. Boldt slowed at the next red light, but ran it. Getting the hang of this. Maybe he would attract the attention of a traffic cruiser. He craned across the front seat and located the dash-mount flasher. He tossed it up onto the dash and threw the switch, facing the blue, pulsating light forward. He forced his place into the left lane and put his foot down. By switching lanes repeatedly, the van continued to pull away from him. Boldt was no match for such maneuvers. He lost sight of it as it followed a long, arching turn to the right. He stepped on it.

A police cruiser approached in the opposing lanes. Boldt rolled down his window and beat on the side of his car, signaling-he hoped-for backup. His eyes left his lane for only a second, but when he looked back, the traffic ahead of him had come to a complete stop.

He slammed on the brakes, the car in an immediate skid, the remaining distance shrinking impossibly fast. He then pumped the brakes as he'd been trained to do-a half dozen times in quick little jabs. He cut his speed in half. The unforgiving back bumper of a pickup truck loomed directly ahead. Thirty yards to go. Twenty. An adrenaline rush choked him. His hands tightened on the wheel. Miles ... Liz ... Bear Berenson saying, "This here is the Lou Boldt . More brakes. Still too fast.

Too close ... Mentally, these last few seconds slowed perceptibly. He could feel the shrinking space between his vehicle and the pickup, he could somehow measure it precisely.

In desperation, he hit and held the brakes. The back tires cried out. The car fishtailed.

The pickup truck-this entire lane of trafficrolled forward as drivers anticipated a green light. This added one vehicle length of roadway between Boldt and the pickup. He skidded to a stop inches behind the pickup.

The van was sitting four cars up. He grabbed for his weapon.

Weapons were not his way, this kind of street cop work was not his work, but he saw little choice.

The driver of that van was connected to Sharon Shaffer's abduction.

The stopped traffic was nothing more than a red traffic light, not a traffic jam as he had first believed. In a moment the traffic would begin to roll again. In a moment Boldt would be doing sixty again chasing him. He checked his rearview mirror: That patrol car was nowhere to be seen. All alone.

He threw the car into PARK and approached the van in a squat from the passenger side in order to avoid the chance of being seen in the driver door mirror. He hurried between waiting cars, his back cramping. Too old for this shit. Someone behind him honked, pissed off, no doubt, that he had left his car. Oh great! he thought. Let's attract as much attention as possible.

The light changed to green. Engines revved, and traffic began moving again. He caught up to the van and, arm outstretched, took hold of the handle to the side door. He yanked, now pulled along by the van's progress. Locked! He lunged for the front door next, the van moving even faster. From behind him the volley of protesting horns continued.

He took hold of the passenger door handle and jerked upward to open it. At that very instant, a finger appeared and locked it as well. The tie didn't go to the runner: Boldt stumbled and fell. The van pulled away.

By the time he reached his car and was driving again, he couldn't see the van for the trucks, the Hondas for the hatchbacks. He stayed with it a while longer, but the van was nowhere to be seen. Without a radio and without backup, Boldt resigned himself to failure.

Depression overwhelmed him-not for what was coming from Shoswitz, he could handle Shoswitz but because a woman was missing, and Boldt was convinced the driver of this van was an accomplice in her abduction.

It was time to start all over, he decided. Time to do things right.

Time to have a little talk with Connie Chi.

Tegg had never seen Maybeck look this desperate, otherwise he might have objected to Maybeck's barging into his office unannounced. Maybeck was relegated to the back hallway, the walk-in, the disposal of waste; he was overstepping his bounds. "What is it?" Tegg complained. "The laptop's been stolen," Maybeck announced.

Tegg felt a sharp pain in the very top of his skull, and one of his tics hit him hard. He felt his shoulder lift and his head strain to meet it. He recovered and said, "Tell me about it, Donald."

"Don't call me that!"

"Start talking, Donald. This instant!"

Maybeck suffered through an explanation, trying to make himself into some kind of hero in the way he had avoided the police. Tegg was beginning to see him in terms of a corpse-just exactly how would he dispose of a person that size?

The laptop? He blamed himself for having ever entrusted such an important matter to Maybeck. It had all been by design: trying to distance himself from incriminating evidence wherever possible. But now? He had to assess his situation, to take control. The planned date of the heart harvest was inside that laptop-the entire history of their operation, if you knew what to look for. "First you handle Connie. She must be dealt with. Hmm? Nothing violent, I'm not suggesting that, just see that she's out of the way, out of town. Now! Then we get the computer back," he said. "One thing at a time. Hmm?" "Connie's first," Maybeck replied like a magpie echoing his master's voice. "Immediately."

"No problem. I know where to find her. I set that up like you told me to."

"You'll watch for cops."

"I know."

"This 'punk/ as you called him," Tegg said distastefully-he had no use for such slang-"is there some way to identify him?" Maybeck said brutishly, "I could always report it to the police."

Tegg waved a finger at him. "Don't challenge me, Donald.

Insolence will get you nowhere with me." A bonfire, Tegg was thinking. That size body was just made for a bonfire. one fire to burn the flesh, a second for the bones. Maybe even a third for those teeth. "This is your error we are attempting to correct here-let's pay particular attention to responsibility, shall we? We've discussed this all before. All before." How strangely seductive the lure of violence could be. He wanted to hurt this man. "I can handle it."

"Spare me such indulgence, would you? Dream on your own time." Tegg felt another tic coming. He squashed it with anger. Interesting how that worked, he thought-perhaps anger, always heralded as the enemy, was indeed a friend. "We will go to whatever means necessary to obtain that computer. A reward, a ransom, I don't care what you have to do."

"I can put the word out. We offer a reward, and we'll be onto this thing like flies on shit. It's password protected," Maybeck reminded. "That's one thing good about it." "There's nothing good about this!" Tegg announced He cleaned out his wallet-one hundred and fifty dollars-and practically threw it at Maybeck. "That kind of thinking is poison! Do you hear me? Poison! We need that computer back immediately. That computer is evidence, Donald! Get that into your head. That laptop is exactly what the police want. That's our battle, don't you see? And it's not one we want to fight, believe you me. No, sir. But we'll fight those we must. Hmm?

You bet we will."

"I can get it back." He waved the money at Tegg. "I have friends."

This seemed unlikely, if not impossible-especially the latter statement. "What an idiot you are!"

"Shut up!"

"An idiot, do you hear me?" He leaned toward Maybeck. "You get that laptop back, and you destroy that database before the police are any the wiser! Get rid of the van, too. If you fail in any of this, you will regret it!"

"Doctor?" His receptionist's voice.

"Is everything okay?"

He'd been shouting. "Out in a minute," Tegg replied in a friendly voice to the closed door. How much had his employee heard? How could everything come down around you so quickly?

Maybeck whispered, "I'say we zoom the girl we kidnapped and take our chances with Wong Kei."

"Is that what you say?" Tegg asked, standing and approaching him, daring to put his face up against Maybeck's. Breath like an open sewer. "I'm not terribly interested in what you have to say, Donald. But you had better be interested in what I have to say. Extremely interested." He whispered, "Connie, then the laptop, the van: That's your order of business, your priorities. If Connie won't play along ... well ... Use your imagination." "No problem," Donnie said.

Was he actually condoning such a thing? He felt a disturbing pressure in his head, like a tire taking too much air. He wondered why he couldn't just step away from it all? Let it go. How far would he go in order to make up for that mistake of his? He didn't like himself; he didn't even know himself. He had studied the psychology of cornered animals in college; only now that he was experiencing it did he begin to understand.

Only now did he see clearly what exactly was to become of the black man out in the kennel. He too was a liability, one that at this point they could certainly not afford.

But not for long.

LO With the surveillance a complete disaster, with no one to be mad at but himself, with no appetite, Boldt left work and headed directly to the back door of The Big joke. He didn't want Liz to see him like this-he wasn't sure what he wanted. Had he been a drinker, he would have gotten drunk, but booze only gave him a sour stomach and a bad case of the blues. The blues themselves seemed the best way out-eighty-_ eight keys of refuge, where voices sang in his head and drove out all thought. The club was closed to the public by order of the Treasury Department, but since Bear Berenson lived upstairs, access was still available through the back. The piano had never been confiscated-just the financial records-and only two of the six screws intended to lock it shut had violated it. , Boldt let himself in, found the piano in the dark, and started playing. A while later Bear settled himself into a chair at the table farthest from the stage, because Boldt hated the cigarette smoke and because this table sat immediately under a light which Bear needed to read his trade paperback, How to Beat the IRS, a gift from Boldt. He studied it like a preacher with a Bible, his reading punctuated by grunts of disapproval and sighs of supplication. A captain going down with the ship, he paused and looked up only to relish a particular phrase from Boldt's piano or to roll himself another joint.

it had been several days since Boldt had played, and he took to it hungrily, tuning all else out. His pager-switched off-his holstered weapon, his shield and his wallet all occupied a leathery heap by the glass of milk that Bear occasionally refreshed on his way back from the bar.

The investigation would occasionally surface, like a prairie dog lifting its head from its lair, but Boldt would send it into retreat with the stomp of a foot or the stabbing of a dissonant note.

Bear disappeared sometime during the marathon. Boldt didn't look to see what time it was. He heard the phone ring several times, glad it wasn't his. A while later, needing the bathroom and unable to use the club's because of the dark, he found his way upstairs. Bear was asleep in front of the television. With that much pot in him he wouldn't be worth trying to awaken and put to bed, so Boldt left him.

He was back at the piano and into one of his better renditions of "All The Things You Are" when he detected movement out of the corner of his eye.

He turned to see Liz standing in the darkness. Like him, she had entered through the back door. Arms crossed, she observed him solemnly, in quiet contemplation. No telling how long she might have been there: Liz was not one to interrupt his playing. "Bad day," he offered. "They happen," she reminded.

A wind moved through the room carrying the scent of her with it.

Perhaps this was what had stopped him in the first place. She smelled gorgeous. She explained, "We need you, Miles and I. We need you even when you feel like this-especially when you feel like this. I worried. I was picturing a hotel room. Something like that."

"Not likely."

"But possible. Anything is possible. Have I let you down? Have you let me down? Can I blame it on your work? Can I blame it on you? I want to. I try to./I "I miss the music, that's all. I miss you more, you and Einstein. Where is he?"

"Emma is pulling emergency duty." Their neighbor. She pinch-hit when they needed her. "You don't get it, do you?" she asked. "Maybe not."

"I love you." When he failed to reply she added, "I want to be your piano. I want to be the one you turn to when you feel like this. I want to be the one to help."

"You do.

It's not you, it's me," he said. "It's both of us. It always is."

"I screwed up a surveillance this afternoon."

"Do you see what this stuff does to you?"

"Please."

"But do you? He's killing you, too. He is! And me and Miles. What about your son? I hate this. It's as if we never worked any of this out. But we did, once."

"I love this work. I live to stop guys like this."

"But when you don't? Look at you."

He glanced at the piano. "This is the other me."

"No, Lou: This is the same you. I won't give you permission to love your work more than your family." "Who said anything about that?" ,,I did.,, "I'm talking about me."

"You never talk about you.

That's one of our problems."

"One of our problems?"

"Things are far from perfect," she advised him.

There was a spider in one of the spotlights, searching its web for food, seemingly supported by nothing. Boldt felt like that at times: alone, hanging by a thread, caught at the focal point of all that heat. "People die. You see enough of it, it makes you think. "Shit happens," she said. She was angry. "Do you wish I hadn't signed back up?"