Your Heart Belongs To Me

Now comes the evening of the mind.

Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood. -Donald Justice, “The Evening of the Mind”

THIRTY-TWO

On the one-year anniversary of his heart transplant, Ryan Perry made no plans for a celebration. Being alive was celebration enough.

During the morning, he worked alone in the garage, performing routine maintenance on a fully sparkled ’32 five-window deuce coupe that he had bought at auction.

In the afternoon, ensconced in an armchair with a footstool, in the smaller of the two living rooms, he continued reading Samantha’s first book.

Styled as a solarium, the chamber provided an atmosphere to match that in the novel. Tall windows revealed a down sky, a limp pillow stuffed with the soft wet feathers of gray geese. Needles of rain knitted together scattered scarves of thin fog, which then unraveled through whatever tree or shrub next snagged them.

The room’s collection of palms and ferns webbed the limestone floor with spidery shadows. The air had a green and fertile scent, for the most part pleasing, although from time to time there arose a faint fetid odor of what might have been decomposing moss or root rot, which seemed always, curiously, to be detectable only when he read passages that in particular disturbed him.

She had infused the novel with quiet humor, and one of her central subjects proved to be love, as he had intuited when he’d left the long message on her voice mail, before his transplant surgery. Yet in the weave of the narrative were solemn threads, somber threads, and the entire garment she had sewn seemed darker than the materials from which she had made it.

The story enthralled Ryan, and though the prose was luminous and swift, he resisted rushing through the pages, but instead savoured the sentences. This was his second reading of the novel in four days.

Winston Amory wheeled to Ryan’s chair a serving cart on which stood a sterling-silver coffeepot with candle-burner to keep the contents warm, and a small plate of almond cookies.

“Sir, I took the liberty of assuming, as you are not at a table, you might prefer a mug to a cup.”

“Perfect, Winston. Thank you.”

After pouring a mug of coffee, Winston placed a coaster on the table beside the armchair, and then the mug upon the coaster.

Referring to his wife, Winston said, “Penelope wonders if you would like dinner at seven, as usual.”

“A little later tonight. Eight would be ideal.”

“Eight it is, sir.” He nodded once, his customary abbreviated bow, before departing stiff-backed and straight-shouldered.

Although Winston managed the estate and marshaled the household staff to its duties with consummate grace and professionalism, Ryan suspected that he and Penelope exaggerated their Englishness, from their accents to their mannerisms, to their obsession with propriety and protocol, because they had learned, in previous positions, that this was what enchanted Americans who employed their services. This performance occasionally annoyed him, more often amused him, and in sum was worth enduring because they did a fine job and because he had complete trust in them.

Before returning home for further recuperation after receiving his new heart, he had dismissed Lee and Kay Ting, as well as their assistants. Each had been given two years of severance pay, about which none complained, plus a strong letter of recommendation, but no explanation.

He had no evidence of treachery in their case, but he had no proof that would exonerate them, either. He had wanted to come home to a sense of security and peace.

Wilson Mott’s report on Winston and Penelope Amory-and on the other new employees-was so exhaustive that Ryan felt as if he knew them all as well as he knew himself. He was not suspicious of them, and they gave him no reason to wonder about their loyalty; and the year had gone by without a single strange incident.

Now, with coffee and cookies at hand, Ryan again became so absorbed in Sam’s novel that he lost track of the passage of time, and looked up from a chapter’s end to find that the early-winter twilight had begun to drain from the day what light the rain and fog had not already drowned.

Had he raised his eyes only a few minutes later, he might not have been able to see the figure on the south lawn.

Initially he thought this visitor must be a shadow shaped by plumes of fog, because it appeared to be a monk in hooded habit far from any monastery.

A moment’s consideration remade the habit into a black raincoat. The hood, the fading light, and a distance of forty feet hid all but the palest impression of a face.

The visitor-intruder began to seem a better word-appeared to be staring at that floor-to-ceiling window providing the most direct view of Ryan in his armchair.

As he put aside his book and rose to approach the window, the figure moved. By the time he reached the glass, he saw no sign of an intruder.

Through the drizzling rain, nothing moved on the broad south lawn except slowly writhing anacondas of fog.

After a year that had flowed by in the most ordinary currents, Ryan was prepared to dismiss the brief vision as a trick of twilight.

But the figure reappeared from among three deodar cedars that, with their drooping boughs, seemed themselves like giant monks in attendance at a solemn ceremony. Slowly the figure moved into view and then stopped, once again facing the solarium.

Dimming by the minute, the dying day exposed less of the face than before, although the intruder had ventured ten feet closer to the house.

Just as Ryan realized that it might not be wise to stand exposed at a lighted window, the figure turned and retreated across the lawn. It seemed not to step away but to glide, as if it too were merely fog, but of a dark variety.

The murk of dusk and mist and rain soon folded into night. The intruder did not reappear.

The landscaping staff received full pay for rain days but did not report to work; however, Henry Sorne, the head landscaper, might have paid a visit to check the lawn drains, a few of which, clogged with leaves, had overflowed in past storms.

Not Henry Sorne. The stature of the figure, the gracefulness with which it moved in the cumbersome coat, as well as something about the attitude in which it stood facing the window, convinced Ryan that this intruder had been a woman.

Penelope Amory and her assistant, Jordana, were the only women on the household staff. Neither of them had reason to be inspecting the lawns, and neither seemed to be the type to fancy a rainy-day walk.

The grounds were walled. The motorized bronze gates locked automatically when you passed through them and could not be left unlatched accidentally. Neither the walls nor the gates could be easily scaled.

Although the two walk-in gates featured electronic locks that could be released either from within the house or by the inputting of a code in the exterior keypads, the driveway gate could be opened also with a remote control. Only one person, other than staff, had ever possessed a remote.

Standing at the solarium window, now seeing nothing but his reflection painted on the night-blackened glass, Ryan whispered, “Samantha?”

After dinner, Ryan took Sam’s novel upstairs, intending to read another chapter or two in bed, perhaps until he fell asleep, although he doubted that even on a second reading her words would lull him into slumber.

As usual, Penelope had earlier removed the quilted spread and turned down the covers of his bed for the night. A lamp had been left on, as he liked.

Atop his stack of plumped pillows stood a small cellophane bag, the neck twisted shut and tied securely with a red ribbon. Penelope did not leave bedtime candy, which was what the bag contained.

This was not the traditional mint or the two-piece sample of Godiva often left on hotel pillows by the night maids. The bag held tiny white candy hearts with brief romantic declarations printed in red on one side of them, a confection sold only during the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, which was less than a month away.

Bemused, Ryan turned the crackling bag over in his hand. He noticed that all of the candy messages visible to him were the same: BE MINE.

As he recalled from adolescence, in the original bags in which these treats were sold, several messages were included: LOVE YOU, TOO SWEET, KISS ME, and others.

To obtain a full collection that asked only BE MINE, you would have to purchase several bags and cull from them the hearts with the wanted message.

In the bathroom, sitting at the vanity, he untied the ribbon, opened the bag, and spilled the hearts on the black-granite counter. Those that were faceup revealed the identical message.

One by one, he turned over those that lay with their blank sides exposed, and in every case, the entreaty was the same: BE MINE.

Staring at the hearts, more than a hundred of them, he decided not to taste one.

He returned them to the bag, twisted shut the cellophane, and tied the ribbon tight.

The first anniversary of his transplant certainly must be the occasion for the gift, but he couldn’t interpret the subtext of the two-word sentiment. He should not discount that the candy might have been given in all innocence and with good will.

Raising his gaze from the insistent red messages, he stared at himself in the mirror. He could not read his face.

THIRTY-THREE

Ryan sat in bed, reading until he finished Samantha’s novel for the second time, shortly after two o’clock in the morning. He had not intended to stay up so late.

For a few minutes, he stared at the author’s photo on the back of the book jacket. No camera could do her justice.

Putting the book aside, he leaned against the mounded pillows.

In the three months immediately after the transplant, the side effects of his twenty-eight medications stressed him and, in a couple of instances, considerably worried him. But dosages were adjusted, a few drugs were replaced with others, and thereafter his recovery went so well that Dr. Hobb called him “my super-patient.”

At the one-year mark, no signs of organ rejection had appeared: no unexplained weakness, no fatigue, no fever, no chill or dizziness, no diarrhea or vomiting.

Myocardial biopsy remained the gold standard for identifying rejection. Twice in the past year, as an outpatient, Ryan submitted to the procedure. Both times, the pathologist found no indication of rejection in the tissue samples.

For exercise, he did a lot of walking, uncounted miles. In recent months, he began riding a stationary bike, as well, and lifting light weights.

He was trim, and he felt fit.

Judging by the evidence, he belonged to the fortunate and small minority in whom a stranger’s heart might be received with negative consequences hardly greater than those of a blood transfusion. The most significant medical danger he faced was increased susceptibility to disease because of the immunosuppressant drugs he relied upon.

Yet he had been waiting for the turn, the change of tides, the rotation of the current light into an unknown dark. The events that had led up to the transplant seemed to be unfinished business.

Now came the candy hearts with their simple message, which was nonetheless cryptic for its simplicity. And the figure on the south lawn, in the rain.

He dimmed the bedside lamp. Even after a year of comparative normalcy, he preferred not to sleep in absolute darkness.

Two decks served the master suite. The doors to both were three inches thick, with steel cores and two deadbolts. With the perimeter alarm set, they could not be opened without triggering a siren.

The main stairs ascended from the second floor to the penthouse landing, which was also served by the elevator. The door between that landing and the master suite was secured on this side by a blind deadbolt that had no keyway on the farther side.

Consequently, if intruders were secreted inside the house when the perimeter alarm was activated for the night, they could not gain entrance to the master suite.

In a hidden safe in his walk-in closet, Ryan had stored a 9-millimeter pistol and a box of ammunition. This evening, before bed, he loaded the pistol. It now lay in the half-open nightstand drawer.

He could make a good case against himself to the effect that his fears of conspiracy during the months leading to his transplant were not the result of mental confusion related to diminished circulation, were not caused by the side effects of prescription drugs, but were attributable to an unfortunate lifelong tendency to suspicion. When at an early age you learned not to trust your parents, distrust could become a key element of your life philosophy.

And if that self-indictment was the full truth of things, he needed to resist another descent into paranoia. Perhaps a first step in that resistance ought to be returning the pistol to the safe at once, not in the morning.

He left it in the nightstand drawer.

No unexplained rapping arose. Lying on his right side, ear to the pillow, Ryan heard the slow steady beating of his good heart.

In time he slept, and did not dream.

He woke in the late morning and, by intercom, advised Mrs. Amory that he would be taking lunch at one o’clock in the solarium.

After he showered, shaved, and dressed, he put both the pistol and the bag of candy hearts in the concealed safe.

The storm had passed the previous evening. But a new front was rolling in from the northwest, with rain expected by midafternoon.

When Penelope brought his lunch to the table in the solarium, Ryan asked if she had left candy on his pillow the evening before, though he did not describe the hearts.

In spite of whatever talent she might have for exaggerating her Englishness without once breaking character, she did not seem like a woman who could lie without a score of tics and other tells giving her away. She appeared confused by the question and then as baffled as was Ryan that someone should think it proper etiquette to treat him like a hotel guest in his own home.

After lunch, when she returned to clear the table, she said that she had mentioned the candy to Jordana and to Winston and that she was quite sure neither of them had been the party responsible for this perhaps well-meant but inexcusable occurrence. She had not spoken to Winston’s assistant, Ricardo, as he had been off work the previous day and could not have been responsible.

A service representative with the firm that maintained their heating-cooling system had been in-house and had changed filters on the third floor. And a repairman had worked on the under-counter refrigerator in the master-bedroom retreat. Mrs. Amory wished to know if she should contact them and ascertain if either had been the culprit.

The intensity of her gray-eyed stare and a certain set to her mouth suggested that she regarded this incident as a challenge to her authority and as a personal affront for which she would be pleased to pursue the miscreant to the gates of Hell, if necessary, and give him an upbraiding that he would find worse than the tortures that awaited him in the flames of damnation.

“It’s commendable of you,” Ryan said placatingly, “to be so committed to finding an explanation. But it’s not all that important, Penelope. Let’s not take this out of house. Someone must have meant it as a joke, that’s all.”

“You can rest assured, I’ll keep my eye on those gentlemen when next they’re on the premises,” she said.

“I have no doubt of it,” he said. “No doubt at all.”

Alone in the solarium, he returned to his favorite armchair and opened Samantha’s book to begin a third reading.

Rain began to fall at a quarter past two. As on the previous day, Nature was in an indolent mood, and the sky shed a languid drizzle.

From time to time, Ryan interrupted his reading to sweep the south lawn with his gaze.

He glanced up from the novel less often than he intended. Had the hooded figure returned, it could have watched him for half an hour or longer without his being aware of its presence.

The story, the characters, the prose still enchanted him, but from this third reading, he sought something more than any other work of fiction could have given him. Being in the story was being with Samantha, hearing her voice, which to him counted as both a joy and a sadness.

He also hoped to gain an understanding of why things were the way they were between them. Having completed the book the very day she learned of his transplant, Sam could not have written any part of it with the intention of explaining their estrangement to him, and anyway people didn’t write entire novels to each other in the place of a letter or a phone chat. Yet on his first reading, in only three chapters, he had sensed that this book had something to reveal to him that would explain their current relationship.

Throughout, the novel sang with Samantha’s voice, glowed with her grace, and reflected her sensibilities, but it also contained many scenes that Ryan would not have thought she could write, that sounded like Samantha…but like Samantha as she might have been if some of the experiences that shaped her life had never happened.

This made him feel that he had never fully known her. If he was to make things right between them, rounding out his understanding of Sam was a necessary first step, and the view into her heart provided by this novel seemed certain to help him.

Prior to twilight, Ryan put down the book to survey the lawn, the trees, and the south wall of the estate, on which bougainvillea flourished, providing a thorny obstacle to a quick exit by any intruder. No watcher in the wet.

He got up from the armchair, leaving the floor lamp lit to imply that he had stepped away for only a moment.

At a window near a corner of the room, from between a pair of queen palms lush enough to shade him from the high ceiling lights, he studied the sodden landscape.

Whoever the woman might be, Ryan doubted she would return so soon to prowl the grounds, for she knew that she had been seen on her first visit. Yet stranger things had happened.

Beyond the rain, behind the clouds, the gentle hand of twilight dimmed the sky, and night soon threw the switch to black. The hooded figure did not appear.

After dinner, when Ryan retired to the third floor, he locked the door with the blind deadbolt. With some trepidation, he went directly from the suite foyer into the bedroom.

The bedspread had been removed, and the covers had been turned down, as they should have been. But nothing had been left on his stack of pillows.

As peculiar as the gift of candy hearts seemed, nevertheless Ryan felt foolish for expecting that it might represent the beginning of a new series of mysterious incidents that would send him spiraling into a whirlpool of irrationality like the one in which he had found himself more than a year ago. All of that bizarreness had proved to be coincidence that had seemed substantive only because of the effect on his thinking of poorly oxygenated blood and subsequently because of the side effects of medications.

He checked the two doors to the decks. Each featured a standard deadbolt lock operated from inside by a thumbturn and from outside by a key, and each also had a blind deadbolt with a thumbturn on the inside but nothing to mark its existence on the outside. Both locks on both doors were engaged.

After brushing his teeth, toileting, and changing into pajamas, Ryan considered taking the pistol from the safe. Counseling himself to maintain perspective and not to let his imagination overrule his reason, he returned unarmed to the bedroom.

On his pillow lay a piece of jewelry, a gold heart pendant on a gold chain.

THIRTY-FOUR

In the closet, Ryan pressed a hidden switch. A panel slid aside, revealing the eighteen-inch-square steel face of the wall safe.

Using the lighted keypad, he hurriedly entered the lock code. When the liquid-crystal display announced ACCESS, he opened the safe, snatched up the 9-millimeter pistol, closed the door, and stood for a moment thinking, the weapon gripped in both hands, muzzle pointed at the ceiling.

The checked grip felt rough against his palm. The weapon seemed too light for an instrument of mortal consequences.

He did not want to kill anyone, but he had not survived this far to die easily.

Barefoot, in pajamas, he left the closet, crossed the bedroom, and entered the retreat. He flipped up the light switch with one elbow as he crossed the threshold.

The amboina-wood Art Deco desk. Bookshelves. Entertainment center. Small bar with an under-counter refrigerator.

At the door to the first deck, he found the blind deadbolt still engaged from the inside. No one had left by this exit.

Two windows provided a view of the deck. He drew up the pleated shades on the first, then on the second, half expecting a pale and hooded face at the glass, a milky-eyed stare, a wicked grin, whoever had been circling toward him around the black lake. No presence awaited him, and both windows were locked from inside.

Off the retreat lay a windowless half bath. No one in there. His reflection in the mirror, his mouth pressed in a flat grim line, his eyes wild. The gun so huge.

Returning to the bedroom, at the door to the second deck, he found the blind deadbolt engaged. No one had departed by this exit, either.

Three windows, one inoperable. The other two locked. A gust of wind, a shatter of rain against the glass caused his heart to jump.

Nowhere to hide except under the bed. Although no one but an anorexic model could slip under a low-profile king-size job with sideboards, Ryan dropped to his knees anyway and peered into that space, where because of the superb housecleaning he found not even a ball of dust.

The foyer. The main door. Blind deadbolt locked.

Bathroom. A large open space. The marble floor cold under his bare feet. Nothing moved but Ryan’s nervous reflections. A door led to a water closet, another to a walk-in linen storage. No one in either space.

His expansive personal closet had no open shelves, only drawers for folded items. Hanging clothes were behind cabinet doors.

By pushing the suits and shirts aside on the rods, a grown man could have hidden in any of a dozen different compartments. Ryan opened all the doors but confronted no intruder.

To have left the pendant on the pillow after Ryan had locked himself in the suite for the night, someone must have been in there with him. Yet no one remained; and no exit had been opened.

He returned to his bed, holding the pistol at his side, and stood staring at the pendant.

A patter like a pack of scurrying rats in the attic. He looked up. Not rats, rain. On the slate roof, rain.

If anyone had come into the suite from a deck, through a door or a window, they would have dripped on the carpet. Ryan would have felt the moisture under his bare feet.

No one had been here. Someone had been here. Unreason.

As if the pendant were bewitched and to touch it would ensure the transmission of a curse, Ryan hesitated to pick it up. But curiosity kills more than cats.

As it lay on the pillow, the gold heart revealed a single side, softly burnished. In his hand, dangling from the chain, the other side came into view. Two words, engraved: BE MINE.

The pendant was not a locket. He was relieved that it was not a locket. If it had been a locket, it would have contained something that he would not have wanted to see.

BE MINE.

As he wondered at those words, recalling the tiny candy hearts, a memory troubled him: the open wall safe as, in the grip of fear, he had snatched up the pistol.

Belatedly, what Ryan had seen in the safe registered with him. He stood listening to the rain rats and felt Fate gnawing at his bones.

If what he recalled was true, the normalcy of the past year was a trapdoor with a corroded spring, and the coils of the spring just now abruptly cracked and failed.

In denial of the memory, dropping the pendant on the nightstand, clutching the pistol, he returned to the closet, not hurriedly but at a death-row pace.

The sliding panel remained open, the safe revealed. When he slammed the door after grabbing the gun, the lock had automatically engaged. On the status display glowed the word SECURE.

Under the circumstances, that assurance seemed to mock him.

When he entered the lock code in the illuminated keypad, SECURE changed to ACCESS. After a hesitation, he opened the foot-square steel door.

The safe had contained four thousand dollars in cash, to be used in an emergency, two expensive watches, and a pair of diamond links for French cuffs, which he never wore. None of those items had been touched.

Also in the safe had been a small, hinged jewelry-display box containing the $85,000 engagement ring, already sized to Samantha’s hand, that he had not been able to persuade her to accept. The box remained, and when Ryan opened it, the ring sparkled.

The previous night, he had also stowed the candy hearts in this safe. The ribbon-tied cellophane bag and all that it contained were gone.

This he had seen but not registered when, minutes before, he had been frantic to retrieve the pistol.

What he had not noticed earlier, but now discovered, was that the box of 9-mm cartridges had also been taken. He did not need to sort through the contents of the small compartment. The box could not be buried under the other items: They were follies and small; the box was full of mortality, big and heavy.

Ryan could not at first understand why an intruder, finding the safe, would take the bullets but not the delivery system, leaving him with ten rounds for defense.

Yes. Well. Of course.

He ejected the magazine from the pistol. The ten cartridges had been removed from it, as well.

Believing as he did in the necessity of action, Ryan had plunged into a search for an intruder, racing from room to room, tearing open doors, armed with a useless weapon, discovering no one to shoot, but now he had been pride-shot and humiliated by the metaphoric bullet of his adversary’s mockery.

THIRTY-FIVE

A seven-digit access number opened the safe’s programming to Ryan. He deleted his former lock combination and entered a new one based on a date important to him but meaningless to anyone else.

He suspected this was wasted effort. He alone had possessed the previous code, but someone had violated the safe anyway.

To open the panel that concealed the safe, he had used a hidden switch incorporated into the rheostat that controlled the closet lighting.

Although the trim plate that covered the junction box appeared to be fixed to the wall with two screws, they were only screw heads. They had no function except deception.

The control stick slid up for brighter, down for dimmer. When the stick was all the way at the top of the slot, you could press up on the trim plate, moving it one click at a time on the hidden track to which it was attached. The combination that caused the panel to slide open, revealing the safe, was three clicks up, two clicks back, and two clicks up.

The pressure required to move the trim plate was sufficient that this secret function could not be accidentally discovered by a maid cleaning the closet.

A local alarm company, vetted and recommended by Wilson Mott, had installed both this small safe and a concealed walk-in model on the ground floor. They were bonded, with a long history of reliable service, and Ryan doubted that one of their employees was tormenting him.

Tormenting seemed to be the operative word, for if the immediate intention had been to harm him, he would already be dead.

Torment was a form of violence, however, and anyone who enjoyed inflicting it might be expected to move from psychological torment to physical, even to murder.

He put the useless pistol in the safe. In addition to removing the ammunition, the intruder might have tampered with the weapon. Ryan did not know enough about guns to trust his examination of the 9-mm to reveal any subtle but critical damage that had been done to it.

Before he bought another box of cartridges, reloaded, and tested the pistol, he would have it examined by someone with the experience to certify its reliability. He didn’t know if a tricked-up gun could explode in his hand when he pulled the trigger, but he wasn’t going to find out the hard way.

Alternately, he could purchase a new pistol. The law required a waiting period for a handgun, however, and Ryan suspected that his tormentor had an agenda and a timetable that would bring them to a brink before the waiting period had passed.

As he closed the safe and watched the concealing panel slide into place, he realized that if the intruder had known about this wall safe, another secret of the house had most likely also been compromised.

In the bedroom once more, he plucked an electronic key from the nightstand drawer. He went to a six-foot-by-six-foot painting that was mounted tight to the south wall, and held the blunt end of the key to one of the eyes of a tiger in the painting. Behind that very spot, a lock-code reader triggered the release of the bolts that held in place the painting and the portion of the wall to which it was attached.

Most houses of this size and complexity featured a panic room in which the owners could take refuge in the event of a home-invasion robbery or a similar crisis. This one measured twelve by sixteen feet.

The door that was a painting swung inward. Ryan stepped over the raised threshold, into a fireproof space formed of poured-in-place concrete, lined with quarter-inch steel plate, and upholstered in the highest-quality soundproofing.

A land-line separate from the house phone system, dedicated electric service unrelated to the rest of the estate, dedicated incoming fresh-air and air-exhaust lines made the panic room self-sustaining. Invaders could cut the house services-or in a siege situation, they could be cut by authorities-and this haven would still function.

Packaged food, bottled water, a corner toilet, a backup chemical toilet, and other supplies would support those who took shelter here for several days. Two chairs and a bed were also provided.

On the bed lay the cellophane bag of candy hearts.

THIRTY-SIX

In slippers, with a bathrobe over his pajamas, turning on lights as he went, Ryan hurried down four flights of stairs to the bottom floor of the house, directly to the service hall at the end of which lay the laundry room.

One of the storage rooms off that hall, the one that interested him now, always remained locked, but he possessed a key. In a corner of this room stood a wide, tall, black metal cabinet, also locked, which for convenience could be opened with the same key.

In the cabinet were racked recorders that stored on magnetic disks the observations of the estate security cameras. Twenty cameras kept watch on the exterior of the house and the grounds. Seven others maintained surveillance of the interior hallways and the penthouse landing, though no cameras intruded into any rooms.

He switched on a monitor that presented him with a menu from which he selected with a remote control. He was most interested in the camera that covered the penthouse landing, because it recorded everyone who, either by staircase or elevator, arrived in this area en route to the door of the master suite.

After he had specified the camera, the menu instructed him to enter the date, the hour, and the minute from which he wanted to begin viewing. He chose this date, this hour, thirty minutes earlier.

The twenty-by-fourteen-foot landing outside the master suite appeared on the screen. The date was noted on the lower left side. On the lower right, a digital clock kept a running count of the hour, minute, and second.

Intently focused on the recording, Ryan fast-forwarded to review in fifteen minutes the next thirty minutes’ worth of images.

Near the beginning, he watched himself come off the stairs and proceed to the master-suite door, carrying Samantha’s book, on his way to bed.

To conserve storage space, the camera didn’t record fluid video but took a snapshot every half second. On screen, Ryan moved like a figure in an animation sequence drawn on stacks of flippable cards.

Earlier, when he entered the bedroom, he had first checked the bed to see if a second gift awaited. Finding nothing on his pillow, he had spent some time brushing his teeth, preparing for the night.

Now, minute after minute, the camera failed to show anyone entering the locked master suite after him.

Here was proof that when he had gone into the suite, an intruder must have been there already, in the retreat off the bedroom.

While Ryan had gotten ready for bed, the unknown-but now soon to be seen-giver of gifts had placed the pendant and left the suite, somehow locking the blind deadbolt upon exiting.

But the video failed to support that theory. No one came out of the master suite until Ryan himself appeared again, this time wearing a bathrobe over his pajamas, hurrying to the stairs and ultimately to this room in which he now studied the security recording.

His search of the suite, following the discovery of the heart pendant, had been thorough. He had not missed any place where even a small child could have hidden.

Now he accessed the recording made by the camera that covered the third-floor deck outside the master-suite retreat, and studied the same time period. A single deck lamp provided enough light for the night-vision camera to present a picture nearly as bright as one taken during the day. No one departed by that door or by one of those two windows, either.

When he reviewed the recording of the other master-level deck, he saw no one come out of the door or out of the windows that opened directly off the bedroom.

No one had left the suite, but no one had been there when he searched every niche of the place.

Judging by the evidence, the gold pendant must have materialized magically on the pillow.

What appeared to be magical, however, must be always and only an ordinary event rendered enigmatic by the lack of one crucial fact.

Ryan racked his brain to think of what that fact might be, but both reason and imagination failed him.

Frustrated, about to switch off the monitor, he decided to have a look at the recordings made at twilight, the previous day, on the south lawn, when he had been reading in the solarium and had discovered he was under observation. Two cameras covered that area.

The system stored all of these recordings for thirty days, then dumped them unless otherwise instructed.

The first camera, mounted on the house, provided approximately the view that Ryan would have had from his armchair. It presented now the clotted gray goose-down sky, the drizzle, the solemn trees, the slithering fog, the saturated yard across which the hooded trespasser had glided.

He ran the scene beginning prior to the onset of twilight, and watched as the watery light drained from the day. Night came, but the intruder did not.

Disbelieving, having fast-forwarded through the recording, Ryan watched it again, but in real time, which seemed interminable. Sky, rain, trees, fog, inconstant light fading to darkness-but no visitor either ominous or otherwise.

The second south-lawn camera was mounted on a limb of an Indian laurel, covering some of the same ground from a different angle. The three deodar cedars, from the shadows of which the hooded figure had made its second appearance, were central to this view.

Through the fading light, into darkfall, no phantom glided forth from beneath the majestic drooping boughs of the cedars.

The previous evening, damn it, he had seen something. He had not merely hallucinated the figure. It was neither a trick of rain and fog nor a reflection on the window glass of some palm or fern in the solarium. He’d seen someone in a hooded raincoat, maybe a woman, moving and wet and real.

The watcher in the rain was as real as the candy hearts, as real as the gold heart pendant that lay now…

Where?

On the nightstand. Yes. After holding it by the chain and seeing the inscription, he put it on the nightstand. Later, after finding the cellophane bag of candy in the panic room, he had put that on the nightstand, as well.

Ryan switched off the monitor, locked the cabinet, left the storage room, locked the door, and returned to the master suite, overcome by a grim expectation.

On the nightstand stood only the lamp and the clock. The bag of candy and the pendant were gone.

A frantic but exhaustive search of the master suite turned up neither item.

When, last of all, he opened the safe with the new combination that he had recently programmed, the pendant and candy hearts were not in there, either. And like the ammunition before it, the pistol had been taken.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Because the master suite was not secure, Ryan could not assume that he would be safe when sleeping.

He considered spending the night in one of the guest quarters or bedding down in an unlikely place, such as the laundry. But if he was not safe in this third-floor redoubt, no haven existed anywhere within these walls.

Briefly he considered decamping to a hotel, but indignation at these violations of his privacy swiftly swelled into a righteous anger. He had not lived through a heart transplant only to run like a frightened child from a tormentor whose pranks were sophisticated in execution but insipid in concept, the kind of psycho-movie crap that made teenage girls scream in terror and delight.

Denied a gun, he went into the retreat to choose a knife.

The under-counter refrigerator contained not only soft drinks and bottled water, but also items on which he sometimes snacked: a variety of cheeses, a few pieces of fresh fruit.

A drawer in the bar cabinet contained utensils, including flatware and knives. There were a paring knife to peel the fruit, a standard kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade, and a more pointed knife with a serrated edge.

He chose the kitchen knife and returned with it to the bedroom. He placed it under the pillow beside his, on which Samantha had not rested her head in a long time.

Reclining against his mound of pillows, he switched on the TV but pressed MUTE. He watched a sitcom that was no funnier silent than it would have been with sound.

His mind relentlessly circled a disturbing corollary. If people were conspiring to torment and possibly to harm him now, then the conspiracy he had suspected before his transplant, which eventually he had pretty much dismissed as imaginary, had almost surely been real.

An element of that conspiracy had been the possibility that his cardiomyopathy had been the consequence of poisoning. So if he had been poisoned then, he should assume that he would be poisoned again, that his new heart would be destroyed like his first.

If that was true, he probably had been poisoned already. Trusting his new staff, he had eaten and drunk what they served.

He wondered how long after poisoning the heart-muscle damage manifested.

Of course the staff might be innocent. If some stranger could come and go from the house at will, undetected, the ingredients of Ryan’s meals might have been poisoned without the involvement of the Amorys or their assistants.

An alternative assumption and corollary demanded consideration. If the perceived conspiracy and poisoning before his transplant had been imagined, then the current incidents might be imagined, too.

Indeed, he had nothing-not the raincoat-hooded presence on video, not the pendant, not the candy-to prove that any of these recent, taunting incidents had occurred.

Before his transplant, he had been on three medications that Dr. Gupta prescribed. Post-surgery, he took twenty-eight. If a drug or combination of drugs could, as a side effect, induce paranoid delusions and hallucinations, he was at greater risk now than he’d been a year previous.

But he knew that he was not delusional. He knew he was not.

Simmering anger instead of fear, determination to be the hunter instead of the prey, kept Ryan’s mind circling around the puzzle in an alternately widening and shrinking gyre, circling in search of a single loose thread that when plucked would unravel the mystery into truth.

Bafflement hardened into frustration, until he wanted to scream to vent his exasperation. Instead, he picked up Samantha’s book for distraction.

Earlier in the day, he had reached the twenty-seventh of sixty-six chapters in his third reading of the novel. Now, within a single paragraph, Sam’s prose again bewitched him.

Once, while working on the book, she had spoken of subtext. He knew what that was-the underlying, implicit meaning of the story, which the writer never directly expressed. Not all works of fiction had subtext; perhaps most did not.

Samantha said that readers did not need to be consciously aware of the subtext to enjoy a story fully, because if the tale had been told well, they would subconsciously absorb the implicit meaning. In fact, the emotional effect of the subtext frequently could be more powerful when the reader was not able to put it into words, when it slammed him hard without his quite understanding by what he had been slammed.

Subtext could be layered, she said, implicit meanings spread one over another like the delicate layers in phyllo, that flaky pastry used in Greek and Middle Eastern desserts.

Ryan thought he understood her novel’s primary subtext. But he sensed other layers, the meaning of which he could not infer.

More important, this mattered to him because in those depths of the tale, he sensed a waiting revelation that could explain why they remained apart although they loved each other. Why she had not at once accepted his proposal of marriage. And why she might never accept it.

The revelation was so elusive, however, that he might as well have been a fisherman casting a line without either a hook or bait, seeking a fish that never needed to eat.

Eventually he put the book aside and watched the muted TV, which he’d never turned off. Horsemen raced across desert plains, through purple sage, past weather-carved red rocks, under a vastness of sky, furiously firing guns, but without the clatter of hooves or the crack of shots, without a single savage human cry.

He listened to the house, waiting for a footfall, for the rustle of a garment, for the snick of his stolen pistol being cocked, for his name whispered by a voice that he would not recognize but that his heart would know.

He had lived too long with the fear of death to be kept awake by that alone. Eventually he grew sleepy.

He hoped to dream. He had not dreamed in a year. He welcomed even the bad dreams that had plagued him, for the texture they would give to sleep.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The poster in the bookstore window featured a photo of Samantha and the jacket of her novel. A headline announced that she would be signing copies from noon until two o’clock, this date.

Ryan had noticed the sign days ago. On seeing it, he thought he should not come here, but he knew he would.

Now he carried with him the copy that he purchased on the day the novel first appeared on store shelves. He wanted more than a signature.

Since he’d been here the last time, a smaller poster had been added beside the first: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

He had not known that the book was such a success.

A sudden set of emotions swelled through him, not one after another, but every wave at once. He was proud of her, so proud he felt like buttonholing passersby to assure them that she was unique and kind and worthy of success, but also pierced by regret that he had not been with her when she heard the news or when she got her first good review, and twisted by a guilt that he could not name, yet he also caught a wave that seemed more like happiness than anything he had felt in a long time.

Under the bestseller announcement, the smaller poster featured a reproduction of the most recent Sunday’s New York Times Book Review hardcover bestseller list. Among fifteen titles, the ninth had been circled in red. In Sam’s debut appearance on the list, she cracked the top ten.

“Sonofabitch,” he said, “way to go,” and he was grinning. “Way to go, you did it.”

Excitement effervesced in Ryan, and he tried to think of a way-the best way-to memorialize this moment, this triumph. But then he realized that the bestseller list would not be news to Sam, as it was to him, that she had already celebrated this success and no doubt others.

He had come ten minutes before the scheduled conclusion of her signing. Through the store window, he saw a line of people waiting to get to the table at which Samantha sat, and he knew she would stay late, until she signed all their copies.

Even from a distance, the sight of Sam proved that his new heart possessed all the capacity of the old one.

Suddenly concerned that she would glance up and see him with his face pressed to the window, that he would appear pathetic, he turned away from the bookstore.

He considered retreating to his car in the mall parking lot and waiting half an hour before returning. He worried he would miss her.

Here and there on the open-air promenade, benches provided weary shoppers with places to rest between bouts of spending. Enormous terra-cotta pots overflowing with red ivy geraniums flanked the bench on which Ryan sat.

For a few minutes, he tried to read Samantha’s book, but with the prospect of meeting her, he grew too nervous to concentrate. And he had too much respect for her work, even on the third reading-especially because it deserved a third reading-to give it less than his full attention.

Here in the middle of California ’s four-month rainy season, with a new storm predicted to move in overnight, a temporary reprieve from miserable weather had been granted. A transparent sky, as bright and smooth as glass, cast reflections of silver sunshine on the southern coast.

Ryan watched small birds policing a restaurant patio for crumbs, numerous breeds of dogs on leashes and each one grinning with delight at every sight and scent, a tandem stroller with two pink babies in crocheted yellow tams and yellow-and-blue suits and yellow booties with blue pompons on the toes.

Putting aside for the moment the troubles of the last two days, he was glad for life, and he tried not to worry about how much more-or little-of it might be coming to him.

At 2:40, Samantha stepped out of the bookstore in the company of a cheerful-seeming woman in red shoes and a tartan-plaid dress, with jubilant masses of bouncing chestnut-brown curls and a way with extravagant gestures that, from a distance, made her appear to be declaiming Shakespeare.

Ryan’s courage sank at the prospect of approaching Sam when she was in the company of a publicity agent or a publisher’s rep. But evidently, the gesticulating woman was the bookstore manager, or at least a clerk, for after shaking Sam’s hand, clapping her twice on the shoulder, and seeming to pretend for a moment to whirl a lasso above her head, she went back inside.

Not yet having seen Ryan, Sam walked in his direction, digging in her purse for something, perhaps car keys.

She wore an exquisitely tailored black pantsuit and white blouse with black piping. Trim, lithe, fashionable, she moved with the brisk confidence that would have identified her if he had unexpectedly seen her at a distance in the street.

Approaching her, he forgot every opening line he had practiced and could say only, “Sam,” and she looked up as her right hand came out of the purse with a bristling bunch of keys.

They had not seen each other in more than ten months and had not spoken in seven.

He did not know what her reaction would be, and he was prepared for a strained smile or a pained grimace, a few impatient words and a brisk dismissal.

Instead, he saw something in her eyes that hurt him more deeply than would have anger or loathing. Although it might not quite be pity with which she regarded him, it was close.

He was grateful for her smile. As lovely as it was, however, it had an unmistakable melancholy aspect. “Ryan.”

“Hello, Sam.”

“Look at you. How are you doing?”

“I’m all right. I feel good.”

She said, “You look like always.”

“Not if you could see the humongous scar,” he assured her, tapping his chest. He realized at once that he had said the wrong thing, so he quickly added, “Congratulations on the book.”

She ducked her head almost shyly. “All I’ve proved so far is I’m at least a one-hit wonder.”

“Not you. You’ve got the right stuff, Sam. You’re working on a second, aren’t you?”

“Sure. Yeah.” She shrugged. “But you never know.”

“Hey, number nine on the list.”

“We’ve learned it rises to seven next week.”

“That’s wonderful. You’ll go to the top.”

She shook her head. “John Grisham doesn’t have anything to worry about.”

Holding up the copy he had brought with him, he said, “I’ve read it twice. I’m reading it again. I knew it would be good, Samantha, but I didn’t expect it to be such-”

As he reached for words of praise, he discovered only surfing lingo would be adequate to express his admiration.

“-such a fully macking behemoth, pure rolling thunder.”

The melancholy in her smile remained in her soft laugh. “We’ll have to quote that on the paperback.”

Although he yearned to put his arms around her, he restrained himself, unwilling to risk that she would stiffen in the embrace or shrink from him.

Trying for a smaller grace, indicating the bench flanked by ivy geraniums, he said, “Could we sit for a few minutes? I’d like to talk to you about it.”

He expected her to plead an imminent appointment, but she said, “Sure. The sun is so nice.”

On the bench, they sat angled toward each other and, riffling the pages of the novel, he said, “You never showed me this in progress, so I never could have anticipated…”

“I never share what I’m writing while I’m writing it. Not with anyone. I wish I could. It’s a lonely process.”

“I’ve been thinking about subtext.”

“Never think about it too much. The magic goes.”

“This book is phyllo pastry,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Totally. Implicit meanings. I’ll never see them all.”

“Feeling them’s enough.”

“Forget the phyllo.”

“It’s a flaky analogy anyway.”

He said, “It’s more like the sea. Thermal strata that descend forever, schooling sunfish in this one, and under the sunfish are clouds of luminescent plankton, under the plankton krill, and on and on, light playing down through the layers but shadows rising. And down there somewhere there’s something of you, a mysterious other you. I mean…another side of you, a quality I never recognized.”

She did not at once respond, and he thought that somehow he had offended her or had sounded so jejune that she was embarrassed for him, but then she said, “What quality?”

“I don’t know. I can’t get my mind around it yet. But I have this feeling that when I do, when I understand that part of you…I’ll know why you couldn’t accept my proposal.”

She regarded him with such tenderness that he could hardly bear the weight of it.

“Sam,” he pressed, “is what I feel possible? Is there something in this book that will tell me what it was I didn’t have that you needed most?”

“I suppose there could be. There is. Though I didn’t write it to enlighten you.”

“I understand.”

“But inevitably, I’m in it. All of me, down there under the luminescent plankton.”

The melancholy of her smile was a deeper sorrow than before.

He glanced around, wondering if passersby were alert to the small drama on this bench. Sam was already something of a literary celebrity, and he did not want to discomfit her by making any kind of scene.

The shoppers hurried past unaware, self-amused children giggled, young couples hand-in-hand drifted by in mutual infatuation, and only an Irish setter on a leash looked alertly at Ryan and Sam as though catching the scent of distress, but it was pulled along by a man in khaki shorts and Birkenstocks.

“Sam, you know, I wish you’d just tell me what it was I didn’t have.”

“During all the time we were together, I tried to tell you.”

He frowned. “Was I that dense?”

With the gentlest regret, she said, “It’s not a thing you discuss like halitosis or table manners, Ryan. It’s not a thing you can acquire overnight just because you know I need it. And the worst would be to fake it because you think it’s wanted.”

“So how was I supposed to know what it was, what you needed-by subtext?”

“Yes. By subtext. The implicit meaning of how I lived my life, what I felt, what mattered to me.”

“Sam, I’m lost.”

Revealing a pain at which her melancholy had only hinted, she said, “Sweetie, I know. I know you are, I know, and it breaks my heart.”

He risked reaching out to her, and she took his hand, for which his gratitude was too great to be expressed.

“Sam, if I read the book enough to get it, to understand what you needed that I didn’t have, and if I can be that for you, whatever it is, can we try again?”

She gripped his hand tightly, as though she wanted to hold fast to him forever. Nevertheless, she said, “It’s too late, Ryan. I wish it weren’t, but it is.”

“Is there…someone else?”

“No. There hasn’t been, not a single date this whole year, and I’ve been fine alone, I didn’t want anything else. Maybe one day there will be someone. I don’t know.”

“But you loved me. I know you did. You can’t just stop loving someone from one day to the next.”

“I never stopped,” she said.

Those three words, with such potential to exhilarate him, instead disheartened because her voice conveyed with them a quiet yet intense grief, an anguish, with which wives spoke of their recently deceased husbands, for whom their love would henceforth be unrequited.

“I love you,” she said. “But I can’t be in love with you.”

Frustrated, he said, “You’re parsing words.”

“I’m not. There’s a difference.”

“Not enough to matter.”

“Everything matters, Ryan. Everything.”

“Please tell me what I’ve done.”

She looked stricken. “No. Oh, God, no.”

Her reaction seemed out of proportion to his question, which after all was just another way of asking what she needed that he had not recognized.

The sharp emotion of her response implied that they were at the hard point on which the lever of their relationship was balanced, the point on which it had turned from light to dark, from hope to hopelessness.

Designing software, running a business, you learned to recognize lever-point moments, to bear down on them and by bearing down to lift the whole enterprise over an impediment and swing it toward success.

“Please tell me,” Ryan pressed. “Tell me what I’ve done.”

Her hand tightened on his so fiercely that her grip hurt him and her fingernails gouged almost to the point of drawing blood.

“Love you and yet talk about it? Face to face? Impossible.”

“But if you love me, you want to get past this as much as I do.”

“There is no getting past it.”

“We will get past it,” he insisted.

“I don’t want to destroy everything.”

“Destroy what? What’s left if we don’t try?”

“The year we had together when so much was right.”

“That can’t be destroyed, Sam.”

“Oh, yes, it can. By talking about this.”

“But if we just-”

“And nothing to be gained now. Nothing to be set right by words. Nothing to be prevented.”

He opened his mouth to speak.

She stopped him before his inhalation escaped him as another breath of pleading words. “No. Let me keep loving you. And let me remember the time when I was in love with you, let me have that forever.”

Because Ryan was so abashed at the purity of her passion, at the realization that she had loved him more entirely than he perhaps had the capacity to understand, and because still he did not know what need he had failed to fill, what mistake he had made, he could reply with only two words.

Once more, she stopped him before he could speak. “Don’t say you’re lost. Don’t say it again.” Her eyes were lustrous with grief and her voice tremulous. “It’s true. I accept it’s true, and that’s why I can’t bear to hear it again. I just can’t, Winky.”

She pulled her hand from his, not angrily but with a quiet desperation, got to her feet, hesitated as if she might change her mind and sit again, but then turned and walked away.

For fear of chasing after her, Ryan remained on the bench, in the glassy sunshine, the red ivy geraniums as colorful as a Tiffany lampshade, the shop windows a blur of glare, the arcs of water in a fountain shimmering like Steuben and splashing into the receiving pool with a bright, brittle, shattering sound.

Eventually he noticed the young Asian woman standing twenty feet away, in front of the bookstore. She appeared to be watching him, and must have seen him with Samantha.

She held in both hands perhaps half a dozen stems of pale-pink lilies rising from a cone of florist-shop cellophane tied with a blue ribbon.

Concerned that she might be an admirer of Samantha’s book and, intrigued by his tête-à-tête with the author, might approach him to discuss the novel, Ryan rose from the bench. He could only tell this woman that he was lost, and she, too, would be unable to help him.

THIRTY-NINE

The winters of the past half decade had been among the chilliest on record for California, though temperatures that made a local reach for a sweater might seem like picnic weather to anyone in Maine or Michigan. With two hours of unseasonably balmy daylight remaining, Saturday crowds strolled the sprawling open-air mall, more to bask in the sun and to people-watch than to shop.

At one time, these multitudes would have energized Ryan, and he would have found the scene engaging. Now they made him edgy.

Recuperation from transplant surgery had required a period of calm and quiet. Thereafter, he avoided crowds, out of concern his immunosuppressant drugs would make him vulnerable to colds and flu that might be hard to shake. Eventually he spent more time at home not because of medical necessity but because he had come for the time being to prefer solitary pursuits.

This throng did not push or jostle, but wandered the mall maze at a relaxed pace. Yet these people seemed like crushing legions, a buzzing swarm, an alien species that would sweep him along to some inescapable hive. As he made his way toward the parking lot, he resisted a plein-air claustrophobia that, had he surrendered to it, would have sent him running pell-mell for open space.

Crammed with vehicles, the enormous parking lot was largely still and quiet. By this tail-end of the afternoon, most people who intended to come to the mall had already arrived; and with two hours of window-shopping weather remaining, few were ready to go home.

As he found the row in which he had parked, as he walked toward the farther end where he had left his deuce coupe, Ryan dwelt on the look in Samantha’s eyes. He thought she pitied him, but now in his misery, he suspected it had been something even worse than pity.

Pity is pain felt at seeing the distress of others, joined with a desire to help. But Samantha could not help him; she made it clear that she could not. What he had seen in her eyes seemed more like commiseration, which might be as tender as pity, but was a compassion for the hopeless, for those who could not be reached or relieved.

The sun oppressed him, the glare of windshields, the heat rising from parked cars, the scent of tar wafting up from the hot blacktop, and he wanted to be home in the cool of the solarium.

“Hello,” said a voice behind him. “Hello, hello.”

He turned to discover the Asian woman with the bouquet of pale-pink lilies. She was in her twenties, petite, strikingly pretty, with long glossy black hair, not fully Asian but Eurasian, with celadon eyes.

“You know her, you know the author,” she said, her English without accent.

If he was too short with her, his rudeness would reflect on Sam, so he said, “Yes. I know her. Used to know her.”

“She is a very good writer, so talented.”

“Yes, she certainly is. I wish I had her talent.”

“So compassionate,” the woman said, stepping closer and with her glance indicating the book he carried.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, “but I’m afraid I have to be somewhere, I’m late.”

“A remarkable book, full of such insights.”

“Yes, it is, but I’m late.”

Holding the lilies with both hands, she thrust them toward him. “Here. I can see the sorrow between you and her, you need these more than I do.”

Startled, he said, “Oh, no, I can’t take them.”

“Please do, you must,” she said, pushing them against his chest with such insistence that one heavy bloom broke off its stem and fell to the blacktop.

With pungent pollen from the stamens abrasive in his nostrils, nonplussed, Ryan said, “No, see, I’m not going anywhere that I’ll be able to put them in water.”

“Here, here, you must,” she said, and if he had not taken the crackling cellophane cone in his free hand, she would have let the flowers fall to the ground.

Although he had accepted the lilies, he tried to pass them back to her.

He felt suddenly that he had been scorched, a line of fire searing along his left side. An instant later a sharper pain followed the hot shock of laceration-and only then he saw the switchblade knife.

As the lilies and the book dropped from Ryan’s hands, the woman said, “I can kill you any time I want.”

Stunned, clutching at his wound, Ryan collapsed back against a Ford Explorer.

She turned and walked away at a brisk pace toward the parallel row of cars, but she did not run.

The blade had been so sharp, it slit his shirt without pulling the threads, as cleanly as a straight razor slashing through one sheet of newspaper.

Reaching cross-body, right hand slick with blood, he frantically traced the wound. It was not ragged enough to be a laceration, more like an incision, about four inches long, too shallow to require stitches, not mortal, just a warning cut, but deep enough to have discernible lips.

He looked up and saw that, as petite as she was, she would swiftly disappear through the crowded rows of cars, perhaps in one of which she would escape.

Shock had silenced him. Now that he thought to shout for help, he could summon only a wheeze.

Looking for someone to call to his aid, Ryan surveyed the surrounding lot. In the distance, two cars moved away along the trunk road from which the rows of parking spaces branched. He saw three people on foot, but none nearby.

The woman with the knife vanished among the vehicles, as if she liquefied into the glass glare, into the heat rising off blacktop.

Ryan possessed his full voice now, but only cursed quietly, having had time for second thoughts about making a public spectacle of himself. Anyway, she was gone, beyond finding.

He crushed a few lilies underfoot, without intention, as he made his way to the dropped book, which he plucked off the pavement with his clean hand.

At his ’32 Ford coupe, perspiration dripped off his brow onto the trunk lid as he fumbled in a pants pocket for his keys. He had broken out in a sweat that had nothing to do with the warm day.

In the trunk he kept a tool kit for road repairs. With it were a moving blanket, a few clean chamois cloths, a roll of paper towels, and bottled water, among other items.

He stuffed a chamois through the tear in his shirt and pressed it to the wound, clutching his arm to his side to hold the cloth in place.

After he washed his bloody hand with bottled water, he half opened the folded moving blanket and draped it over the driver’s seat.

A Chevy Tahoe cruised along the parking lane, but Ryan didn’t hail the driver. He wanted only to get out of there and home.

He heard her voice in memory: I can kill you any time I want.

Having been excited by the drawing of his blood, maybe she would decide she needed to come back and kill him now.

The Ford single overhead cam 427, built solely for racing, had enough torque to rock the car as it idled. Behind the engine was a Ford C-6 transmission with 2,500-rpm stall converter.

Leaving the parking lot, Ryan was tempted to take the streets as if they were the race lanes of a Grand Prix, but he stayed at the posted speed limits, loath to be pulled over by the police.

The car was not a classic but a hot rod, totally customized, and Ryan had hands-free phone technology aboard. His cell rang, and even in his current state of mind, he automatically accepted the call. “Hello.”

The woman who had slashed him said, “How is the pain?”

“What do you want?”

“Do you never listen?”

“What do you want?”

“How could I make it any clearer?”

“Who are you?”

“I am the voice of the lilies.”

Angrily, he said, “Make sense.”

“They toil not, neither do they spin.”

“I said sense, not nonsense. Is Lee there? Is Kay?”

“The Tings?” She laughed softly. “Do you think this is about them?”

“You know them, huh? Yeah, you know them.”

“I know everything about you, who you fire and who you use.”

“I gave them two years’ severance. I treated them well.”

“You think this has to do with the Tings because my eyes are slanted like theirs? It has nothing to do with them.”

“Then tell me what this is about.”

“You know what it’s about. You know.”

“If I knew, you wouldn’t have gotten close enough to cut me.”

A red traffic light forced him to stop. The car rocked, and under the blood-soaked chamois, the stinging incision pulsed in time with the idling engine.

“Are you really so stupid?” she asked.

“I have a right to know.”

“You have a right to die,” she said.

He thought at once of Spencer Barghest in Las Vegas and the collection of preserved cadavers. But he had never found a connection between Dr. Death and anything that happened sixteen months previous.

“I’m not stupid,” he said. “I know you want something. Everyone wants something. I have money, a lot of it. I can give you anything you want.”

“If not stupid,” she said, “then grotesquely ignorant. At best, grotesquely ignorant.”

“Tell me what you want,” he insisted.

“Your heart belongs to me. I want it back.”

The irrationality of her demand left Ryan unable to respond.

“Your heart. Your heart belongs to me,” the woman repeated, and she began to cry.

As he listened to her weeping, Ryan suspected that reason would not save him from her, that she was insane and driven by an obsession that he could never understand.

“Your heart belongs to me.”

“All right,” he replied softly, wanting to calm her.

“To me, to me. It is my heart, my precious heart, and I want it back.”

She hung up.

A horn sounded behind him. The traffic light had changed from red to green.

Instead of pressing on, Ryan pulled to the side of the road and put the car in park.

Using the *69 function, he tried to ring back the weeping woman. Eventually the attempted call brought only a recorded phone-company message requesting that he either hang up or key in a number.

When he had a break in traffic, Ryan drove back into the street.

The sky was high and clear, an inverted empty bowl, but the forecast called for rain late Sunday morning, continuing until at least Monday afternoon. When the bowl was full and spilling, she would come. In the dark and rain, hooded, she would come, and like a ghost, she would not be kept out by locks.

FORTY

Ryan parked the deuce coupe and got out, relieved to find the garage deserted. Standing at the open car door, he withdrew the blood-soaked chamois from inside his shirt, dropped it on the quilted blanket that protected the driver’s seat, and pressed a clean cloth over the wound.

Quickly, he folded the bloody chamois into the blanket, held the blanket under his left arm, against his side, and went into the house. He rode the elevator to the top floor and reached the refuge of the master suite without encountering anyone.

He put the blanket aside, intending to bag it later and throw it in the trash.

In the bathroom, he washed the wound with alcohol. Subsequently he applied iodine.

He almost relished the stinging. The pain cleared his head.

Because the cut was shallow, a thick styptic cream stopped the bleeding. After a while, he gently wiped the excess cream away and spread on Neosporin.

The rote task of dressing the wound both focused him on his peril and freed his mind to think through what must happen next.

To the Neosporin, he stuck thin gauze pads. Once he had applied adhesive tape at right angles to the incision, to help keep the lips of it together, he ran longer strips parallel to the wound, to secure the shorter lengths of tape.

The pain had diminished to a faint throbbing.

He changed into soft black jeans and a black sweater-shirt with a spread collar.

The master-retreat bar included a little wine storage. He opened a ten-year-old bottle of Opus One and filled a Riedel glass almost to the brim.

Employing the intercom, he informed Mrs. Amory that he would turn down the bed himself this evening and that he would take dinner in the master suite. He wanted steak, and he asked that the food-service cart be left on the penthouse landing at seven o’clock.

At a quarter till five, he called his best number for Dr. Dougal Hobb in Beverly Hills. On a weekend, he expected to get a physicians’ service, which he did. He left his name and number and stressed that he was a transplant patient with an emergency situation.

Sitting at the amboina-wood desk, he switched on the plasma TV in the entertainment center and muted the sound, staring at 1930s gangsters firing noiseless machine guns from silent black cars that glided around sharp corners without the bark of brakes or rubber.

Having drunk a third of the wine in the glass, he held his right hand in front of his face. It hardly trembled anymore.

He changed channels and watched an uncharacteristically taci-turn Russell Crowe captain a soundless sailing ship through a furious but silent storm.

Eleven minutes after Ryan had spoken to the physicians’ service, Dr. Hobb returned his call.

“I’m sorry if I alarmed you, Doctor. There’s no physical crisis. But it’s no less important that you help me with something.”

As concerned as ever, with no indication of ill temper, Hobb said, “I’m always on call, Ryan. Never hesitate if you need me. As I warned you, no matter how well the recovery goes, emotional problems can develop suddenly.”

“I wish it were that simple.”

“The phone numbers of the therapists I gave you a year ago are still current, but if you’ve misplaced them-”

“This isn’t an emotional problem, Doctor. This is…I don’t know what to call it.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“I’d rather not right now. But here’s the thing-I’ve got to know who was the donor of my heart.”

“But you do know, Ryan. A schoolteacher who suffered massive head trauma in an accident.”

“Yeah, I know that much. She was twenty-six, would be twenty-seven now, going on twenty-eight. But I need a good photograph of her.”

For a beat, Hobb was as silent as Russell Crowe’s ship when it plowed through hushed seas so terrible that sailors were lashed to their duty stations to avoid being washed overboard.

Then the surgeon said, “Ryan, the best man on that list of therapists is Sidney -”

“No therapist, Dr. Hobb. A photo.”

“But really-”

“A photo and a name, Dr. Hobb. Please. This is so important.”

“Ryan, some families prefer the recipients of their loved one’s organs to know who gave them the gift of life.”

“That’s all I want.”

“But many other families prefer that they-and the donor-remain anonymous. They want no thanks, and their grief is private.”

“I understand, Doctor. And in most cases I would respect that position. But this is an extraordinary situation.”

“With all due respect, it’s unreasonable to-”

“I’m in a position where I can’t take no for an answer. I really can’t. I just can’t.”

“Ryan, I’m the surgeon who removed her heart and transplanted it to you, and even I’m not privy to her name. The family wants its privacy.”

“Somebody in the medical system knows her name and can find her next of kin. I just want a chance to ask the family to change their minds.”

“Perhaps it was the donor’s explicit condition that her name not be revealed. The family may feel morally powerless to override the wishes of the deceased.”

Ryan took a deep breath. “Not to be indelicate, Doctor, but with the jet fees and medical expenses, I’ve spent a million six hundred thousand, and I’ll need expensive follow-up care all my life.”

“Ryan, this is awkward. And not like you.”

“No, wait. Please understand. Every penny this cost me was well spent, no charge was excessive. I’m alive, after all. I’m just trying to put this in perspective. With all the costs, no insurance, I’d still like to offer five hundred thousand to her family if they’ll provide her photo and her name.”

“My God,” Hobb said.

“They may be offended,” Ryan said. “I think you are. They may tell me to go to hell. Or you will. But it’s not that I think I can buy anything I want. It’s just…I’m in a corner. I’ll be grateful to anyone who can help me, who has the decency and mercy to help me.”

Dougal Hobb, the storm-tossed sailing ship, and Ryan shared a long silence, as if the surgeon were mentally cutting open the situation to explore it further.

Then Hobb said, “I could try to help you, Ryan. But I can’t fly blind. If I knew at least something about your problem…”

Ryan reached for an explanation with which the physician might not be able to sympathize but to which he might accord a higher value than the absolute privacy of the donor’s family.

“Call it a spiritual crisis, Doctor. That she died and I lived, though she was certainly a better person than I am. I know myself well enough to be sure of that. And so it haunts me. I’m not able to sleep. I’m exhausted. I need to…to be able to properly honor her.”

After another incisive silence, the surgeon said, “You don’t mean to honor her in a public way.”

“No, sir. I don’t. The media never got wind of my illness, the transplant. I don’t want my health problems to be public knowledge.”

“You mean honor her…say, as a Catholic might honor someone by having a Mass said for her.”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.”

“Are you a Catholic, Ryan?”

“No, Doctor. But that’s the kind of thing I mean.”

“There’s someone I could talk to,” Hobb acknowledged. “He has the full file on the donor. He could put the question before them. Before the family.”

“I would be grateful. You can’t know how grateful.”

“They might be willing to provide a photograph. Even a first name. But if the family doesn’t want you to have her last name or contact information for them, would you be satisfied?”

“The photo would be enormously…comforting. Anything they can do for me. I’d be grateful for anything.”

“This is highly unusual,” Hobb said. “But I must admit it’s happened before. And we resolved it that time. It all depends on the family.”

The woman with the lilies wanted to torment Ryan, to carve his nerves to ribbons before she put a sharp blade through his heart. Before further violence, she would most likely give him at least a day to consider the shallow incision in his side, to anticipate his next wound.

Night and rain were her allies. Twenty-four hours from now, she would have the collaboration of both.

“One more thing, Doctor. The photo and whatever else the family will share-I need it as soon as possible. Twelve hours or sooner would be ideal.”

If Dougal Hobb whetted his scalpel on those words, he decided not to cut with it. After a silence, he said only, “Spiritual crises often last years, even a lifetime. There’s usually not an urgency about them.”

“This one is different,” Ryan said. “Thank you for your help and your thoughtfulness, Doctor.”

FORTY-ONE

The filet mignon cut like butter.

As he ate, Ryan wondered about the woman’s expertise with the switchblade. She maneuvered him with the lilies, inflicting precisely the wound she intended.

Had she cut deeper, he would have needed medical assistance. She sliced shallow enough to leave him with the option of treating the wound himself-and evidently expected that he would.

Although she might prove herself a killer when the time came, she remained for now a death tease. She wanted this game to last, inflicting the maximum psychological torture before gutting him-if gutting was the only thing she had in mind.

The confidence and delicacy with which she wielded the knife might have been learned on the street, but Ryan suspected she was not anything as common as a gang girl. The bloody business in the shopping-mall parking lot had been not butchery but switchblade ballet.

Unsettling as the encounter had been, he was glad for it.

As recently as the previous evening, he had required himself to consider the possibility that these new incidents-the hooded watcher in the rain of whom no security-camera proof existed, the tiny candy hearts and the inscribed gold heart pendant, which were no longer in his possession-were delusional, as the strange events more than a year earlier had evidently been delusional, and were related to his current battery of twenty-eight medications.

He had rejected that possibility, which of course had been his subjective and perhaps unreliable opinion. The wound in his left side counted as objective proof sufficient to settle the issue.

After dinner, he returned the food-service cart, with the dirty dishes, to the landing, and buzzed Mrs. Amory to retrieve it.

For an hour, he nursed a second glass of Opus One and paged through Samantha’s novel, spot-reading passages, as other men in a crisis might open the Bible at random and read verses in the hope of receiving divine guidance.

At nine o’clock, he went to the Crestron panel embedded in the wall of the master-suite foyer and accessed the security cameras. He toured all the interior hallways, and when he found every one of them dark, he assumed the Amorys had retired to their private quarters for the night.

On the lowest floor of the house, in the service hall that led to the laundry, he unlocked the storage room that he had visited the previous evening, and quietly closed the door behind him. He unlocked the tall metal cabinet that contained the security-camera recorders, and he switched on the monitor.

Back then, when he had first reviewed the recording that should have captured the hooded figure in the rain, the phantom’s absence rattled him. At that time, of course, he had not yet been confronted by a switchblade diva, and still had reason to wonder if his outré experiences owed anything to pharmaceuticals.

In that frame of mind, he had not been a sufficiently analytical observer of the video. He’d been looking for what was manifestly not there, when perhaps he should have been studying what was to be seen.

Now he selected the first south-lawn camera recording taken at twilight, more than forty-eight hours earlier. He watched it in real time, because a lot of details flew past unnoticed in a fast-forward replay.

Again the drizzle, the slithering shapes of fog, the deodars, and the fading light provided an atmospheric backdrop against which no hooded figure appeared, though Ryan had seen it twice that night.

Something about the lazy coiling and twining of the serpentine bands of fog struck him as curious. When he reversed the twilight to watch it be imposed again upon the day, a moment came when the fog twitched. Following the twitch, the meandering mist repeated the exact movement it had made moments earlier.

He reversed a minute, pushed PLAY, and saw that a piece of the recording had been cloned to fill in for something deleted. Further in the twilight, a second piece of cloned video occurred-when the hooded intruder should have walked out of the deodars.

In the lower-right corner of the screen, accompanying the duplicated video, the timer flashed the seconds in continuous sequence, without repeating the count that went with the original segment. The hacker who had done this was a wizard with the system and a demon for detail.

For a while, Ryan reran the cloned bits-the first forty-nine seconds long, the second thirty-one seconds-thinking through the implications of this discovery.

A day had passed between the time he saw the hooded intruder and when he first reviewed the security-camera video. Someone could have tampered with it in the interim.

But last night, before reviewing the recording of this twilight, he had raced down here in pajamas and bathrobe to see who might have entered and departed the master suite to put the heart pendant on his pillow. The deletion of that person from the penthouse-landing video and the replacement of the incriminating segment with cloned images had to have been done immediately in the wake of action, as the intruder was still on the move.

This suggested that the woman with the lilies worked with at least one partner. Assuming she was the one who repeatedly violated the master suite, her backup had been tied in by computer to the security system-most likely from somewhere inside the house-busily deleting her image from video as soon as she passed out of frame.

She could no longer be considered a psycho loner. The conspiracy theory, previously a sieve, suddenly held water.

More important, the capabilities of those aligned against Ryan were impressive, and suggested depth of support.

Finally he possessed evidence. Without witnesses to the attack, he was unable to prove that the cut in his side hadn’t happened in an accident. But cloned images on a security recording couldn’t be accidental.

This was not much evidence by police standards. But he had no intention of turning to the police until he knew the motives of the conspirators-and perhaps not even then.

The woman with the switchblade claimed to want him dead, and he believed that her intention was indeed eventually to kill him. Her motive, however, remained a mystery.

The Wilson Mott operative, Cathy Sienna, had listed five roots of violence: lust, envy, anger, avarice, vengeance. She had referred to them as failings rather than motives, but they were motives all right. As with anyone intent on murder, more than one might apply.

As Ryan was about to switch off the monitor, the image on the screen flickered and changed. Instead of a view from any security camera inside or outside the house, there appeared a glistening, viscous mass, red and marbled and blue-veined and throbbing, like a menace discovered inside a cracked-open meteor in an old science-fiction movie.

For an instant Ryan had no idea what the thing might be, and then he realized this was video of a beating human heart and its attendant structures, inside an open human chest.

Although he did not touch the remote control, the screen divided into quadrants representing cameras at different locations around the estate-presenting the same gruesome video. A moment later, four other camera views flashed on the screen, all featuring the throbbing heart, and then four more, and four more…

This was not a real-time event, not a mutilation occurring on the estate, but instead an educational film of open-heart surgery. The surgeon’s hands entered the shot, and the camera pulled back to show the surgical team.

The security system cycled through all the cameras, and then again, faster and still faster, until the images passed in such a frenzy that the action in the documentary could not be followed. The monitor went dark.

From the racked array of magnetic-disk recorders in the cabinet arose the distress cries of electronics in death throes. Then silence-and on every piece of equipment, the indicator lights went dark.

Ryan didn’t need to call in tech support to know that the system had crashed, that the standard thirty days of preserved recordings had been wiped, and that he no longer possessed evidence of security-video tampering.

FORTY-TWO

In the master retreat, Ryan pulled open a desk drawer, fingered through folders in a hanging file, and located the one containing the photo of Teresa Reach, which he had removed from the album in Spencer Barghest’s study.

Prior to the diagnosis of cardiomyopathy that he had received from Dr. Gupta almost sixteen months earlier, he had been convinced that in this photograph he would discover a clue that would lead him to an explanation of the strange events occurring at that time.

Ultimately his obsessive analysis of the photo revealed nothing useful. Eventually he decided there had been no conspiracy against him, no poisoning, only innocent coincidences that seemed mysterious and meaningful because of his suspicious nature and because ill health affected his clarity of mind.

Perhaps the time had come to look at Teresa again.

He no longer had the workstation that Mott had provided for the enhancement and analysis of the photograph. His unassisted eyes would have to be enough.

As he sat at the desk, the phone rang: his most private line. Caller ID provided no identity.

When he picked up the handset, the woman with the lilies said, “Review the activity in your checking account. You’ll discover you made a hundred-thousand-dollar wire transfer as a donation for cardiovascular research. I imagine a financial loss is to you more painful than a knife wound.”

Instead of playing her game, he said, “Who are you people?”

“There are not people. There is me.”

“Liar. You have institutional capabilities. Big backup.”

“Whoever I am, you’re dead.”

“Not yet,” he said, and hung up.

Be to do. Not: Be to be done to. Seize the moment. Act, don’t react. Catch the wave, shoot the curl, skeg it, nail it, don’t be nailed, exist to live, never exist to exist. Existence is an entrance, not an exit. To be or not to be is not the question.

Ryan toured the great house, turning lights on as he went, turning them off in his wake, seeing little of the rooms through which he roamed, seeing instead the place that he had come from: the roaches crawling and the roaches of another kind pinched in an ashtray, the posters of Katmandu and Khartoum, journeys never made because Dad’s daily head trips to more exotic realms take the travel money, take the rent money, so sometimes a trip to Vegas in the van, with Mom and the man, whatever man at the moment might be the man that her main man can never be, the high spirits on the eastward drive, the hard light of the vast desert and the light talk of big money, betting systems and card-counting schemes, bottles of Dos Equis to pass the miles, the groping in the front seat while in the back of the van you pretend deafness, pretend sleep, pretend death, pretend never to have been born; sometimes being left alone in casino parking lots at night, hiding in the back of the van because when you sit up front where you can be seen, strange people rap on the window and sweet-talk you-vampires, you figure-and try to get you to unlock the door, and then the cheap motel, always the same cheap motel, where you wait in the van while Mom and the man of the moment spend “quality time” together; a day later or two, the drive westward, the desperate talk about money, the bitter accusations, the rest stop where one of them hits her and she hits back, and you try to stop it, but you’re small and weak, and then he does something to her right there in the open, and you have to walk away, away into the hot dry land, walk toward home, you can’t watch, but you can’t walk hundreds of miles, so when they pull up beside you in the van, you have to get in the back, and they’re up front laughing, like nothing happened, and then it’s all the way home, the desert without beauty in this direction, the Mojave a vast dirty ashtray, Mom and the man talking about the next time, scoring big the next time, refine the system, practice the card counting, all the way home to Dad and Katmandu and Khartoum and the roaches and the roaches and the next man of the moment.

When he had walked the house twice, Ryan returned to the master suite, where he did not bother to lock the door.

Certain that he would be tormented considerably more before the next attack came, he did not put a knife under his pillow.

Dr. Hobb had advised him to drink only sparingly because alcohol might interfere with the absorption and diminish the effectiveness of some of his twenty-eight medications. He poured a third glass of Opus One.

Ryan sat in bed with Samantha’s book. He fell asleep while reading, and he dreamed of the events of her novel, relived vivid moments of the story.

These were strange dreams because he never appeared in the cast, and because all through the night he expected each scene to shimmer as if it were a reflection on water, to shimmer and to part as a previously hidden presence rose out of the depths of subtext and turned upon him a blank and pitiless stare.

At 8:14 he was awakened by a call from Dr. Dougal Hobb. The surgeon had already received from the family an e-mailed photograph of their daughter, whose heart now beat in Ryan’s breast.

“As I foresaw, they were willing to give you her first name, as well, but not the family name,” Hobb said. “And after I explained that you were anguished, having what you described as a spiritual crisis, they refused compensation.”

“That’s…unexpected,” Ryan said. “I’m grateful.”

“They’re good people, Ryan. Good, decent people. Which is why you have to swear to me you will not write or speak publicly about this poor girl, using either the photo or her name. As good as these people are, I would nevertheless not be surprised-and wouldn’t blame them-if they sued you for violation of their privacy.”

“The photo, her name-they’re just for me,” Ryan assured him.

“I am e-mailing everything to you as we speak.”

“And, Doctor…thank you for taking my request to heart and acting on it so quickly.”

Instead of going down to his study on the second floor, Ryan used the laptop and the compact printer in the master suite to open and print out the surgeon’s e-mail.

Except for a slightly different hair style, the heart donor proved to be a dead ringer for the woman with the switchblade.

Her name had been Lily.

FORTY-THREE

Her raised chin, her set mouth, her forthright gaze suggested more than mere confidence, perhaps defiance.

Sitting at the desk in the retreat, studying the photo of Lily, Ryan knew this must be the twin of the woman who assaulted him.

I am the voice of the lilies.

He put the photo of Lily X beside the picture of Teresa Reach. The black-haired Eurasian beauty, the golden-haired beauty, the first vibrantly alive in the photo but dead now, the second dead even when photographed, both victims of automobile accidents, both having been diagnosed as brain-dead, one assisted into death by Spencer Barghest, the other by Dr. Hobb when he harvested her heart, each with a twin who survived her.

The longer Ryan considered the two photos, the more uneasy he grew, because it seemed that before him lay a terrible truth that continued to elude him and that in time, when he least expected, would hit him with the power of a tsunami.

Not long after meeting Samantha, Ryan had read a great deal about identical twins. In particular, he recalled that the survivor, separated from an identical by tragedy, often felt unjustified guilt as well as grief.

He wondered if Lily’s twin had been driving the car in which she had suffered the catastrophic head trauma. Her guilt would then be to a degree justified, and her grief intensified.

The longer he compared the photos, the more clearly he recalled how certain he had been, sixteen months ago, that the image of Teresa held the answer to the mysteries then plaguing him. That intuition began to prickle his spine again, the apprehension that she was the key not only to what had happened to him sixteen months earlier but also to everything that was happening now.

Ryan had exhaustively analyzed Teresa’s photo and had found no detail that could be called a clue. Laboriously repeating that analysis was not likely to lead him to any eureka moment.

But perhaps the photo itself did not contain the revelation. Maybe the importance of the photo was who had taken it or where he had found it, or how she had been assisted out of life, by what means and under exactly what circumstances-details that might be contained in Barghest’s written accounts, if they could be found, of the suicides that he had made possible.

At 9:45, Ryan placed a call to Wilson Mott, who as always was pleased to hear from him.

“I’ll be flying to Las Vegas this afternoon,” Ryan said. “The people who worked with me there last year-George Zane and Cathy Sienna-are they available now?”

“Yes, they’re available. But neither of them is based in Nevada. They work out of our Los Angeles office.”

“They can fly with me,” Ryan said.

“I think it’s more appropriate if they don’t use your Learjet. We have our own transport. Besides, if they have to make appointments and preparations for you, they need to be there at least a few hours in advance.”

“Yes, more appropriate. All right. If you recall, the last time I had two appointments.”

“I’ve got the file in front of me,” said Mott. “You had business with two individuals at separate locations.”

“It’s the gentleman that I’ll need to repeat,” Ryan said. “And rather urgently.”

“We’ll do our best,” Mott said.

Ryan hung up.

He put the photos of the two dead women in the manila envelope.

Unbidden, an image came into his mind’s eye: the hospital room in which he had stayed the night before the transplant, the floor and walls and furniture polished not by anyone’s hand but by the effect of the sedative he had been given, even the shadows glossy, Wally Dunnaman at the window, the chrome-yellow night of the city beyond, and the air shivering with the crash of bells.

Standing in the warm master retreat, beside the elegant amboina desk, Ryan Perry began to tremble, then to shake, and dread overtook him. He asked himself what he dreaded, and he did not know, although he suspected that soon he would be provided with the answer.