Husband

Chapter 29

In the late 1940s, if you owned a car like a Chrysler Windsor, you knew the engine was big because it made a big sound. It had the throb of a bull's heart, low fierce snort and heavy stamp of hooves.

The war was over, you were a survivor, large swaths of Europe lay in ruin, but the homeland was untouched, and you wanted to feel alive. You didn't want a sound-proofed engine compartment. You didn't want noise-control technology. You wanted power, balanced weight, and speed.

The car's dark trunk reverberated with engine knock and rumble transferred along the drive shaft, through the body and the frame. The thrum and stutter of road noise rose and fell in direct relation to the tempo of the turning wheels.

Mitch smelled faint traces of exhaust gases, perhaps from a leak in the muffler, but he was in no danger of being overcome by carbon monoxide. Stronger were the rubbery scent of the mat on which he lay and the acidity of his own fear sweat.

Although as dark as the chamber in his parents' house, this mobile learning room otherwise failed to impose sensory deprivation. Yet one of the greatest lessons of his life was being driven home to him mile by mile.

His father says there is no tao, no natural law we are born to understand. In his materialist view, we should conduct ourselves not according to any code, only according to self-interest.

Rationality is always in a man's self-interest, Daniel says. Therefore, any act that is rational is right and good and

admirable.

Evil does not exist in Daniel's philosophy. Stealing, rape, murder of the innocent — these and other crimes are merely irrational because they put he who commits them in jeopardy of his freedom.

Daniel does acknowledge that the degree of irrationality depends on the criminal's chances of escaping punishment. Therefore, those irrational acts that succeed and have only positive consequences for the perpetrator may be right and admirable, if not good for society.

Thieves, rapists, murderers, and their ilk might benefit from therapy and rehabilitation, or they might not. In either case, Daniel says, they are not evil; they are recovering — or irredeemable — irrationalists, only that and nothing more.

Mitch had thought that these teachings had not penetrated him, that he'd not been singed by the fire of a Daniel Rafferty education. But fire produced fumes; he'd been smoked in his father's fanaticism so long that some of what steeped into him had stayed.

He could see, but he had been blind. He could hear, but he had been deaf.

This day, this night, Mitch had come face-to-face with evil. It was as real as stone.

Although an irrational man should be met with compassion and therapy, an evil man was owed nothing more or less than resistance and retribution, the fury of a righteous justice.

In Julian Campbell's library, when the gunman had produced the handcuffs, Mitch had at once held out his hands. He had not waited for instructions.

If he had not appeared worn down, had not seemed meek and resigned to his fate, they might have cuffed his hands behind him. Reaching the revolver in his ankle holster would have been more difficult; using it with accuracy would have been impossible.

Campbell had even commented on Mitch's weariness, by which he had meant primarily the weariness of mind and heart.

They thought they knew the kind of man he was, and maybe they did. But they didn't know the kind of man he could become when the life of his wife was in the balance.

Amused by his lack of familiarity with the pistol that they had confiscated, they had not imagined he would have a second weapon. Not only good men are disadvantaged by their expectations.

Mitch pulled up the leg of his jeans and retrieved the revolver. He unstrapped the holster and discarded it.

Earlier, he had examined the weapon and had not found a safety. In movies, only some pistols had safeties, never revolvers.

If he lived through the next two days and got Holly back alive, he would never again allow himself to be put in a position where he had to rely on Tinseltown's grasp of reality for his or his family's survival.

When he had first swung open the cylinder, he had discovered five rounds in five chambers, where he expected six.

He would have to score two hits out of five rounds. Direct hits, not just wing shots.

Perhaps one of the gunmen would open the trunk. It would be better if the two were there, giving him the advantage of surprise with both.

Both would have their weapons drawn — or only one. If one, Mitch must be quick enough to target his armed adversary first.

A peaceable man, planning violence, was plagued by thoughts that were not helpful: As a teenager, cursed by the explosions of acne that had left his face a moonscape, the scarred gunman must have suffered much humiliation.

Sympathy for the devil was a kind of masochism at best, a death wish at worst.

For a while, rocking to the rhythms of road and rubber, and of internal combustion, Mitch tried to imagine all the ways that the violence might go down when the trunk lid went up. Then he tried not to imagine.

According to his radiant watch, they traveled more than half an hour and then, slowing, changed from blacktop to an unpaved road. Small stones rattled through the undercarriage, rapped hard against the floor pan.

He smelled dust and licked the alkaline taste of it from his lips, but the air never became foul enough to choke him.

After twelve minutes at an easy speed, on the dirt road, the car came slowly to a stop. The engine idled for half a minute, and then the driver switched it off.

After forty-five minutes of drone and drum, the silence was like a sudden deafness.

One door opened, then the other. They were coming.

Facing the back of the car, Mitch splayed his legs, bracing his feet in opposite corners of the space. He could not sit erect until the lid raised, but he waited with his back partly off the floor of the trunk, as if in the middle of doing a series of stomach crunches at the gym.

The cuffs all but required that he hold the revolver in a two-hand grip, which was probably better anyway.

He didn't hear footsteps, just the gallop of his heart, but then he heard the key in the trunk lock.

Through his mind's eye blinked an image of Jason Osteen being shot in the head, blinked and blinked, repeating like a film loop, Jason slammed by the bullet, skull exploding, slammed by the bullet, skull exploding….

As the lid lifted, Mitch realized that the trunk did not have a convenience light, and he began to sit up, thrusting the revolver forward.

The full-pitcher moon spilled its milk, backlighting the two gunmen.

Mitch's eyes were adapted to absolute blackness, and theirs were not. He sat in darkness, and they stood in moonlight. They thought he was a meek and broken and helpless man, and he was not.

He didn't consciously squeeze off the first shot, but felt the hard recoil and saw the muzzle flash and heard the crash, and then he was aware of squeezing the trigger the second time.

Two point-blank rounds knocked one silhouette down out of the moon-soaked night.

The second silhouette backed away from the car, and Mitch sat all the way up, squeezing off one, two, three more rounds.

The hammer clicked, and there was just the quiet of the moon, and the hammer clicked, and he reminded himself Only five, only five!

He had to get out of the trunk. With no ammunition, he was a fish in a barrel. Out. Out of the trunk.

Chapter 30

Rising too fast, Mitch knocked his head against the lid, almost fell back, but maintained forward momentum. He scrambled out of the trunk.

His left foot came down on solid ground, but he planted his right on the twice-shot man. He staggered, stepped on the body again, and it shifted under him, and he fell.

He rolled away from the gunman, to the verge of the road. He was stopped by a wild hedge of mesquite, which he identified by its oily smell.

He had lost the revolver. It didn't matter. No ammunition.

Around him lay a parched moon-silvered landscape: the narrow dirt road, desert scrub, barren soil, boulders.

Sleek, its ample chrome features lustrous with lunar polish, the Chrysler Windsor seemed strangely futuristic in this primitive land, like a ship meant to sail the stars. The driver had switched off the headlights when he killed the engine.

The gunman on whom Mitch had twice stepped, when exiting the trunk, had not cried out. He had not reared up or clutched at Mitch. He was probably dead.

Maybe the second man had been killed, too. Coming out of the trunk, Mitch had lost track of him.

If one of the last three rounds had found its target, the second man should have been a buffet for vultures on the dirt road behind the car.

The sandy soil of the roadbed was rich in silica. Glass is made from silica, mirrors from glass. The single-lane track offered much higher reflectivity than any surface in the night.

Lying facedown and flat, head cautiously raised, Mitch could see a significant distance along the pale ribbon as it dwindled through the gnarled and bristling scrub, in the direction from which they had come. No second body lay on the road.

If the guy hadn't been at least winged, surely he would have charged, firing, as Mitch clambered out of the Chrysler.

Hit, he might have hobbled or crawled into the scrub or behind a formation of stone. He could be anywhere out there, assessing his wound, reviewing his options.

The gunman would be angry but not scared. He lived for action like this. He was a sociopath. He wouldn't scare easily.

Definitely, unequivocally, Mitch was afraid of the man hiding in the night. He also feared the one who was lying on the road at the back of the Chrysler.

The guy near the car might be dead, but even if he was crow-bait, Mitch was afraid of him anyway. He didn't want to go near him.

He had to do what he didn't want to do, because whether the sonofabitch was a carcass or unconscious, he possessed a weapon. Mitch needed a weapon. And quick.

He had discovered that he was capable of violence, at least in self-defense, but he hadn't been prepared for the rapidity with which events unfolded following the first shot, for the speed with which decisions must be made, for the suddenness with which new challenges could arise.

On the farther side of the road, several blinds of scraggly vegetation offered concealment, as did low batters of weathered rock.

If the light breeze that had been active toward the coast had made its way this far inland, the desert had swallowed it to the last draught. Any movement of the brush would reveal not the hand of Nature but instead his enemy.

As far as he could tell in this murk, all was still.

Acutely aware that his own movement made a mark of him, hampered by the handcuffs, Mitch wriggled on his belly to the man behind the car.

In the gunman's open and unblinking eyes, the mortician moon had laid coins.

Beside the body rested a familiar shape of steel made sterling in this light. Mitch seized it gratefully, almost squirmed away, but realized that he had found the useless revolver.

Wincing at the faint jingle produced by the short chain between his handcuffs, he patted down the corpse — and pressed his fingers in a wetness. Sickened, shuddering, he wiped his hand on the dead man's clothes.

As he was about to conclude that this guy had gotten out of the Chrysler without a weapon, he discovered the checked grip of the pistol protruding from under the corpse. He pulled the gun free.

A shot cracked. The dead man twitched, having taken the round meant for Mitch.

He flung himself toward the Chrysler and heard a second shot and heard the whispery whine of passing death and heard a bullet ricochet off the car. He also heard a closer whisper, although he might have imagined two near misses with one round and might in fact have heard nothing after the insectile shriek of the ricochet.

With the car between himself and the shooter, he felt safer, but then almost at once not safe at all.

The gunman could come around the Chrysler at either the front end or the back. He had the advantage of choosing his approach and initiating the action.

Meanwhile, Mitch would be forced to keep an alert watch in both directions. An impossible task.

Already the other might be on the move.

Mitch thrust up from the ground and away from the car. He ran in a crouch, off the road, through the natural hedge of mesquite, which crackled revealingly and at the same time shushed as if warning him to be quiet.

The land sloped down from the road, which was good. If it had sloped up, he would have been visible, his broad back an easy target, the moment the gunman rounded the Chrysler.

He had lucked into firm but sandy soil, instead of shale or loose stones, so he didn't make a clatter as he ran. The moon mapped his route, and he weaved among clumps of brush instead of thrashing through them, mindful that keeping his balance was more difficult with his hands cuffed in front of him.

At the bottom of the thirty-foot slope, he turned right. Based on the position of the moon, he believed that he was heading almost due west.

Something like a cricket sang. Something stranger clicked and shrilled.

A colony of pampas-grass clumps drew his attention with scores of tall feathery panicles. They glowed white in the moonlight, and reminded him of the plumed tails of proud horses.

From the round clumps sprayed very narrow, sharp-edged, pointed, recurved blades of grass three to five feet in length. They were waist-high on Mitch. When dry, these blades could scratch, prickle like needles, even cut.

Each clump respected the territorial integrity of the other. He was able to pass among them.

In the heart of the colony, he felt safely screened by the white feathery panicles that rose higher than his head. He remained on his feet and, through gaps between the plumes, he peered back the way that he had come.

The ghostly light did not reveal a pursuer. Mitch shifted his position, gently pushed aside a panicle, and another, surveying the edge of the roadway at the top of the slope. He didn't see anyone up there.

He did not intend to hide in the pampas for long. He had fled his vulnerable position at the car only to gain a couple of minutes to think.

He wasn't concerned that the remaining gunman would drive away in the Chrysler. Julian Campbell wasn't the kind of boss to whom you could report failure with the confidence that you would keep either your job or your head.

Besides, to the guy out there on the hunt, this was sport, and Mitch was the most dangerous game of all. The hunter was motivated by vengeance, by pride, and by the taste for violence that had led him into this kind of work in the first place.

Had he been able to hide until dawn or slip away, Mitch would not have done so. He wasn't boiling over with macho enthusiasm for a confrontation with this second professional killer, but he understood too well the consequences of avoiding it altogether.

If the remaining gunman lived and reported back to Campbell, Anson would know sooner rather than later that his fratello piccolo, his little brother, was alive and free. Mitch would lose his ease of movement and the advantage of surprise.

Most likely, Campbell didn't expect a report from his pair of executioners until morning. Perhaps he would not even seek them out until the following afternoon.

Indeed, Campbell might miss the Chrysler Windsor before he missed the men. That depended on which of his machines he most valued.

Mitch needed to be able to catch Anson by surprise, and he needed to be in his brother's house at noon to take the call from the kidnappers. Holly was on a higher and narrower ledge than ever.

He could not hide, and his enemy would not. For predator and prey — whoever might be which — this had to be a fight to the death.

Chapter 31

Surrounded by noble white plumes that suggested an encircling protectorate of helmeted knights, Mitch in the pampas grass recalled the hard crack of the two shots that had almost drilled him as he had been taking the pistol from the dead gunman.

If his adversary's weapon had been equipped with a sound suppressor, as it had been in the library, the reports would not have been so loud. He might not have heard them.

In this desolate place, the gunman had not been concerned about attracting unwanted attention, but he had not removed the silencer just for the satisfaction of a louder bang. He must have had another reason.

Sound suppressors were most likely illegal. They facilitated quiet murder. They were meant for use in close quarters — as in a mansion where the household staff was not reliably corrupt.

Logic led Mitch quickly to conclude that a sound suppressor was useful only in discreet situations because it diminished the accuracy of the weapon.

" When you were standing over your captive in a library or when you forced him to kneel before you on a lonely desert road, a pistol with a sound suppressor might serve you well. But at a distance of twenty feet, or thirty, perhaps it reduced the accuracy to such a degree that you were more certain to hit your target by throwing the pistol than by shooting it.

Small stones rattled like tumbling dice.

The sound seemed to have arisen west of him. He turned in that direction. With caution, he parted the pampas panicles.

Fifty feet away, the gunman crouched like a hunchback troll. He was waiting for any repercussions of the noise that he had made.

Even when still, the man could not be mistaken for a thrust of rock or for desert flora, because he'd drawn attention to himself in the process of crossing a long barren swath of alkaline soil. That patch of ground appeared not merely reflective but luminous.

If Mitch had not paused here, if he had continued west, he would have encountered the killer in the open, perhaps coming face-to-face as in a Western-movie showdown.

He considered lying in wait, letting his stalker draw closer before firing.

Then instinct suggested that the colony of pampas grass and similar features of the landscape were exactly the places that would most interest the gunman. He expected Mitch to hide; and he would regard the pampas with suspicion.

Mitch hesitated, for the advantage still seemed to be his. He could fire from cover, while the troll stood in the open. He had not yet squeezed off a shot with this pistol, while his adversary had expended two.

A spare magazine. Given that mayhem was the gunman's business, he probably carried a spare magazine, maybe two.

He would approach the pampas colony cautiously. He would not make an easy target of himself

When Mitch fired and missed because of distance, angle, distorting light, and lack of experience, the gunman would return fire. Vigorously.

The pampas offered visual cover, not protection. A barrage of eight rounds followed at least by another volley often would not be survivable.

Still crouching, the trollish figure took two tentative steps forward. He paused again.

Inspiration came to Mitch, a bold idea that for a moment he considered discarding as reckless but then embraced as his best chance.

He let the panicles ease into their natural positions. He slipped out of the colony opposite from the point at which the gunman approached it, hoping to keep it between them as long as possible.

To a choir of crickets and the more sinister clicking-shrilling of the unknown insect musician, Mitch hurried eastward, along the route that he had taken earlier. He passed the point at which he had descended the embankment; that unscreened ascent would leave him too exposed if he failed to reach the top before the gunman rounded the pampas colony.

About sixty feet farther, he arrived at a wide shallow swale in the otherwise uniform face of the slope. Chaparral thrived in this depression and spilled up over the edges of it.

In need of his cuffed hands to climb, Mitch jammed the pistol under his belt. Previously, moonlight had shown him the way, but now moonshadows obscured and deceived. Always conscious that quiet was as important as swift progress, he insinuated himself upward through the chaparral.

He stirred up a musky scent that might have had a plant source but that suggested he was trespassing in one kind of animal habitat or another. Brush snared, poked, scratched.

He thought of snakes, and then he refused to think of them.

When he reached the top without drawing gunfire, he eeled out of the swale, onto the shoulder of the road. He crawled to the center of the dirt lane before standing.

If he attempted to circle behind where he thought the gunman might be headed, he would find that meanwhile the gunman would have done some anticipating of his own, would have changed course in hope of surprising his quarry even as his quarry schemed to surprise him. Stalking and counter-stalking, they could spend a lot of precious time wandering the wilderness, now and then finding each other's spoor, until one of them made a mistake.

If that was the game, the fatal mistake would be Mitch's, for he was the less experienced player. As had been true thus far, his hope lay in not fulfilling his enemy's expectations.

Because Mitch had surprised them with the revolver, the gunman would expect him to have as savage an instinct for self-preservation as any cornered animal. He had proved, after all, not to be paralyzed by fear, self-pity, and self-loathing.

But the gunman might not expect a cornered animal, once having broken free, to return voluntarily to the corner that it had recently escaped.

The vintage Chrysler stood sixty feet west of him, the trunk lid still half raised.

Mitch hurried to the car and paused beside the corpse. Eyes filled with the starry wonder of the heavens, the acne-scarred gunman lay supine.

Those eyes were two collapsed stars, black holes, exerting such gravity that Mitch assumed they would pull him to destruction if he stared at them too long.

In fact, he felt no guilt. In spite of his father, he realized that he believed in meaning and in natural law, but killing in self-defense was no sin by any tao.

Neither was it an occasion for celebration. He felt that he had been robbed of something precious. Call it innocence, but that was only part of what he had lost; with innocence had gone a capacity for a certain kind of tenderness, a heretofore lifelong expectation of an impending, sweet, ineffable joy.

Looking back, Mitch studied the ground for footprints he might have left. In sunshine, the hard-packed dirt might betray him; but he saw no tracks now.

Under the moon's mesmerizing stare, the desert seemed to be asleep and dreaming, rendered in the silver-and-black palette of most dreams, every shadow as hard as iron, every object as insubstantial as smoke.

When he looked into the trunk, where the moon declined to peer, the darkness suggested the open mouth of some creature without mercy. He could not see the floor of the space, as though it were a magical compartment offering storage for an infinite amount of baggage.

He withdrew the pistol from under his belt.

He lifted the lid higher, climbed into the trunk, and pulled the lid partway shut again.

After a little experimentation, he figured out that the sound suppressor was threaded to the barrel of the pistol. He unscrewed it and set it aside.

Sooner rather than later, when he failed to find Mitch hiding in pampas grass or in chaparral, or in a niche of weather-sculpted rock, the gunman would come back to watch the Chrysler. He would expect his prey to return to the car in the hope that the keys might be in the ignition.

This professional killer would not be capable of understanding that a good husband could never drive away from his vows, from his wife, from his best hope of love in a world that offered little of it.

If the gunman established a surveillance point behind the car, he might cross the road in the moonlight. He would be cautious and quick, but a clear target nonetheless.

The possibility existed that he would watch the front of the vehicle. But if time passed and nothing happened, he might undertake another general exploration of the area and, on returning, cross Mitch's sights.

Only seven or eight minutes had passed since the pair had opened the trunk to receive a greeting of gunfire. The surviving man would be patient. But eventually, if his surveillance and his searches were not fruitful, he would consider packing up and getting out of here, regardless of how much he might fear his boss.

At that time, if not before, he would come to the back of the car to deal with the corpse. He would want to load it into the trunk.

Now Mitch half sat, half lay, swaddled in darkness, his head raised just enough to see across the sill of the trunk.

He had killed a man.

He intended to kill another.

The pistol felt heavy in his hand. He smoothed his trembling fingers along its contours, seeking a clickable safety, but he found none.

As he stared at the lonely moon-glazed road crowded by the spectral desert, he understood that what he had lost-innocence, and that fundamentally childlike expectation of impending, ineffable joy — was gradually being replaced by something else, and not by something bad. The hole in him was filling, with what he could not yet say.

From the car trunk he had a limited view of the world, but in that wedge he perceived far more this night than he would have been capable of perceiving previously.

The silvery road receded from him but also approached, offering him a choice of opposite horizons.

Some stone formations contained chips of mica that sparkled in the moonlight, and where the rock rose in silhouette against the sky, the stars appeared to have salted themselves upon the earth.

Out of the north, southbound, on its feathered sails, a great horned owl, as pale as it was immense, swooped low and silent across the road, then rowed itself higher into the night, much higher and away.

Mitch sensed that what he seemed to be gaining for what he had lost, what so quickly healed the hole in him, was a capacity for awe, a deeper sense of the mystery of all things.

Then he pulled back from the brink of awe, to terror and to grim determination, when the gunman returned with an intention that had not been foreseen.

Chapter 32

So stealthily had the killer returned that Mitch was unaware of his presence until he heard one of the car doors click open and swing wide with the faintest creak.

The man had approached from the front of the Chrysler. Risking exposure in the brief glow of the car's interior lights, he got in and pulled the door shut as softly as it could be closed.

If he had gotten behind the wheel, he must intend to leave the scene.

No. He wouldn't drive away with the trunk lid open. And surely he wouldn't leave the corpse.

Mitch waited in silence.

The gunman was silent, too.

Slowly the silence became a kind of pressure that Mitch could feel on his skin, on his eardrums, on his unblinking eyes, as if the car were descending into a watery abyss, an ever-increasing weight of ocean bearing down on it.

The gunman must be sitting in the dark, surveying the night, waiting to learn whether the throb of light had drawn attention, whether he had been seen. If his return inspired no response, what would he do next?

The desert remained breathless.

In these circumstances, the car would seem as sensitive to motion as a boat on water. If Mitch moved, the killer would be alerted to his presence.

A minute passed. Another.

Mitch pictured the smooth-faced gunman sitting up there in the car, in the gloom, at least thirty years old, maybe thirty-five, yet with such a remarkably soft smooth face, as if life had not touched him and never would.

He tried to imagine what the man with the smooth face was doing, planning. The mind behind that mask remained inaccessible to Mitch's imagination. He might have more profitably pondered what a desert lizard believed about God or rain or jimsonweed.

After a long stillness, the gunman shifted positions, and the movement proved to be a revelation. The unnerving intimacy of the sound indicated that the man wasn't behind the wheel of the Chrysler. He was in the backseat.

He must have been sitting forward, watchful, ever since getting into the car. When at last he leaned back, the upholstery made a sound like leather or vinyl does when stressed, and the seat springs quietly complained.

The backseat of the car formed the back wall of the trunk. He and Mitch were within a couple feet of each other.

They were almost as close to each other as they had been on the walk from the library to the car pavilion.

Lying in the trunk, Mitch thought about that walk.

The gunman made a low sound, either a stifled cough or a groan further muffled by the intervening wall of upholstery.

Perhaps he had been wounded, after all. His condition wasn't sufficiently serious to persuade him to pack up and leave, although it might be painful enough to discourage a lot of roaming.

Clearly, he settled in the car because he hoped that eventually, in desperation, his quarry would return to it. He figured Mitch would be circumspect in his approach, thoroughly scoping out the immediate surrounding territory, but would not expect death to be waiting for him in the shadows of the backseat.

In this makeshift learning room, Mitch thought about that walk between the library and the car pavilion: the moon like a lily pad floating in the pool, the muzzle of the pistol pressed into his side, the songs of the toads, the lacy branches of the silver sheens, the pistol pressed into his side….

A car of this vintage would not feature a fire wall or a crash panel between the trunk and the passenger compartment. The back of the rear seat might have been finished with a quarter-inch fiberboard panel or even just with cloth.

The backrest might contain six inches of padding. A bullet would meet some resistance.

The barrier wasn't bulletproof. No one armored with a mere sofa cushion would expect to walk unscathed through a barrage often high-velocity rounds.

Currently Mitch half lay and half sat on his left side, facing the night through the open trunk lid.

He would need to roll onto his right side in order to bring the pistol to bear on the back wall of the trunk.

He weighed a hundred and seventy pounds. No degree in physics was required to figure out that the car would respond to that much weight shifting position.

Turn fast, open fire — and maybe he would discover that he was wrong about the partition between trunk and passenger compartment. If there was indeed a metal panel, he might not only be nailed by a ricochet but also fail to hit his target.

Then he would be wounded and out of ammunition, and the gunman would know where to find him.

A bead of sweat slipped along the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth.

The night was mild, not hot.

An urge to act pulled his nerves as taut as bowstrings.

Chapter 33

As Mitch lay in indecision, he heard in memory Holly's. scream, and the sharp slap of her being hit.

A real sound refocused his attention on the present: his enemy, in the passenger compartment, stifling a series of coughs.

The noise had been so effectively muffled that it wouldn't have been heard beyond the car. As before, the coughing lasted only a few seconds.

Maybe the gunman's cough related to a wound. Or he was allergic to desert pollen.

When the guy coughed again, Mitch would seize the opportunity to change positions.

Beyond the open trunk, the desert seemed to darkle, brighten, darkle rhythmically, but in fact the acuity of his vision sharpened briefly with each systolic thrust of his pounding heart.

A sudden illusion of snow, however, had a basis in reality. Moonlight frosted the phosphorescent wings of swarming moths that whirled like flakes of winter across the road.

Mitch's cuffed hands gripped the pistol so fiercely that his knuckles began to ache. His right forefinger hooked the trigger guard, rather than the trigger itself, because he feared that a nervous twitch would cause him to fire before he intended.

His teeth were clenched. He heard himself inhale, exhale. He opened his mouth to breathe more quietly.

Even though his heart raced, time ceased to be a river running and became a creeping flow of mud.

Instinct had served Mitch well in recent hours. Likewise, a sixth sense might at any moment alert the gunman that he was not alone.

A sludge of seconds filled an empty minute, filled another, and another — and then the man's third bout of stifled coughing gave Mitch cover to roll from his left side to his right. The maneuver complete, he lay with his back to the open end of the trunk, very still.

The gunman's silence seemed to have a quality of heightened vigilance, of suspicion. The world now came to Mitch's five senses through a distorting lens of extreme anxiety.

What angle of fire? What pattern?

Think.

The man with the smooth face would not be sitting upright. He would slump to take full advantage of the darkness in the backseat.

In other circumstances, the assassin might have preferred a corner, where he could further ensure his invisibility. But because the raised lid of the trunk obstructed an easy view of him through the rear window of the car, he could safely sit in the center, the better to cover both front doors.

Keeping the cuff chain taut, Mitch quietly put down the pistol. He dared not risk knocking the weapon against something during the exploration he needed to perform.

Blindly reaching forward with both hands, he found the back wall of the trunk. Although firm under his fingertips, the surface had a cloth covering.

The Chrysler might not have been restored with a hundred percent fidelity. Campbell might have chosen some custom upgrades, including more refined materials in the trunk.

A pair of synchronized spiders, his hands crept left to right across the surface, testing. He pressed gently, and then a little harder.

Beneath his questing fingertips, the surface flexed slightly. Quarter-inch fiberboard, covered in cloth, might flex that way. It did not have the feel of metal.

The panel accepted his pressure in silence, but when he relaxed his hands, it returned to form with a subtle buckling noise.

From the passenger compartment came the protest of stressed upholstery, a short twist of sound and nothing more. The gunman had most likely adjusted his position for comfort — though he might have turned to listen more intently.

Mitch felt the floor, seeking the pistol, and rested his hands on it.

Lying on his side, knees drawn up, with no room to extend his arms, he was not in a good shooting position.

If he tried to move toward the open end of the trunk before firing, he would give himself away. A mere second or two of warning might be enough for the experienced gunman to roll off the backseat, onto the floor.

Mitch went through it in his mind one more time, to be sure that he had not overlooked anything. The smallest miscalculation could be the death of him.

He raised the pistol. He would shoot left to right, then right to left, a double spray, five rounds in each arc.

When he squeezed the trigger, nothing happened. Just a faint but crisp metallic snick.

His heart was both hammer and anvil, and he had to hear through that roar, but he was pretty sure the gunman had not moved again, had not detected the small sound of the stubborn pistol.

Earlier he had explored the weapon and hadn't found a safety click.

He eased off the trigger, hesitated, squeezed again.

Snick.

Before panic could seize him, serendipity fluttered against his cheek and into his open mouth: a moth, not as cold as they had looked when whirling like snowflakes.

Reflexively, he sputtered, spat out the insect, gagging, and pulled the trigger again. A stop was incorporated into the trigger — maybe that was the safety — through which you had to pull to fire, a double action, and because he pulled harder than before, the pistol boomed.

The recoil, exacerbated by his position, rocked him, and the crash couldn't have been louder if it had been the door to Hell slamming behind him, and he was surprised by a blow-back of debris, bits of singed cloth and flecks of fiberboard spraying his face, but he squinched his eyes shut and kept firing, left to right, the gun trying to pull up, pull wild, then right to left, controlling the weapon, not just shooting it, and though he had thought he would be able to count the rounds as he fired them, he lost track after two, and then the magazine was depleted.

Chapter 34

If the gunman wasn't dead, even if wounded, he could return fire through the backrest. The car trunk was still a potential deathtrap.

Abandoning the useless pistol, Mitch scrambled out, knocking a knee against the sill, an elbow against the bumper, dropped to his hands and knees in the road, then thrust to his feet. He ran in a crouch for ten yards, fifteen, before stopping and looking back.

The gunman hadn't gotten out of the Chrysler. The four doors were closed.

Mitch waited, sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, off his chin.

Gone were the snowflake moths, the great horned owl, the songs of crickets, the click-shrill of the sinister something.

Under the mute moon, in the petrified desert, the Chrysler looked anachronistic, like a time machine in the early Mesozoic, sleek and gleaming two hundred million years before it was built.

When the air, as dry as salt, began to sear his throat, he stopped breathing through his mouth, and when the sweat began to dry on his face, he asked himself how long he should wait before assuming that the man was dead. He looked at his watch. He looked at the moon. He waited.

He needed the car.

He had timed the trip on the dirt track at twelve minutes. They had been making perhaps twenty-five miles per hour on that last leg of the journey. The math put him five miles from a paved road.

Even when he got that far back toward civilization, he might find himself in lonely territory without much traffic. Besides, in his current condition, dirty and rumpled and no doubt wild-eyed, no one would give him a ride, except maybe an itinerant psychopath cruising for a victim.

Finally he approached the Chrysler.

He circled the vehicle, staying as far from the sides of it as the width of the road would allow, alert for a smooth ghostly face peering from the shadows within. After arriving without incident at the trunk from which he had twice escaped, he paused and listened.

Holly was in a bad place, and if the kidnappers tried to reach Mitch, they wouldn't have any luck because his cell phone was in that white plastic bag back at Campbell's estate. The noon call to Anson's house would be his only chance to reconnect with them before they decided to chop their hostage and move on to another game.

Without further hesitation, he went to the back door on the driver's side and opened it.

Lying on the seat, eyes open, bloody but still alive, was the smooth-faced man, with his pistol aimed at the door. The muzzle looked like an eyeless socket, and the gunman looked triumphant when he said, "Die."

He tried to pull the trigger, but the pistol wobbled in his hand, and then he lost his grip on it. The weapon dropped to the floor of the car, and the gunman's hand dropped into his lap, and now that his one-word threat had turned out to be a prediction of his own fate, he lay there as if making an obscene proposition.

Leaving the door open, Mitch walked to the side of the road and sat on a boulder until he could be certain that, after all, he was not going to vomit.

Chapter 35

Sitting on the boulder, Mitch had much to consider. When this was finished, if it was ever finished, maybe the best thing would be to go to the police, tell his story of desperate self-defense, and present them with the two dead gunmen in the trunk of the Chrysler.

Julian Campbell would deny that he had employed them or at least that he had directed them to kill Mitch. Men like these two were most likely paid in cash; from Campbell's point of view, the fewer records the better, and the gunmen hadn't been the type to care that, if paid in cash with no tax deductions, they would eventually be denied their Social Security.

The possibility existed that no authorities were aware of the dark side to Campbell's empire. To all appearances, he might be one of California's most upstanding citizens.

Mitch, on the other hand, was a humble gardener already set up to take the fall for his wife's murder in the event that he failed to ransom her. And in Corona del Mar, on the street in front of Anson's house, the trunk of his Honda contained the body of John Knox.

Although he believed in the rule of law, Mitch didn't for a minute believe that crime-scene investigation was as meticulous — or CSI technicians as infallible — as portrayed on TV The more evidence that suggested his guilt, even if it was planted, the more they would find to support their suspicion, and the easier they would find it to ignore the details that might exonerate him.

Anyway, the most important thing right now was to remain free and mobile until he ransomed Holly. He would ransom her. Or die trying.

After he'd met Holly and fallen almost at once in love, he had realized that he'd previously been only half alive, buried alive in his childhood. She had opened the emotional casket in which his parents had left him, and he had risen, flourished.

His transformation had amazed him. He had thought himself fully alive, at last, when they married.

This night, however, he realized that part of him had remained asleep. He had awakened to a clarity of vision no less exhilarating than it was terrifying.

He had encountered evil of a purity that a day previously he had not thought existed, that he had been educated to deny existed. With the recognition of evil, however, came a growing awareness of more dimensions in every scene, in nearly every object, than he had seen before, greater beauty, strange promise, and mystery.

He did not know precisely what he meant by that. He only knew that it was the case, that he'd opened his eyes to a higher reality. Behind the layered and gorgeous mysteries of this new world around him, he sensed a truth that veil by veil would reveal itself.

In this state of enlightenment, funny that he should find the most urgent task before him to be the disposal of a pair of dead men.

A laugh rose in him, but he swallowed it. Sitting in the desert, near midnight, with no company but corpses, laughing at the moon did not seem to be the first step on the right path out of here.

From high in the east, a meteor slid westward like the pull-tab of a zipper, opening the black sky to reveal a glimpse of whiteness beyond, but the teeth of the zipper closed as quickly as they opened, keeping the sky clothed, and the meteor became a cinder, a vapor.

Taking the falling star as an omen to get on with his grisly work, Mitch knelt beside the scarred gunman and searched his pockets. He quickly found the two things he wanted: the handcuff key and the keys to the Chrysler Windsor.

Having freed himself of the cuffs, he threw them in the open trunk of the car. He rubbed his chafed wrists.

He dragged the body of the gunman to the south shoulder of the road, through the screening brush, and left it there.

Getting the second one out of the backseat involved unpleasant wrestling, but in two minutes the dead pair were lying side by side, faceup to the wonder of the stars.

At the car once more, Mitch found a flashlight on the front seat. He'd figured there would be one because they must have intended to bury him nearby and would have needed a light to guide them.

The car's weak ceiling lamp had not shown him as much of the backseat as he needed to see. He examined it with the flashlight.

Because the gunman had not died instantly, he'd had time to bleed, and he'd done a thorough job of it.

Mitch counted eight holes in the backrest, rounds that punched through from the trunk. The other two had evidently been deflected or fully stopped by the structure of the seat.

In the back of the front seat were five holes; but only one bullet had drilled all the way through. A pockmark in the glove-box door indicated the end point of its trajectory.

He found the spent slug on the floor in front of the passenger's seat. He threw it away into the night.

Once he got off the dirt track and onto paved roads, though he would be in a hurry, he would have to obey the posted speed limits. If a highway-patrol officer stopped him and got one glimpse of the blood and destruction in the backseat, Mitch would probably be eating at the expense of the state of California for a long time.

The two gunmen had not brought a shovel.

Considering their professionalism, he doubted they would have left his body to rot where hikers or off-road racers might have found it. Familiar with the area, they had known a feature of the landscape that served as a natural tomb unlikely to be discovered casually.

Searching for that burial place at night, with a flashlight, did not appeal to Mitch. Nor did the prospect of the bone collection that he might find there.

He returned to the bodies and relieved them of their wallets to make identification more difficult. He was becoming less squeamish about handling them — and his new attitude disturbed him.

After dragging the dead men farther from the road, he interred them in a tight grove of waist-high manzanita. Shrouds of leathery leaves concealed them from easy discovery.

Although the desert seems hostile to life, many species thrive in it, and a number are carrion eaters. Within an hour, the first of these would be drawn to the double treat in the manzanita.

Some were beetles like the one that the gunmen had taken care not to crush underfoot as they had led him along the car-pavilion loggia.

In the morning, the desert heat would begin to do its work as well, significantly hastening the process of decomposition.

If they were ever found, their names might never be known. And which of them suffered terrible acne scars and which had a smooth face would matter to no one, and count for nothing.

In the car pavilion, as they had been closing him into the trunk of the Chrysler, he had said / wish we didn't have to do this.

Well, said the one with the smooth skin, that's how it is.

Another shooting star drew his attention to the deep clear sky. A brief bright scar, and then the heavens healed.

He returned to the car and closed the trunk lid.

Having gotten the best of two experienced killers, perhaps he should have felt empowered, proud, and fierce. Instead, he had been further humbled.

To spare himself the stench of blood, he rolled down the windows in all four doors of the Chrysler Windsor.

The engine started at once: a full-throated song of power. He switched on the headlights.

He was relieved to see that the fuel gauge indicated the tank was nearly three-quarters full. He didn't want to stop at any public place, not even at a self-service station.

He had turned the car around and driven four miles on the dirt road when, topping a rise, he came upon a sight that caused him to brake to a stop.

To the south, in a shallow bowl of land, lay a lake of mercury with concentric rings of sparkling diamonds floating on it, moving slowly to the currents of a lazy whirlpool, as majestic as a spiral galaxy.

For a moment the scene was so unreal that he thought it must be a hallucination or a vision. Then he understood that it was a field of grass, perhaps squirreltail with its plumelike flower spikes and silky awns.

The moonlight silvered the spikes and struck sparkles from the high sheen of the awns. A wind eddy, the laziest of spiral breezes, pulsed around the bowl of land with such grace and consistent timing that, were there music for this dance of grass, it would be a waltz.

In mere grass was hidden meaning, but the stink of blood brought him back from the mystic to the mundane.

He continued to the end of the dirt road and turned right because he recalled that they had turned left on the way here. The paved roads were well marked, and he returned not to the Campbell estate — which he hoped he would not see again — but to the interstate.

Post-midnight traffic was light. He drove north, never faster than five miles per hour above the speed limit, an excess that the law rarely punished.

The Chrysler Windsor was a beautiful machine. Seldom do dead men return to haunt the living in such style.

Chapter 36

Mitch arrived in the city of Orange at 2:20 a.m., and parked on a street that was a block away from the one on which his house stood.

He rolled up the four windows and locked the Chrysler.

With his shirttail pulled out to conceal it, he carried a pistol under his belt. The weapon had belonged to the smooth-faced gunman who, having said Die, failed to find the strength to flex his trigger finger one last time. It contained eight cartridges; Mitch hoped that he would not need any of them.

He was parked under an old jacaranda in full flower, and when he moved into the light from the street lamp, he saw that he walked on a carpet of purple petals.

Warily, he approached his property along the alleyway behind it.

A rattling induced him to switch on his flashlight. From between two trash cans that had been set out for morning collection, a city-adapted possum, like a large pale-faced rat, twitched its pink nose.

Mitch clicked off the light and proceeded to his garage. The gate at the corner of the building was never locked. He passed through it into the backyard.

His house keys, with his wallet and other personal items, had been confiscated in Campbell's library.

He kept a spare key in a small key safe that was padlocked to a ringbolt low on the garage wall, concealed behind a row of azaleas.

Risking the flashlight but hooding it with his fingers, Mitch parted the azaleas. He dialed in the combination, disengaged the lock, plucked the key from the safe, and switched off the light.

Making not a sound, he let himself into the garage, which was keyed to match the house.

The moon had traveled westward; and trees let little of that light through the windows. He stood in the dark, listening.

Either the silence convinced him that he was alone or the darkness reminded him too much of the car trunk that he had twice escaped, and he switched on the garage lights.

His truck was where he had left it. The Honda's space was empty.

He climbed the stairs to the loft. The boxes were still stacked to disguise the gap in the railing.

At the front of the loft, he discovered that the recorder and electronic surveillance gear were gone. One of the kidnappers must have come to collect the equipment.

He wondered what they thought had happened to John Knox. He worried that Knox's disappearance had already had consequences for Holly.

When a fit of tremors shook him, he forced his mind away from that dark speculation.

He was not a machine, and neither was she. Their lives had meaning, they had been brought together by destiny for a purpose, and they would fulfill their purpose.

He had to believe that was true. Without it, he had nothing.

Leaving the garage dark, he entered the house through the back door, confident that the place was no longer watched.

The staged murder scene in the kitchen remained as he had last seen it. The spattered blood, dry now. Hand prints on the cabinetry.

In the adjacent laundry room, he took off his shoes and examined them in the fluorescent light. He was surprised to find no blood.

His socks were not stained, either. He stripped them off anyway and threw them in the washing machine.

He found small smears on his shirt and jeans. In the shirt pocket, he found Detective Taggart's card. He saved the card, tossed the clothes in the machine, added soap, and started the wash cycle.

Standing at the laundry sink, he scrubbed his hands and forearms with soap and a soft-bristle brush. He wasn't washing away evidence. Perhaps certain memories were what he hoped to flush down the drain.

With a wet rag, he wiped his face, his neck.

His weariness was profound. He needed rest, but he had no time for sleep. Anyway, if he tried to sleep, his mind would be ridden by dreads both known and nameless, would be ridden hard in circles, howling, to wide-eyed exhaustion.

In shoes and underwear, carrying the pistol, he returned to the kitchen. From the refrigerator, he got a can of Red Bull, a high-caffeine drink, and chugged it.

Finishing the Red Bull, he saw Holly's purse open on a nearby counter. It had been there earlier in the day.

Earlier, however, he had not taken time to notice the debris scattered on the counter beside the purse. A wadded cellophane wrapper. A small box, the top torn open. A pamphlet of instructions.

Holly had bought a home pregnancy-test kit. She had opened it and evidently had used it, sometime between when he had left for work and when the kidnappers had taken her.

Sometimes as a child in the learning room, when you have spoken to no one for a long time, nor heard a voice other than your muffled own, and when you have been denied food — though never water — for as much as three days, when for a week or two you have seen no light except for the brief daily interruption when your urine bottles and waste bucket are traded for fresh containers, you reach a point where the silence and the darkness seem not like conditions any longer but like objects with real mass, objects that share the room with you and, growing by the hour, demand more space, until they press on you from all sides, the silence and the darkness, and weigh on you from above, squeezing you into a cubic minim that your body can occupy only if it is condensed like an automobile compressed by a junkyard ram. In the horror of that extreme claustrophobia, you tell yourself that you cannot endure another minute, but you do, you endure another minute, another, another, an hour, a day, you endure, and then the door opens,

the banishment ends, and there is light, there is always eventually light.

Holly had not revealed that her period was overdue. False hopes had been raised twice before. She had wanted to be sure this time before telling him.

Mitch had not believed in destiny; now he did. And if a man believes in destiny, after all, he must believe in one that is golden, one that shines. He will not wait to see what he is served, damn if he will. He'll butter his bread thick with fate and eat the whole loaf.

Carrying the pistol, he hurried to the bedroom. The switch by the door turned on one of two bedside lamps.

With single-minded purpose, he went to the closet. The door stood open.

His clothes were disarranged. Two pair of jeans had slipped from their hangers and lay on the closet floor.

He didn't remember having left the closet in this condition, but he snatched a pair of jeans from the floor and pulled them on.

Shrugging into a dark-blue long-sleeved cotton shirt, he turned from the closet and for the first time saw the clothes strewn on the bed. A pair of khakis, a yellow shirt, white athletic socks, white briefs and T-shirt.

They were his clothes. He recognized them.

They were mottled with dark blood.

By now he knew the look of planted evidence. Some new outrage was to be hung around his neck.

He retrieved the pistol from the closet shelf where he had put it while dressing.

The door stood open to the dark bathroom.

Like a dowser's divining rod, the pistol guided him to that darkness. Crossing the threshold, he flipped the light switch and with bated breath stepped into the bathroom brightness.

He expected to find something grotesque in the shower or a severed something in the sink. But all was normal.

His face in the mirror was clenched with dread, as tight as a fist, but his eyes were as wide as they had ever been and were no longer blind to anything.

Returning to the bedroom, he noticed something out of place on the nightstand with the extinguished lamp. He clicked the switch.

Two colorful polished spheres of dinosaur dung stood there on small bronze stands.

Although they were opaque, they made him think of crystal balls and sinister fortunetellers in old movies, predicting dire fates.

"Anson," Mitch whispered, and then a word uncommon to him, "My God. Oh, God."

Chapter 37

The hard winds that came out of the eastern mountains were usually born with the rising or setting of the sun. Now, many hours after sunset, and hours before sunrise, a strong spring wind suddenly blew down upon the lowlands as if it had burst through a great door.

Along the alleyway where wind whistled, to the Chrysler, Mitch hurried but with the hesitant heart of a man making the short journey from his cell on death row to the execution chamber.

He didn't take time to roll down the windows. As he drove, he opened only the one in the driver's door.

A gruff wind huffed at him, pawed his hair, its breath warm and insistent.

Insane men lack self-control. They see conspiracies all around them and reveal their lunacy in irrational anger, in ludicrous fears. Genuinely insane men don't know they are deranged, and therefore they see no need to wear a mask.

Mitch wanted to believe that his brother was insane. If Anson was instead acting with cold-blooded calculation, he was a monster. If you had admired and loved a monster, your gullibility should shame you. Worse, it seemed that by your willingness to be deceived, you empowered the monster. You shared at least some small portion of the responsibility for his crimes.

Anson did not lack self-control. He never spoke of conspiracies. He feared nothing. As for masks, he had an aptitude for misdirection, a talent for disguise, a genius for deception. He was not insane.

Along the night streets, queen palms thrashed, like madwomen in frenzies tossing their hair, and bottle-brush trees shed millions of scarlet needles that were the petals of their exotic flowers.

The land rose, and low hills rolled into higher hills, and in the wind were scraps of paper, leaves, kiting pages from newspapers, a large transparent plastic bag billowing along like a jellyfish.

His parents' house was the only one on the block with lights in the windows.

Perhaps he should have been discreet, but he parked in the driveway. He put up the window, left the pistol in the car, brought the flashlight.

Filled with voices of chaos, rich with the smell of eucalyptus, the wind lashed the walkway with tree shadows.

He did not ring the doorbell. He had no false hope, only an awful need to know.

As he had thought it might be, the house was unlocked. He stepped into the foyer and closed the door behind him.

To his left, to his right, an uncountable number of Mitches receded from him in a mirror world, all of them with a ghastly expression, all of them lost.

The house was not silent, for the wind gibbered at windows, groaned in the eaves, and eucalyptus trailers scourged the walls.

In Daniel's study, a spectacle of shattered glass display shelves glittered on the floor, and scattered everywhere were the colorful polished spheres, as if a poltergeist had played billiards with them.

Room by room, Mitch searched the first floor, turning on lights where they were off. In truth, he expected to find nothing more on this level of the big house, and he did not. He told himself that he was just being thorough. But he knew that he was delaying his ascent to the second floor.

At the stairs, he gazed up, and heard himself say, "Daniel," but not loud, and "Kathy," no louder.

For what awaited Mitch, he should have had to descend. Climbing to it seemed all wrong. Sepulchers are not constructed at the tops of towers.

As he climbed, nature's long exhale grew more fierce. Windows thrummed. Roof beams creaked.

In the upstairs hall, a black object lay on the polished wood floor: the shape of an electric razor but a bit larger. The business end featured a four-inch-wide gap between two gleaming metal pegs.

He hesitated, then picked it up. On the side of the thing was a seesaw switch. When he pressed it, a jagged white arc of electricity snapped between the metal pegs, the poles.

This was a Taser, a self-defense weapon. Chances were that Daniel and Kathy had not used it to defend themselves.

More likely, Anson had brought it with him and had assaulted them with it. A jolt from a Taser can disable a man for minutes, leave him helpless, muscles spasming as his nerves misfire.

Although Mitch knew where he must go, he delayed the terrible moment and went instead to the master bedroom.

The lights were on except for a nightstand lamp that had been knocked to the floor in a struggle, the bulb broken. The sheets were tangled. Pillows had slid off the bed.

The sleepers had been literally shocked awake.

Daniel owned a large collection of neckties, and perhaps a score were scattered across the carpet. Bright serpents of silk.

Glancing through other doors but not taking the time to inspect fully the spaces beyond, Mitch moved more purposefully to the room at the end of the shorter of the two upstairs halls.

Here the door was like all the others, but when he opened it, another door faced him. This one was heavily padded and covered with a black fabric.

Shaking badly, he hesitated. He had expected never to return here, never to cross this threshold again.

The inner door could be opened only from the hall, not from the chamber beyond. He turned the latch release. The well-fitted channels of an interlocking rubber seal parted with a sucking sound as he pushed the door inward.

Inside, there were no lamps, no ceiling fixture. He switched on the flashlight.

After Daniel himself had layered floor, walls, and ceiling with eighteen inches of various soundproofing materials, the room had been reduced to a windowless nine-foot square. The ceiling was six feet.

The black material that upholstered every surface, densely woven and without sheen, soaked up the beam of the flashlight.

Modified sensory deprivation. They had said it was a tool for discipline, not a punishment, a method to focus the mind inward toward self-discovery — a technique, not a torture. Numerous studies had been published about the wonders of one degree or another of sensory deprivation.

Daniel and Kathy lay side by side: she in her pajamas, he in his underwear. Their hands and ankles had been bound with neckties. The knots were cruelly tight, biting the flesh.

The bindings between the wrists and those between the ankles had been connected with another necktie, drawn taut, to further limit each victim's movement.

They had not been gagged. Perhaps Anson had wanted to have a conversation with them.

And screams could not escape the learning room.

Although Mitch stooped just inside the door, the aggressive silence pulled at him, as quicksand pulls what it snares, as gravity the falling object. His rapid, ragged breathing was muffled to a whispery wheeze.

He could not hear the windstorm anymore, but he was sure that the wind abided.

Looking at Kathy was harder than looking at Daniel, though not as difficult as Mitch had expected. If he could have prevented this, he would have stood between them and his brother. But now that it was done…it was done. And the heart sank rather than recoiled, and the mind fell into despondency but not into despair.

Daniel's face, eyes open, was wrenched by terror, but there was clearly puzzlement in it as well. At the penultimate moment, he must have wondered how this could be — how Anson, his one success, could be the death of him.

Systems of child-rearing and education were numberless, and no one ever died because of them, or at least not the men and women who dedicated themselves to conceiving and refining the theories.

Tasered, tied, and perhaps following a conversation, Daniel and Kathy had been stabbed. Mitch did not dwell upon the wounds.

The weapons were a pair of gardening shears and a hand trowel.

Mitch recognized them as having come from the rack of tools in his garage.

Chapter 38

Mitch closed the bodies in the learning room, and he sat at the top of the stairs to think. Fear and shock and one Red Bull weren't sufficient to clear his thoughts as fully as four hours of sleep would have done.

Battalions of wind threw themselves against the house, and the walls shuddered but withstood the siege.

Mitch could have wept if he had dared to allow himself tears, but he would not have known for whom he was crying.

He had never seen Daniel or Kathy cry. They believed in applied reason and "mutual supportive analysis" in place of easy emotion.

How could you cry for those who never cried for themselves, who talked and talked themselves through their disappointments, their misadventures, and even their bereavements?

No one who knew the truth of this family would fault him if he cried for himself, but he had not cried for himself since he was five because he had not wanted them to have the satisfaction of his tears.

He would not cry for his brother.

The wretched kind of pity that he had felt for Anson earlier was vapor now. It had not boiled away here in the learning room, but in the trunk of the vintage Chrysler.

During his drive north from Rancho Santa Fe, with four windows open to ventilate the car, he let the draft blow from him all delusion and self-deception. The brother whom he had thought he knew, had thought he loved, in fact had never existed. Mitch had loved not a real person but instead a sociopath's performance, a phantom.

Now Anson had seized the moment to take vengeance on Daniel and Kathy, pinning the crimes on his brother, whom he thought would never be found.

If Holly was not ransomed, her kidnappers would kill her and perhaps dispose of her body at sea. Mitch would take the fall for her murder — and, somehow, for the shooting of Jason Osteen.

Such a killing spree would thrill the cable-channel true-crime shows. If he was missing — in fact dead in a desert grave — the search for him would be their leading story for weeks if not for months.

In time he might become a legend like D. B. Cooper, the airline hijacker who, decades earlier, had parachuted out of a plane with a fortune in cash, never to be heard from again.

Mitch considered returning to the learning room to collect the gardening shears and the hand trowel. The thought of wrenching the blades from the bodies repulsed him. He had done worse in recent hours; but he could not do this.

Besides, clever Anson had probably salted other evidence in addition to the gardening tools. Finding it would take time, and Mitch had no time to spare.

His wristwatch read six minutes past three in the morning. In less than nine hours, the kidnappers would call Anson with further instructions.

Forty-five of the original sixty hours remained until the midnight-Wednesday deadline.

This would be over long before then. New developments required new rules, and Mitch was going to set them.

With an imitation of wolves, the wind called him into the night.

After turning off the upstairs lights, he went down to the kitchen. In the past, Daniel had always kept a box of Hershey's bars in the refrigerator. Daniel liked his chocolate cold.

The box waited on the bottom shelf, only one bar missing. These had always been Daniel's treats, off limits to everyone else.

Mitch took the entire box. He was too exhausted and too tightly knotted with anxiety to be hungry, but he hoped that sugar might substitute for sleep.

He turned out the first-floor lights and left the house by the front door.

Brooms of fallen palm fronds swept the street, and in their wake came a rolling trash can spewing its contents. Impatiens withered and shredded themselves, shrubs shook as if trying to pull themselves up by their roots, a ripped window awning — actually green, but black in this light — flapped madly like the flag of some demonic nation, the eucalyptuses gave the wind a thousand hissing voices, and it seemed as if the moon would be blown down and the stars snuffed out like candles.

In the haunted Chrysler, Mitch set out in search of Anson.

Chapter 39

Holly works at the nail even though she makes no progress with it, because if she doesn't work at the nail, she will have nothing to do, and with nothing to do, she will go mad.

For some reason, she remembers Glenn Close playing a madwoman in Fatal Attraction. Even if she were to go crazy, Holly is not capable of boiling anyone's pet bunny in a soup pot, unless of course her family is starving and has nothing to eat or the bunny is possessed by a demon. Then all bets are off.

Suddenly the nail begins to wiggle, and that's exciting. She is so excited that she almost needs the bedpan that her kidnappers left with her.

Her excitement wanes as, during the next half-hour, she manages to extract only about a quarter of an inch of the nail from the floor plank. Then it binds and won't budge farther.

Nevertheless, a quarter of an inch is better than nothing. The spike might be — what? — three inches long. Cumulatively — discounting the breaks she took for the pizza they allowed her to have, and to rest her fingers — she has spent perhaps seven hours on the nail. If she can tease it out just a little faster, at the rate of an inch a day, by the Wednesday-midnight deadline, she will have only an inch to go.

In the event that Mitch has raised the ransom by that time, they will all just have to wait another day until she extracts the damn nail.

She has always been an optimist. People have called her sunny and cheerful and buoyant and ebullient; and annoyed by her unflagging positive outlook, a sourpuss once asked her if she was the love child of Mickey Mouse and Tinkerbell.

She could have been mean and told him the truth, that her father died in a traffic accident and her mother in childbirth, that she had been raised by a grandmother rich in love and mirth.

Instead she told him Yes, but because Tink doesn't have the hips for childbirth, I was carried to term by Daisy Duck.

At the moment, uncharacteristically, she finds it difficult to keep her spirits up. Being kidnapped fractures your funny bone.

She has two broken fingernails, and the pads of her fingers are sore. If she hadn't wrapped them in the tail of her blouse, to pad them, while she worked on the nail, they would probably be bleeding.

In the scheme of things, these injuries are insignificant. If her captors start cutting off her fingers like they promised Mitch, that would be something to bitch about.

She takes a break from her work with the nail. She lies back on the air mattress in the dark.

Although she is exhausted, she does not expect to sleep. Then she is dreaming about being in a lightless place different from the room in which the kidnappers have imprisoned her.

In the dream, she is not tethered to a ringbolt in the floor. She is walking in darkness, carrying a bundle in her arms.

She is not in a room but in a series of passageways. A maze of tunnels. A labyrinth.

The bundle grows heavy. Her arms ache. She doesn't know what she carries, but something terrible will happen if she puts it down.

A dim glow draws her. She arrives in a chamber brightened by a single candle.

Mitch is here. She's so happy to see him. Her father and mother, whom she has never known except from photographs, are here, too.

The bundle in her arms is a sleeping baby. Her sleeping baby.

Smiling, her mother comes forward to take the baby. Holly's arms ache, but she holds fast to the precious bundle.

Mitch says Give us the baby, sweetheart. He should be with us. You don't belong here.

Her parents are dead, and so is Mitch, and when she lets go of the infant, it will not just be sleeping anymore.

She refuses to give her son to them — and then somehow it is in her mother's arms. Her father blows out the candle.

Holly wakes to a howling beast that is only the wind, but beast enough, hammering the walls, shaking dust down from the roof beams.

A soft glow, not a candle but a small flashlight, brings minimal relief from the darkness in which she has been imprisoned. It reveals the knitted black ski mask, the chapped lips, and the beryl-blue eyes of one of her keepers kneeling before her — the one who worries her.

"I've brought you candy," he says.

He holds out to her a Mr. Goodbar.

His fingers are long and white. His nails are bitten.

Holly dislikes touching anything that he has touched. Hiding her distaste, she accepts the candy bar.

"They're asleep. This is my shift." He puts on the floor in front of her a can of cola beaded with icy sweat. "You like Pepsi?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Do you know Chamisal, New Mexico?" he asks.

He has a soft, musical voice. It could almost be a woman's voice, but not quite.

"Chamisal?" she says. "No. I've never been there."

"I've had experiences there," he says. "My life was changed."

Wind booms and something rattles on the roof, and she uses the noise as an excuse to look up, hoping to see a memorable detail of her prison for later testimony.

She was brought here in a blindfold. At the end, they came up narrow steps. She thinks she might be in an attic.

Half the lens of the small flashlight has been taped over. The ceiling remains unrevealed in gloom. The light reaches only to the nearest bare-board wall, and all else around her is lost in shadow.

They are careful.

"Have you been to Rio Lucio, New Mexico?" he asks.

"No. Not there, either."

"In Rio Lucio, there is a small stucco house painted blue with yellow trim. Why don't you eat your chocolate?"

"I'm saving it for later."

"Who knows how much time any of us has?" he asks. "Enjoy it now I like to watch you eat."

Reluctantly, she peels the wrapper off the candy bar.

"A saintly woman named Ermina Lavato lives in the blue-and-yellow stucco house in Rio Lucio. She is seventy-two."

He believes that statements like this constitute conversation. His pauses suggest that obvious rejoinders are available to Holly.

After swallowing chocolate, she says, "Is Ermina a relative?"

"No. She's of Hispanic origin. She makes exquisite chicken fajitas in a kitchen that looks like it came from the 1920s."

"I'm not much of a cook," Holly says inanely.

His gaze is riveted on her mouth, and she takes a bite from the Mr. Goodbar with the feeling that she's engaged in an obscene act.

"Ermina is very poor. The house is small but very beautiful. Each room is painted a different soothing color."

As he stares at her mouth, she returns the scrutiny, to the extent his mask allows. His teeth are yellow. The incisors are sharp, the canines unusually pointed.

"Her bedroom walls hold forty-two images of the Holy Mother."

His lips look as if they are perpetually chapped. Sometimes he chews at the loose shreds of skin when he isn't talking.

"In the living room are thirty-nine images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by thorns."

The cracks in his lips glisten as if they might start seeping.

"In Ermina Lavato's backyard, I buried a treasure."

"As a gift for her?" Holly asks.

"No. She would not approve of what I buried. Drink your Pepsi."

She does not want to drink from a can he handled. She opens it anyway, and takes a sip.

"Do you know Penasco, New Mexico?"

"I haven't traveled much in New Mexico."

He is silent for a moment, and the wind howls into his silence, and his gaze drops to her throat as she swallows Pepsi. Then: "My life changed in Penasco."

"I thought that was Chamisal."

"My life has changed often in New Mexico. It's a place of change and great mystery."

Having thought of a use for the Pepsi can, Holly sets it aside with the hope he will allow her to keep it if she hasn't finished the cola by the time he leaves.

"You would enjoy Chamisal, Penasco, Rodarte, so many beautiful and mysterious places."

She considers her words before she speaks. "Let's hope I live to see them."

He meets her stare directly. His eyes are the blue of a somber sky that suggests an impending storm even in the absence of clouds.

In a voice still softer than usual, not in a whisper but with a quiet tenderness, he says, "May I speak to you in confidence?"

If he touches her, she will scream until she wakes the others.

Interpreting her expression as consent, he says, "There were five of us, and now just three."

This is not what she has expected. She holds his gaze though it disturbs her.

"To improve the split from five ways to four, we killed Jason."

She cringes inwardly at the revelation of a name. She doesn't want to know names or see faces.

"Now Johnny Knox has disappeared," he says. "Johnny was running surveillance, hasn't called in. The three of us — we didn't agree to improve the split from four. The issue was never raised."

Mitch, she thinks at once.

Outside, the tenor of the wind changes. Ceasing to shriek, it rushes with a great shush, counseling Holly in the wisdom of silence.

"The other two were out on errands yesterday," he continues, "separately, at different times. Either could have killed Johnny."

To reward him for these revelations, she eats more chocolate.

Watching her mouth once more, he says, "Maybe they decided on a two-way split. Or one of them may want to have it all."

Not wishing to appear to sow discord, she says, "They wouldn't do that."

"They might," he says. "Do you know Vallecito, New Mexico?"

Licking chocolate from her lips, Holly says, "No."

"Austere," he says. "So many of these places are austere but so beautiful. My life changed in Vallecito."

"How did it change?"

Instead of answering, he says, "You should see Las Trampas, New Mexico, in the snow. A scattering of humble buildings, white fields, low hills dark with chaparral, and the sky as white as the fields."

"You're something of a poet," she says, and half means it.

"They have no casinos in Las Vegas, New Mexico. They have life and they have mystery."

His white hands come together, not in contemplation, certainly not in prayer, but as though each possesses its own awareness, as if they are pleased by the feel of each other.

"In Rio Lucio, Eloisa Sandoval has a shrine to Saint Anthony in her small adobe-walled kitchen. Twelve ceramic figures arranged in tiers, one for each child and grandchild. Candles every evening in the vespers hour."

She hopes that he will make new revelations about his partners, but she knows that she must appear discreetly intrigued by everything he says.

"Ernest Sandoval drives a '64 Chevy Impala with giant steel chain links for a steering wheel, a custom-painted dashboard, and a ceiling upholstered in red velvet."

The long fingers with spatulate pads smooth one another, smooth and smooth.

"Ernest is interested in saints with whom his pious wife is unfamiliar. And he knows…amazing places."

The Mr. Goodbar has begun to cloy in Holly's mouth, to stick in her throat, but she takes another bite of it.

"Ancient spirits dwell in New Mexico, since before the existence of humanity. Are you a seeker?"

If she encourages him too much, he will read her as insincere. "I don't think so. Sometimes we all feel…something is missing. But that's everyone. That's human nature."

"I see a seeker in you, Holly Rafferty. A tiny seed of spirit waiting to bloom."

His eyes are as clear as a limpid stream, but cloaked by silt at the bottom are strange forms that she cannot identify.

Lowering her gaze, she says demurely, "I'm afraid you see too much in me. I'm not a deep thinker."

"The secret is not to think. We think in words. And what lies beneath the reality we see is a truth that words can't contain. The secret is to feel."

"See, to you that's a simple concept, but even that's too deep for me." She laughs softly at herself. "My biggest dream is to be in real estate."

"You underestimate yourself," he assures her. "Within you are…enormous possibilities."

His large bony wrists and long pale hands are utterly hairless, either naturally or because he uses a depilatory cream.

Chapter 40

With hobgoblins of wind threatening at the open window in the driver's door, Mitch cruised past Anson's house in Corona del Mar.

Large creamy-white flowers had been shaken from the big magnolia tree and had blown in a drift against the front door, revealed in a stoop lamp that remained on all night. Otherwise, the house was dark.

He did not believe that Anson had come home, washed up, and gone happily to sleep almost at once after killing their parents. He must be out somewhere — and up to something.

Mitch's Honda no longer stood at the curb where he had left it when he had first come here at the direction of the kidnappers.

In the next block, he parked, finished a Hershey's bar, rolled up the window, and locked the Chrysler Windsor. Unfortunately, it drew attention to itself among the surrounding contemporary vehicles, museum grandeur in a game arcade.

Mitch walked to the alleyway on which Anson's garage had access. Lights blazed throughout the lower floor of the rear condo above the pair of two-car garages.

Some people might have work that kept them busy just past three-thirty in the morning. Or insomnia.

Standing in the alleyway, Mitch planted his feet wide to resist the rushing wind. He studied the high curtained windows.

Since Campbell's library, he had entered a new reality. He saw things more clearly now than he had seen them from his former perspective.

If Anson had eight million dollars and a fully paid-off yacht, he probably owned both condos, not just one, as he had claimed. He lived in the front unit and used the back condo for the office in which he applied linguistic theory to software design, or whatever the hell he did to get rich.

The toiler in the night, behind those curtained windows, was not a neighbor. Anson himself sat up there, bent to a computer.

Perhaps he was plotting a course, by yacht, to a haven beyond the authority of all law.

A service gate opened onto a narrow walkway beside the garage. Mitch followed it into the brick courtyard that separated the two condos. The courtyard lights were off.

Bordering the brick patio were planting beds lush with nandina and a variety of ferns, plus bromeliads and anthuriums to provide a punctuation of red blooms.

The houses to the front and back, the tall side fences, and the neighboring houses crowding close on their narrow lots all blocked the wind. Though still marked by blustering crosscurrents, a more genteel version slipped down the roof slopes and danced with the courtyard greenery instead of whipping it.

Mitch slipped under the arching fronds of a Tasmanian tree fern, which swayed, trembled. He crouched there, peering out at the patio.

The skirt of broad, spreading, lacy fronds rose and dipped, rose and dipped, but the patio was not entirely screened from him at any time. If he remained alert, he couldn't miss a man passing from the back condo to the front.

In the shelter of the tree-fern canopy, he smelled rich planting soil, an inorganic fertilizer, and the vaguely musky scent of moss.

At first this comforted him, reminded him of life when it had been simpler, just sixteen hours ago. After a few minutes, however, the melange of odors brought to mind instead the smell of blood.

In the condo above the garages, the lights went out.

Perhaps assisted by the windstorm, a door slammed shut. The chorus of wind voices did not entirely cover the thud of heavy hurried footsteps that descended exterior stairs to the courtyard.

Between the fronds, Mitch glimpsed a bearish figure crossing the brick patio.

Anson was not aware of his brother behind him, closing, and let out a strangled cry only when the Taser short-circuited his nervous system.

When Anson staggered forward, trying to stay on his feet, Mitch remained close. The Taser delivered another fifty-thousand-volt kiss.

Anson embraced the bricks. He rolled onto his back. His burly body twitched. His arms flopped loosely. His head rolled side to side, and he made noises that suggested he might be in danger of swallowing his tongue.

Mitch didn't want Anson to swallow his tongue, but he wasn't going to take any action to prevent it from happening, either.

Chapter 41

Apocalyptic flocks of wind beat wings against the walls and l. swoop the roof, and the darkness itself seems to vibrate.

The hairless hands, white as doves, groom each other in the dim glow of the half-taped flashlight.

The gentle voice regales her: "In El Valle, New Mexico, there is a graveyard where the grass is seldom cut. Some graves have stones, and some do not."

Holly has finished the chocolate. She feels half sick. Her mouth tastes like blood. She uses Pepsi as a mouthwash.

"A few graves without headstones are surrounded by small picket fences crafted from the slats of old fruit and vegetable crates."

All this is leading somewhere, but his thoughts proceed along neural pathways that can be anticipated only by a mind as bent as his.

"Loved ones paint the pickets in pastels — robin's-egg blue, pale green, the yellow of faded sunflowers."

In spite of the sharp enigmas underlying their soft color, his eyes repel her less, right now, than do his hands.

"Under a quarter moon, hours after a new grave was closed, we did some spade work and opened the wooden casket of a child."

"The yellow of faded sunflowers," Holly repeats, trying to fill her mind with that color as defense against the image of a child in a coffin.

"She was eight, taken by cancer. They buried her with a Saint Christopher medal folded in her left hand, a porcelain figurine of Cinderella in her right because she loved that story."

The sunflowers will not sustain, and in her mind's eye, Holly sees the small hands holding tight to the protection of the saint and to the promise of the poor girl who became a princess.

"By virtue of some hours in the grave of an innocent, those objects acquired great power. They were death-washed and spirit-polished."

The longer she meets his eyes, the less familiar they become.

"We took from her hands the medal and the figurine, and replaced them with…other items."

One white hand vanishes into a pocket of his black jacket. When it reappears, it holds the Saint Christopher medal by a silver chain.

He says, "Here. Take it."

That the object comes from a grave does not repulse her, but that it has been taken from the hand of a dead child offends.

More is happening here than he is putting into words. There is a subtext that Holly does not understand.

She senses that to reject the medal for any reason will have terrible consequences. She holds out her right hand, and he drops the medal into it. The chain ravels in random coils on her palm.

"Do you know Espanola, New Mexico?"

Folding her hand around the medal, she says, "It's another place I've missed."

"My life will be changed there," he reveals as he picks up the flashlight and rises to his feet.

He leaves her in pitch black with the half-full can of Pepsi, which she expects him to take. Her intention is — or had been — to squash the can and to create from it a miniature pry bar with which to work on the stubborn nail.

The Saint Christopher medal will do a better job. Cast in brass and plated with silver or nickel, it is much harder than the soft aluminum of the can.

Her keeper's visit has changed the quality of this lightless space. It had been a lonely darkness. Now Holly imagines it inhabited by rats and waterbugs and legions of crawling things.

Chapter 42

Anson fell hard in front of the back door, and the wind. seemed to cheer his collapse.

Like a creature accustomed to filtering its oxygen from water and now helpless on a beach, he twitched, spasmed. His hands flopped, and his knuckles rapped on the bricks.

He gawped at Mitch, moving his mouth, as if trying to speak, or maybe he was trying to scream in pain. All that came out was a thin squeal, a mere thread of sound, as if his esophagus had constricted to the diameter of a pin.

Mitch tried the door. Unlocked. He pushed it open and stepped into the kitchen.

The lights were off. He didn't switch them on.

Not sure how long the effects of the shock would last, hoping for at least a minute or two, he put the Taser on a counter and returned to the open door.

Warily, he grabbed Anson by the ankles, but his brother was not capable of trying to kick him. Mitch dragged him into the house, and winced when the back of Anson's head stuttered against the raised threshold.

Closing the door, he turned on the lights. The blinds were shut, as they had been when he and Anson received the phone call from the kidnappers.

The pot oizuppa massaia remained on the stove, cold but still fragrant.

Adjacent to the kitchen lay a laundry room. He checked it and found it to be as he remembered: small, no windows.

At the kitchen table, the four dinette chairs were retro-chic stainless steel and red vinyl. He moved one of them to the laundry room.

On the floor, hugging himself as if he were freezing, but most likely trying to stop the twitching, trying to get control of the less dramatic but still continuous muscle spasms, Anson made the pitiable sounds of a dog in pain.

The agony might be real. It might be a performance. Mitch kept a safe distance.

He retrieved the Taser. Reaching to the small of his back, he withdrew the pistol that he had tucked under his belt.

"Anson, I want you to roll over, facedown."

His brother's head lolled from side to side, not in refusal but perhaps involuntarily.

Anticipation of revenge had been in its way a different kind of sugar rush. In reality, nothing about it tasted sweet.

"Listen to me. I want you to roll over and crawl as best you can to the laundry room."

Drool escaped a corner of Anson's mouth. His chin glistened.

"I'm giving you a chance to do it the easy way."

Anson continued to appear disoriented and not in easy control of his body.

Mitch wondered if two Taser shots in quick succession, and the second held perhaps too long, could have done permanent damage. Anson seemed to have been worse than stunned.

The big man's fall might have contained an element of tragedy if he had fallen from a height, but he had gone from low to lower.

Mitch hounded him, repeatedly making the same commands. Then: "Damn it, Anson, if I have to, I can give you a third shock and drag your ass in there while you're helpless."

The back door rattled, distracting Mitch. Only the hand of the wind tested the latch as a strong gust swept more boldly into the sheltered courtyard.

When he looked at Anson again, he saw an acute awareness in his brother's eyes, a sly calculation, which vanished in that glaze of disorientation. Anson's eyes rolled back in his head.

Mitch waited half a minute. Then he moved quickly toward his brother.

Anson sensed him coming, thought he was going to use the Taser, and sat up to block it, grab it.

Instead Mitch squeezed off a shot, intentionally missing his brother, but not by much. At the report of the pistol, Anson flinched back in surprise, and Mitch slammed the gun against the side of his head, hard enough to hurt bad — hard enough, as it turned out, to knock him unconscious.

The point had been to gain Anson's cooperation by convincing him that he was not dealing with the same Mitch. But this worked, too.

Chapter 43

He ain't heavy, he's my brother. Bullshit. He was Mitch's brother, and he was heavy.

Dragging him across the polished wood floor of the kitchen and into the laundry room proved harder than Mitch expected. Hoisting him into the chair was one door away from impossible, but Mitch got it done.

The upholstered panel on the back of the chair fit between two steel verticals. Between each side of that padded panel and the frame was an open space.

He pulled Anson's hands through those gaps. With the handcuffs that he himself had worn earlier, he shackled his brother's wrists behind the chair.

Among the items in a utility drawer were three spare electrical extension cords. A thick orange cord was about forty feet long.

After weaving it through the chair's legs and stretcher bars, Mitch tied it around the washing machine. Far less flexible than rope, the rubber cord would allow only loose knots, so he tied three.

Although Anson might be able to rise into a half crouch, he would have to lift the chair with him. But anchored to the washer, he could not go anywhere.

The blow with the pistol had cut his ear. He was bleeding but not heavily.

His pulse was slow but steady. He might come around quickly.

Leaving the overhead light on, Mitch went upstairs to the master bedroom. He saw what he expected: two small night-lights plugged into wall outlets, neither switched on at the moment.

As a child, Anson had slept with a lamp on low As a teenager, he had settled for a night-light similar to these. In every room of this house, as preparation for a power failure, he kept a flashlight that received fresh batteries four times a year.

Downstairs again, Mitch glanced in the laundry room. Anson remained unconscious in the chair.

Mitch searched the kitchen drawers until he found where Anson kept keys. He plucked out a spare house key. He also took the keys for three different cars, including his Honda, and left the house by the back door.

He doubted that the neighbors could have heard the shot — or, having heard it, could have recognized it for what it was — after it had been filtered through the boom and cry of the wind at war with itself. Nevertheless, he was relieved to see no lights in the houses to either side.

He climbed the stairs to the condo above the garages and tried the door, which was locked. As he expected, the key to Anson's house also opened this one.

Inside, he found Anson's home office occupying space that would normally be a living room and dining area. The nautical paintings were by some of the artists featured in the front condo.

Four computer workstations were served by a single wheeled office chair. The size of the logic units, far larger than anything ordinarily seen in a home, suggested his work required rapid multitiered computation and massive data storage.

Mitch wasn't a computer maven. He had no illusions that he could boot up these machines — if boot up was even a term in use anymore — and discover the nature of the work that had made his brother rich.

Besides, Anson would have layers of security, passwords and procedures, to keep out even serious hackers. He had always been delighted by the elaborate codes and arcane symbolism of the maps that pirates drew to their caches of treasure in those tales that enthralled him as a boy.

Mitch left, locked the door, and went down to the first of the garages. Here were the Expedition that he had driven to Campbell's estate in Rancho Santa Fe and the 1947 Buick Super Woody Wagon.

In the other two-car garage were an empty stall and Mitch's Honda, which he had left on the street.

Perhaps Anson had stored it here after driving it to Orange and taking two of Mitch's garden tools as well as some of his clothes, to Daniel and Kathy's place to murder them, and then to Mitch's again to plant the incriminating evidence.

Mitch opened the trunk. John Knox's body remained wrapped in the weathered canvas tarp.

The accident in the loft seemed to have happened in a long-ago time, in another life.

He returned to the first garage, started the Expedition, and moved it to the empty stall in the second garage.

After moving his Honda to park it beside the Buick wagon, he closed the big roll-up door on that garage.

Grimly, he wrestled the recalcitrant body from the trunk of the Honda. While it lay on the garage floor, he rolled the corpse out of the tarp.

Serious putrescence had not set in yet. The dead man had a sinister sweet-and-sour smell, however, that Mitch was eager to get away from.

The wind keened at the small high windows of the garage, as if it had a taste for the macabre and had blown itself a long way across the world to see Mitch at this gruesome work.

He thought that all this dragging around of bodies should have about it a quality of farce, especially considering that Knox was stiff with rigor mortis and hellaciously cumbersome. But at the moment he had a serious case of laugh-deficit disorder.

After he had loaded Knox into the Buick wagon and closed the tailgate, he folded the tarp and put it in the trunk of the Honda. Eventually he would dispose of it in a Dumpster or in a stranger's trash can.

He couldn't recall ever having been this exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally. His eyes felt singed, his joints half-melted, his muscles fully cooked and tender enough to fall off the bone.

Maybe the sugar and caffeine in the Hershey's bars prevented his engine from stalling. Fear fueled him, too. But what most kept his wheels turning was the thought of Holly in the hands of monsters.

Till death us do part was the stated commitment in their vows.

For Mitch, however, the loss of her would not release him. The commitment would endure. The rest of his life would pass in patient waiting.

He walked the alleyway to the street, returned to the Chrysler Windsor, and drove it back to the second garage. He parked it beside the Expedition and closed the roll-down door.

He consulted his wristwatch—4:09.

In ninety minutes, maybe a little longer, maybe a little less, the furious wind would blow dawn in from the east. Because of dust flung high into the atmosphere, the first light would be pink, and it would rapidly squall across the heavens, fading to the color of a more mature sky as it was blown toward the sea.

Since he had met Holly, he had greeted every day with great expectations. This day was different.

He returned to the house and found Anson awake in the laundry room, and in a mood.

Chapter 44

The cut on his left ear had crusted shut, and body heat was quickly drying the blood that had trickled down his cheek and neck.

His bearish good looks had settled into harder edges, as though a genetic contagion had introduced major wolf DNA into his face. Jaws clenched so tight that his facial muscles knotted, eyes molten with rage, Anson sat in seething silence.

The wind wasn't loud here. A vent pipe carried sighs and whispers from outside into the dryer, so it seemed as if a troubled spirit haunted that machine.

Mitch said, "You're going to help me get Holly back alive."

That statement elicited neither agreement nor refusal, only a glower.

"They'll be calling in a little more than seven and a half hours with wiring instructions."

Paradoxically, confined in the chair, restrained, Anson looked bigger than he had before. Shackles emphasized his physical power, and it seemed that, like some figure out of myth, if he attained the pinnacle of his potential rage, he would be able to snap his bonds as if they were string.

In Mitch's absence, Anson had tried determinedly to wrench the chair free of the washing machine. The steel legs of the chair had scraped and chattered against the tile floor, leaving scars that revealed the intensity of his futile effort. Also, the washer had been pulled out of alignment with the clothes dryer.

"You said you could put it together by phone, by computer," Mitch reminded him. "You said three hours tops."

Anson spat on the floor between them.

"If you've got eight million, you can spare two for Holly. When it's done, you and I never see each other again. You get to go back to the sewer of a life you've made for yourself."

If Anson discovered that Mitch knew about Daniel and Kathy dead in the learning room, there would be no way to force his cooperation. He would think Mitch had already undone the planted evidence to focus the eye of the law on the true perpetrator.

As long as he believed those murders were not yet known, he could hope that cooperation would lead to a moment when Mitch made a mistake that reversed their fortunes.

"Campbell didn't just let you go," Anson said.

"No."

"So…how?"

"Killed those two."

"You?"

"Now I've got to live with that."

"You popped Vosky and Creed?"

"I don't know their names."

"Those were their names, all right."

"Because of you," Mitch said.

"Vosky and Creed? It doesn't compute."

"Then Campbell must have let me go."

"Campbell would never let you go."

"So believe what you want."

From under a beetled brow, Anson studied him with sour eyes. "Where did you get it-the Taser?"

"Vosky and Creed," Mitch lied.

"You just took it away from them, huh?"

"Like I told you — I took everything away from them. Now I'm giving you a few hours to think about things."

"You can have the money."

"That's not what I want you to think about."

"You can have it, but I've got some conditions."

"You don't get to make the rules," Mitch said.

"It's my two million."

"No. It's mine now. I've earned it."

"Cool down, all right?"

"If you were them, you'd screw her first."

"Hey, you know, that's just a thing I said."

"If you were them, you'd kill her but screw her first."

"It was just something to say. Anyway, I'm not them."

"No, you're not them. You're the cause of them."

"Wrong. Things happen. They just happen."

"Without you, they wouldn't be happening to me."

"If you want to look at it that way, you will."

"Here's what you need to think about — who I am now."

"You want me to think about who you are?"

"No more fratello piccolo. Huh? You understand?"

"But you are my little brother."

"If you think of me that way, you'll pull some dumb move I would have fallen for then, but I won't fall for it now."

"If we can make a deal, I'm not pulling any moves."

"We've already made the deal."

"You've got to cut me some slack, man."

"So you can hang me with it?"

"How can any deal work without at least a little trust?"

"You just sit here and think about how fast you could be dead."

Mitch switched off the lights and stepped across the threshold.

In the dark, windowless laundry room, Anson said, "What're you doing?"

"Providing the best learning environment," Mitch said, and pulled the door shut.

"Mickey?" Anson called.

Mickey. After all this, Mickey.

"Mickey, don't do this."

At the kitchen sink, Mitch scrubbed his hands, using a lot of soap and hot water, trying to wash away the tactile memory of John Knox's body, which felt as if it had been imprinted on his skin.

From the refrigerator, he got a package of cheddar-cheese slices and a squeeze bottle of mustard. He found a loaf of bread and made a cold cheese sandwich.

"I hear you out there," Anson called from the laundry room. "What are you doing, Mickey?"

Mitch put the sandwich on a plate. He added a dill pickle. From the refrigerator he got a bottle of beer.

"What's the point of this, Mickey? We've already got a deal. There's no point to this."

Mitch tilted another kitchen chair under the knob of the laundry-room door, bracing it.

"What's that?" Anson asked. "What's happening?"

Mitch switched off the kitchen lights. He went upstairs to Anson's bedroom.

After putting the pistol and the Taser on the nightstand, he sat on the bed, his back against the padded headboard.

He didn't turn down the quilted silk bedspread. He didn't take off his shoes.

After eating the sandwich and the pickle, and drinking the beer, he set the clock radio for 8:30 a.m.

He wanted Anson to have time to think, but he was taking this four-hour break primarily because his own thinking had been slowed by exhaustion. He needed a clear head for what was coming.

Raging across the roof, beating on the windows, speaking in the wild voice of a mob, the wind seemed to mock him, to promise that his every plan would end in chaos.

This was a Santa Ana, the dry wind that harried moisture from the vegetation in the canyons around which many southern California communities had been built, turning that dense growth into tinder. An arsonist would toss a burning rag, another would use a cigarette lighter, another would strike a match — and for days the news would be filled with fire.

The drapes were shut, and when he switched off the lamp, a coverlet of darkness fell over him. He didn't use either of Anson's small night-lights.

Holly's lovely face rose into his mind, and he said aloud, "God, please give me the strength and the wisdom to help her."

This was the first time in his life that he had spoken to God.

He made no promises of piety and charity. He didn't think it worked that way. You could not make deals with God.

With the most important day of his life soon to dawn, he didn't think that he could sleep, but he slept.

Chapter 45

The nail waits. Holly sits in the dark, listening to the wind, fingering the Saint Christopher medal.

She sets aside the can of Pepsi without drinking the last half of it. She does not want to have to use the bedpan again, at least not when the sonofabitch on duty is the sonofabitch with the white hairless hands.

The thought of him emptying her bedpan creeps her out. Just asking him to do it would create an intolerable intimacy.

As she fingers the medal in her left hand, her right hand drops to her belly. Her waist is narrow, her stomach flat. The child grows in her, a secret, as private as a dream.

They say that if you listen to classical music while pregnant, your child will have a higher IQ. As an infant, he or she will cry less and be more content.

This may be true. Life is complex and mysterious. Cause and effect are not always clear. Quantum physicists say that sometimes effect comes before cause. She had watched a one-hour

program about that on the Discovery Channel. She hadn't made much sense of it; and the scientists describing the various phenomena admitted they could not explain them, only observe them.

She moves her hand in slow circles over her belly, thinking how fine it would be, how sweet, if the baby gave a twitch that she could feel. Of course, it is only a ball of cells at this stage, not yet capable of giving a Hi, Mom kick.

Even now, however, its full potential is there, a tiny person in the shell of her body, like a pearl steadily accreting in an oyster, and everything she does will affect her little passenger. No more wine with dinner. Cut way back on the coffee. Perform faithful but sensible exercise. Avoid another kidnapping.

Saint Christopher, being the protector of children, has brought her to a reconsideration of the nail as she blindly traces his image with her fingertips.

She's probably being irrational, taking this babies-learn-in-the-womb business too far. Yet it seems that if, while pregnant, she thrusts a nail into some guy's carotid artery or through his eye into his brain, the incident will surely have an effect on the baby.

Extremely strong emotion — again, according to the Discovery Channel — causes the brain to order the release into the blood of veritable floods of hormones or other chemicals. A homicidal frenzy would seem to qualify as a strong emotion.

If too much caffeine in the blood can put the unborn child at risk, torrents of killer-mommy enzyme can't be desirable. She intends to use the nail on a bad guy, of course, a really bad guy, but the baby has no way of knowing the victim isn't a good guy.

The baby won't be born with homicidal tendencies because of a single incident of violent self-defense. Nevertheless, Holly broods about the nail.

Maybe this irrational worrying is a symptom of pregnancy, like morning sickness, which she hasn't experienced yet, or like a craving for chocolate ice cream with pickles.

Prudence also plays a role in her rethinking of the nail scheme. When you deal with people like those who had kidnapped her, you better not strike out against them unless you are certain that you can carry through with the assault successfully.

If you try to thrust a nail through someone's eye but instead stab him in the nose, you are going to have an angry nose-stabbed criminal psychopath on your case. Not good.

She is still fingering the Saint Christopher medal, pondering the pros and cons of fighting vicious gunmen with only a three-inch nail, when the representative of the New Mexico Tourist Board returns.

He comes behind a flashlight with a half-taped lens, as before, and still has the hands of a pianist from Hell. He kneels in front of her and puts the flashlight on the floor.

"You like the medallion," he says, sounding pleased to see her smoothing it between her fingers as if it is a worry bead.

Instinct encourages her to play to his weirdness. "It has an interesting…feel."

"The girl in the coffin wore a simple white dress with cheap lace tacked to the collar and cuffs. She looked so peaceful."

He has chewed all the shreds of loose skin from his chapped lips. They are mottled red and appear to be tender, swollen.

"She wore white gardenias in her hair. When we opened the lid, the pent-up perfume of the gardenias was intense."

Holly closes her eyes to avoid his.

"We took the medallion and the figurine of Cinderella to a place near Angel Fire, New Mexico, where there's a vortex."

Evidently he thought she knew what he meant by vortex.

His gentle voice becomes gentler, and almost sad, when he adds, "I killed them both in their sleep."

For a moment, she thinks this statement relates to the vortex in Angel Fire, New Mexico, and she tries to make sense of it in that context. When she realizes what he means, she opens her eyes.

"They pretended they didn't know what happened to John Knox, but at least one of them had to know, all right, and probably both."

In a room nearby are two dead men. She didn't hear gunfire. Maybe he slit their throats.

She can picture his pale hairless hands wielding a straight razor with the grace of a magician rolling coins across his knuckles.

Holly has grown accustomed to the manacle on her ankle, to the chain that connects her to a ringbolt in the floor. Suddenly she is again acutely aware that she is not only imprisoned in a room with no windows but also is limited to the portion of the room that the chain permits her to reach.

He says, "I would have been next, and they would have done a two-way split."

Five people had planned her kidnapping. Only one remains.

If he touches her, there is no one to respond to her scream. They are alone together.

"What happens now?" she asks, and at once wishes that she hadn't.

"I'll speak to your husband at noon, as scheduled. Anson will have fronted him the money. Then it's up to you."

She parses his third sentence, but it's a dry lemon from which she can't squeeze any juice. "What do you mean?"

Instead of answering her question, he says, "As part of a church festival, a small carnival comes to Penasco, New Mexico, in August."

She has the crazy feeling that if she snatches off his knitted ski mask, there will be no features to his face other than the beryl-blue eyes and the mouth with yellow teeth and sore lips. No eyebrows, no nose, no ears, the skin as smooth and featureless as white vinyl.

"Just a Ferris wheel and a few other rides, a few games — and last year a fortuneteller."

His hands swoop up to describe the shape of the Ferris wheel but then come to roost on his thighs.

"The fortuneteller calls herself Madame Tiresias, but of course that is not her real name."

Holly is squeezing the medallion so tightly in one hand that her knuckles ache and the raised image of the saint is no doubt impressed in her palm.

"Madame Tiresias is a fraud, but the funny thing is, she has powers of which she's unaware."

He pauses between each statement as if what he has said is so profound that he wants her to have time to absorb it.

"She would not have to be a fraud if she could recognize what she really is, and I intend to show her this year."

Speaking without a tremor in her voice requires self-control, but Holly brings him back to the question he would not answer: "What did you mean — then it will be up to me?"

When he smiles, part of his mouth disappears from the horizontal slit in the mask. This makes his smile seem sly and knowing, as if no one's secrets are safe from him.

"You know what I mean," he says. "You're not Madame Tiresias. You have full knowledge of yourself."

She senses that if she denies his assertion, she will test his patience and perhaps make him angry. His soft voice and his gentle manner are sheep's clothing, and Holly does not want to poke the wolf beneath the fleece.

"You've given me so much to think about," she says.

"I am aware of that. You've been living behind a curtain, and now you know there's not just a window under it, but a whole new world beyond."

Afraid that one wrong word will shatter the spell that the killer has cast over himself, Holly says only, "Yes."

He rises to his feet. "You have some hours yet to decide. Do you need anything?"

A shotgun, she thinks, but she says, "No."

"I know what your decision will be, but you need to reach it on your own. Have you ever been to Guadalupita, New Mexico?"

"No."

His smile curves up behind the slit in the black mask. "You will go there, and you will be amazed."

He follows his flashlight, leaving her alone in darkness.

Gradually Holly realizes that the wind is still blowing hard. From the moment he'd told her that he killed the other kidnappers, the wind had vanished from her consciousness.

For a while she has heard only his voice. His sinuous, insidious voice.

She has not even heard her heart, but she hears it now and feels it, too, shaking the cage of ribs against which it pounds.

The baby, tiny ball of cells, is now bathed in the fight-or-flight chemicals that her brain has ordered released into her blood. Maybe that isn't so bad. Maybe it's even good. Maybe being marinated in that flood will make Baby Rafferty, him or her, tougher than would otherwise be the case.

This is a world that increasingly requires toughness of good people.

With the Saint Christopher medal, Holly sets diligently to work on the stubborn nail.