Husband

Chapter 46

The alarm woke Mitch at eight-thirty, and the wind that had worried his dreams still churned the real world.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, yawning, looking at the backs of his hands, at the palms. After what those hands had done the previous night, they ought to have looked different from the way they had always looked before, but he could discern no change.

Passing the mirrored closet doors, he saw that his clothes were not unusually wrinkled. He had awakened in the same position in which he had fallen asleep; and he must not have moved in four hours.

In the bathroom, searching drawers, he found several unopened toothbrushes. He unwrapped one and used it, then shaved with Anson's electric razor.

Carrying the pistol and the Taser, he went downstairs to the kitchen.

The chair was still braced under the laundry-room doorknob. No sound came from in there.

He cracked three eggs, spiced them with Tabasco sauce, scrambled them, sprinkled Parmesan on them, and ate them with two slices of buttered toast and a glass of orange juice.

By habit, he began to gather the dishes to wash them, but then realized the absurdity of being a thoughtful guest under these circumstances. He left the dirty dishes on the table.

When he opened the laundry and switched on the lights, he found Anson cuffed as before, soaked in sweat. The room wasn't

unusually warm.

"Have you thought about who I am?" Mitch asked.

Anson didn't appear angry anymore. He slumped in the chair and hung his burly head. He did not look physically smaller; but in some way he had been diminished.

When his brother didn't answer, Mitch repeated the question: "Have you thought about who I am?"

Anson raised his head. His eyes were bloodshot, but his lips were pale. Jewels of sweat glittered in his beard stubble.

"I'm in a bad way here," he complained in a voice that he had never used before, one with a whine and with the particular note of offense that suggested he felt victimized.

"One more time. Have you thought about who I am?"

"You're Mitch, but you're not the Mitch I know."

"That's a start."

"There's some part of you now…I don't know what you are.

"I'm a husband. I cultivate. Preserve."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't expect you to understand."

"I've got to go to the bathroom."

"Go ahead."

"I'm bursting. I really have to piss."

"You won't offend me."

"You mean here?"

"It's messy but it's convenient."

"Don't do this to me, bro."

"Don't call me bro."

Anson said, "You're still my brother."

"Biologically."

"Man, this isn't right."

"No, it isn't."

The legs of the chair had scraped a lot more glaze off the floor tiles. Two tiles were cracked.

"Where do you keep the cash?" Mitch asked.

"I wouldn't take your dignity like this."

"You handed me over to killers."

"I didn't humiliate you first."

"You said you'd rape my wife and kill her."

"Are you stuck on that? I explained that."

He had struggled so fiercely to free the chair from the washer that the thick orange extension cord had dimpled the metal of the machine at one corner.

"Where do you keep the cash, Anson?"

"I've got, I don't know, a few hundred in my wallet."

"I'm not stupid. Don't handle me."

Anson's voice cracked. "This hurts like a sonofabitch."

"What hurts?"

"My arms. My shoulders are on fire. Let me change position. Cuff my hands in front of me. This is torture."

Almost pouting, Anson looked like a big little boy. A boy with a coldly calculating reptilian brain.

"Let's talk about the cash first," Mitch said. "You think there's cash, like a lot of cash? There's not."

"If I wire-transfer the money, I'll never see Holly again."

"You might. They don't want you crying to the cops."

"They won't risk her identifying them in court."

"Campbell could persuade them to drop this."

"By beating their mothers, raping their sisters?"

"You want Holly back or not?"

"I killed two of his men. He'd help me now?"

"Maybe. There'd be a respect thing now."

"It wouldn't be a two-way respect thing."

"Man, you've got to stay flexible about people."

"I'm going to tell the kidnappers it has to be a cash trade in person."

"Then it's not going to happen."

"You've got cash somewhere," Mitch insisted. "Money earns interest, dividends. I don't put it in a mattress."

"You read all those pirate stories."

"So?"

"You identified with the pirates, thought they were way cool." Grimacing as if in pain, Anson said, "Please, man, let me go to the bathroom. I'm in a real bad way."

"Now you are a pirate. Even got your own boat, gonna run your business from sea. Pirates don't put their money in banks.

They like to touch it, look at it. They bury it in lots of places so they can get to it easy when their fortunes change."

"Mitch, please, man, I'm having bladder spasms."

"The money you make consulting — yeah, it goes in the bank. But the money from jobs that are — how did you put it? — 'more directly criminal,' like whatever job you did with these guys and then cheated them on the split, that doesn't go in the bank. You don't pay taxes on it."

Anson said nothing.

"I'm not going to march you over to your office and watch while you use the computer to move funds around, arrange a wire transfer. You're bigger than me. You're desperate. I'm not giving you a chance to turn the tables. You're in that chair till this is done."

Accusatorily, Anson said, "I was always there for you."

"Not always."

"As kids, I mean. I was always there for you when we were kids."

"Actually," Mitch said, "we were there for each other."

"We were. That's right. Real brothers. We can get back to that," Anson assured him.

"Yeah? How do we get back to that?"

"I'm not saying it'll be easy. Maybe we start with some honesty. I screwed up, Mitch. It was horrible what I did to you. I was doing some drugs, man, and they messed with my head."

"You weren't doing any drugs. Don't blame it on that. Where's the cash?"

"Bro, I swear to you, the dirty money gets laundered. It ends up in the bank, too."

"I don't believe it."

"You can grind me, but it doesn't change what's true."

"Why don't you think about it some more?" Mitch advised.

"There's nothing to think about. What is is." Mitch switched off the light. "Hey, no," Anson said plaintively.

Stepping across the threshold, pulling the door shut behind him, Mitch closed his brother in the dark.

Chapter 47

Mitch started in the attic. A trapdoor in the walk-in closet off the master bedroom gave access. A ladder folded down off the trap.

Two bare lightbulbs inadequately illuminated the high space, revealing cobwebs in the angles of the rafters.

Eager breathing, hissing, and hungry panting arose at every vent in the eaves, as though the attic were a canary cage and the wind a voracious cat.

Such was the disquieting nature of a Santa Ana wind that even the spiders were agitated by it. They moved restlessly on their webs.

Nothing was stored in the attic. He almost retreated, but was held by suspicion, by a hunch.

This empty space was floored with plywood. Anson would probably not conceal a hoard of cash under a sheet of plywood held down by sixteen nails. He wouldn't be able to get at it fast in an emergency.

Nevertheless, ducking to avoid the lower rafters, Mitch walked back and forth, listening to his hollow footsteps. An odd prophetic feeling seized him, a sense that he was on the brink of a discovery.

His attention was drawn to a nail. The other nails in the floor were pounded flat, but one was raised about a quarter of an inch.

He knelt in front of the nail to examine it. The head was wide and flat. Judging by the size of the head and the thickness of the quarter-inch of shank revealed, it was at least three inches long.

When he pinched the nail between thumb and forefinger and tried to wiggle it, he found that it was firmly lodged.

An extraordinary feeling overcame him, akin to — but different from — what he had experienced when he had first seen the field of squirreltail grass transformed into a silvery whirlpool by the eddying breeze and the moonlight.

Suddenly he felt so close to Holly that he looked over his shoulder, half expecting her to be there. The feeling did not fade, but swelled, until a chill nubbed the flesh on the nape of his neck.

He left the attic and went down to the kitchen. In the drawer where he had found the car keys was a small collection of the most commonly used tools. He selected a screwdriver and a claw hammer.

From the laundry room, Anson said, "What's going on?"

Mitch didn't reply.

In the attic once more, he applied the claw end of the hammer and pulled up the nail. Using the screwdriver as a wedge, tapping the handle with the hammer, he levered the next nail a quarter-inch out of the plywood, and then used the claw to extract it, too.

Agitated spiders plucked silent arpeggios from their silken harps, and the wind was never silent.

The chill on the back of his neck intensified nail by nail. When the last was extracted, he eagerly lifted aside the sheet of plywood.

He found only floor joists. Blankets of fiberglass insulation filled the spaces between the joists.

He lifted out the fiberglass. No strongbox or plastic-wrapped bundles of currency were concealed beneath the insulation.

The prophetic feeling had passed, as had the sense that somehow he had been close to Holly. He sat in mystification.

What the hell was that all about?

Surveying the attic, he felt no compulsion to take up other sheets of plywood.

His original assessment had been correct. In concern of a fire, if for no other reason, Anson wouldn't hide a lot of money where he couldn't get at it quickly.

Mitch left the spiders in darkness with the ever-seeking wind.

In the master closet, after putting up the folding ladder and the trapdoor, he continued his search. He looked behind the hanging clothes, checked drawers for false bottoms, felt under every shelf and along every molding for a hidden lever that might spring open a panel.

In the bedroom, he peered behind paintings in hope of finding a wall safe, although he doubted that Anson would be that obvious. He even rolled the king-size bed out of place, but he found no loose square of carpet concealing a floor vault.

Mitch worked through two bathrooms, a hall closet, and two spare bedrooms that had not been furnished. Nothing.

Downstairs, he began in the mahogany-paneled, book-lined study. There were so many potential hiding places that he had only half finished with the room when he glanced at his watch and saw it was 11:33.

The kidnappers would be calling in twenty-seven minutes.

In the kitchen, he picked up the pistol and went to the laundry room. When he opened the door, the stink of urine met him.

He switched on the light and found Anson in misery.

Most of the flood had been soaked up by his pants, his socks, his shoes, but a small yellow puddle had formed on the tiles at the feet of the chair.

Other than rage, the closest thing sociopaths have to human emotions is self-love and self-pity, the only love and only pity of which they are capable. Their extreme self-love is beyond mere rampant egomania.

Psychotic self-love includes nothing as worthy as self-respect, but it does encompass a kind of overweening pride. Anson could not feel shame, but his pride had fallen from a high place into a swamp of self-pity.

His tan could not conceal an ashen undertone. His face appeared spongy, fungoid. The bloodshot eyes were filmy pools of torment.

"Look what you've done to me," he said.

"You did it to yourself."

If self-pity left room in him for anger, he hid it well.

"This is sick, man."

"It's way sick," Mitch agreed.

"You're having a good laugh."

"No. Nothing funny here."

"'You're laughing inside."

"I hate this."

"If you hate this, where's your shame now?"

Mitch said nothing.

"Where's your red face? Where's my blushing brother?"

"We're running out of time, Anson. They'll be calling soon. I want the cash."

"What do I get? What's in it for me? Why am I supposed to just give and give?"

Arm extended full length, assuming the posture that Campbell had taken with Mitch himself, he pointed the gun at his brother's face.

"You give me the money, and I'll let you live."

"What kind of life would I have?"

"You keep everything else you've got. I pay the ransom, take care of this without the police ever knowing there was a kidnapping, so nobody has to get a statement from you."

No doubt Anson was thinking about Daniel and Kathy.

"You go on like before," Mitch lied, "make whatever kind of life you want."

Anson would have been able to pin their parents' deaths on Mitch with ease if Mitch had been dead and buried in a desert grave beyond discovery. Not so easy now.

"I give you the money," Anson said, "you set me loose."

"That's right."

Dubious, he said, "How?"

"Before I leave to make the trade, I Taser you again, and then I take off the cuffs. I leave while you're still twitching."

Anson thought it over.

"Come on, pirate boy. Give up the treasure. If you don't tell me before the phone rings, it's over."

Anson met his eyes.

Mitch didn't look away. "I'll do it."

"You're just like me," Anson said.

"If that's what you want to think."

Anson's gaze didn't waver. His eyes were bold. His eyes were direct and probing.

He was shackled to a chair. His shoulders ached and his arms ached. He had wet his pants. He was staring down the muzzle of a gun.

Yet his eyes were steady, and full of calculation. A graveyard rat, having tunneled to make nests in a series of skulls, seemed now to occupy this living head, peering out with rat-quick cunning.

"There's a floor safe in the kitchen," Anson said.

Chapter 48

The lower cabinet to the left of the sink featured two roll-out shelves. They contained pots and pans.

Mitch unloaded the shelves and detached them from the tracks in which they rolled, exposing the floor of the cabinet in perhaps one minute.

In the four corners were what appeared to be small wooden angle braces. They were in fact pins holding the otherwise unsecured floor panel in place.

He removed the pins, lifted the floor out of the cabinet, and exposed the concrete slab on which the house had been built. Sunk in the concrete was a floor safe.

The combination that Anson had given him worked on the first try. The heavy lid hinged away from him.

The fireproof box measured approximately two feet long, eighteen inches wide, and one foot deep. Inside were thick packets of hundred-dollar bills in kitchen plastic wrap sealed with clear tape.

The safe also contained a manila envelope. According to Anson, it held bearer bonds issued by a Swiss bank. They were almost as liquid as the hundred-dollar bills but more compact and easier to transport across borders.

Mitch transferred the treasure to the kitchen table and checked the contents of the envelope. He counted six bonds denominated in U.S. dollars, one hundred thousand each, payable to the bearer regardless of whether or not he had been the purchaser.

Just a day previous, he would never have expected to be in possession of so much money; and he doubted that he would ever find himself with this much cash again in his life. Yet he experienced not even the briefest amazement or delight at the sight of such wealth.

This was Holly's ransom, and he was grateful to have it. This money was also why she had been kidnapped, and for that reason, he regarded it with such antipathy that he was loath to touch it.

The kitchen clock read 11:54.

Six minutes until the call.

He returned to the laundry, where he had left the door open and the light on.

As self-involved as he was self-saturated, Anson sat in the wet chair but was somewhere else. He didn't come back to the moment until Mitch spoke to him.

"Six hundred thousand in bonds. How much in cash?"

"The rest of it," Anson said.

"The rest of the two million? So there's a million four hundred thousand in cash?"

"That's what I said. Isn't that what I said?"

"I'm going to count it."

"Go ahead."

"If it's not all there, the deal is off. I don't turn you loose when I leave."

In frustration, Anson rattled his handcuffs against the chair. "What're you trying to do to me?"

"I'm just saying how it is. For me to keep the deal, you have to keep the deal. I'll start counting now."

Mitch turned away from the door, toward the kitchen table, and Anson said, "There's eight hundred thousand in cash."

"Not a million four?"

"The whole bundle, cash and bonds, is a million four. I got confused."

"Yeah. Confused. I need six hundred thousand more."

"That's all there is. I don't have any more."

"You said you didn't have this, either."

"I don't always lie," Anson said.

"Pirates don't bury everything they've got in one place."

"Will you stop with this pirate crap?"

"Why? Because it makes you feel like you've never grown up?" The clock showed 11:55.

Inspiration struck Mitch, and he said, "Stop with the pirate crap because maybe I'll think of the yacht. You bought yourself a sailing yacht. How much do you have stashed aboard it?"

"Nothing. I've got nothing on the boat. Haven't had time to fit it out with a safe."

"If they kill Holly, I'll go through your records here," Mitch said. "I'll get the name of the boat, where it's moored. I'll go down to the harbor with an axe and a power drill."

"Do what you have to do."

"I'll rip it up bow to stern, and when I find the money and know you lied to me, I'll come back here and tape your mouth shut so you can't lie to me anymore."

"I'm telling you the truth."

"I'll close you here in the dark, no water, no food, close you in here to die of dehydration in your own filth. I'll sit right there in the kitchen, at your table, eating your food, listening to you die in the dark."

Mitch didn't believe that he could kill anyone in such a cruel fashion, but to his own ear he sounded hard and cold and convincing.

If he lost Holly, maybe anything was possible. Because of her, he had come fully to life. Without her, a part of him would die, and he would be less of a man.

Anson seemed to follow that same chain of reasoning, for he said, "All right. Okay. Four hundred thousand."

"What?"

"In the boat. I'll tell you where to find it."

"We're still two hundred thousand short."

"There's no more. Not cash. I'd have to liquidate some stock."

Mitch turned to look at the kitchen clock—11:56.

"Four minutes. No time left for lies, Anson."

"Would you for once believe me? Just for once? There's no more in easy cash."

"I already have to change the conditions of the trade," Mitch worried, "no wire transfer. Now I also have to bargain them down two hundred thousand."

"They'll take it," Anson assured him. "I know these pigs. Are they gonna turn down a million eight? No way. Not these pigs."

"You better be right."

"Listen, we're okay now, aren't we? Aren't we okay? So don't leave me in the dark."

Mitch had already turned away from him. He didn't switch off the laundry-room light, and he didn't close the door.

At the table, he stared at the bearer bonds and the cash. He picked up the pen and the notepad and went to the phone.

He could not bear the sight of the telephone. Phones had not brought him good news lately.

He closed his eyes.

Three years ago, they were married with no family in attendance. Dorothy, the grandmother who had raised Holly, had passed suddenly five months previously. On her father's side were an aunt and two cousins. She didn't know them. They didn't care.

Mitch couldn't invite his brother and three sisters without extending an invitation to his parents. He didn't want Daniel and Kathy to be there.

He wasn't motivated by bitterness. He didn't exclude them in anger or as punishment. He'd been afraid for them to be present.

This marriage was his second chance at family, and if it failed, he wouldn't have the nerve to try a third time. Daniel and Kathy were a systemic disease of families, a disease that, allowed in at the roots, would surely deform the plant and wither its fruit.

Afterward, they told his family they had eloped, but actually they'd had a small ceremony and reception at the house for a limited number of friends. Iggy was right: The band had been woofy. Too many numbers with tambourines. And a guy singer who thought his best trick was extended passages in falsetto.

After everyone had gone and the band was a comic memory, he and Holly had danced alone, to a radio, on the portable dance floor that had been set up in the backyard for the event. She had been so lovely in the moonlight, almost otherworldly, that he unconsciously held her too tight, as if she might fade like a phantom, until she said, "I'm breakable, you know," and he relaxed, and she put her head on his shoulder. Although he was usually a clumsy dancer, he never once put a foot wrong, and around them turned the lush landscaping that was the consequence of his patient labor, and above them shone the stars that he had never offered her because he wasn't a man given to poetic declarations, but she owned the stars already, and the moon bowed to her, as well, and all the heavens, and the night.

The phone rang.

Chapter 49

He answered on the second ring and said, "This is Mitch."

"Hello, Mitch. Are you feeling hopeful?"

This mellow voice was not the same as on the previous calls, and the change made Mitch uneasy.

"Yes. I'm hopeful," he said.

"Good. Nothing can be achieved without hope. It was hope that brought me from Angel Fire to here, and it's hope that'll carry me back again."

On consideration, the change didn't disturb Mitch so much as did the nature of the voice. The man spoke with a gentleness that was just one station up the dial from spooky.

"I want to talk to Holly."

"Of course you do. She is the woman of the hour — and acquitting herself very well. This lady is a solid spirit."

Mitch didn't know what to make of that. What the guy had said about Holly was true, but from him, it sounded creepy.

Holly came on the line. "Are you okay, Mitch?"

"I'm all right. I'm going crazy, but I'm all right. I love you."

"I'm okay, too. I haven't been hurt. Not really."

"We're going to pull this off," he assured her. "I'm not going to let you down."

"I never thought you would. Never."

"I love you, Holly."

"He wants the phone back," she said, and returned it to her captor.

She had sounded constrained. Twice he'd told her that he loved her, but she had not responded in kind. Something was wrong.

The gentle voice returned: "There's been one change in the plan, Mitch, one important change. Instead of a wire transfer, cash is king."

Mitch had worried that he would not be able to talk them out of having the ransom sent by wire. He should have been relieved by this development. Instead it troubled him. It was another indication that something had happened to put the kidnappers off their game. A new voice on the phone, then Holly sounding guarded, and now a sudden preference for cash.

"Are you with me, Mitch?"

"Yeah. It's just, you've thrown me a curve here. You should know…Anson hasn't been as full of brotherly concern as maybe you thought he would be."

The caller was amused. "The others thought he would be. I was never sure. I don't expect genuine tears from a crocodile."

"I'm handling the situation," Mitch assured him.

"Have you been surprised by your brother?"

"Repeatedly. Listen, right now I can guarantee eight hundred thousand in cash and six hundred thousand in bearer bonds."

Before Mitch could mention the additional four hundred thousand that was supposedly aboard Anson's boat, the kidnapper said, "That's a disappointment, of course. That other six hundred thousand would buy a lot of time to seek."

Mitch didn't catch the last word. "To what?"

"Do you seek, Mitch?"

"Seek what?"

"If we knew the answer, there'd be no need to seek. A million four will be all right. I'll think of it as a discount for paying cash."

Surprised by the ease with which the lower figure had been accepted, Mitch said, "You can speak for everyone, your partners?"

"Yes. If I don't speak for them, who will?"

"Then…what's next?"

"You come alone."

"All right."

"Unarmed."

"All right."

"Pack the money and bonds in a plastic trash bag. Don't tie the top shut. Are you familiar with the Turnbridge house?"

"Everyone in the county knows the Turnbridge house."

"Come there at three o'clock. Don't get cute and think you can come early and lie in wait. All you'll get for that is a dead wife."

"I'll be there at three. Not a minute earlier. How do I get in?"

"The gate will appear to be chained, but the chain will be loose. After you drive onto the site, replace the chain as it was. What will you be driving?"

"My Honda."

"Stop directly in front of the house. You'll see an SUV. Park well away from it. Park with the back of the Honda toward the house and open the trunk. I want to see no one's in the trunk."

"All right."

"At that point, I'll phone you on your cell with instructions."

"Wait. My cell. It's dead." Actually it was somewhere in Rancho Santa Fe. "Can I use Anson's?"

"What's that number?"

Anson's cell phone lay on the kitchen table, beside the money and the bonds. Mitch snared it. "I don't know the number. I have to switch it on and look. Give me a minute."

As Mitch waited for the phone company logo to leave the screen, the man with the gentle voice said, "Tell me, is Anson alive?"

Surprised by the question, Mitch said only, "Yes."

Amused, the caller said, "The simple answer tells me so much."

"What does it tell you?"

"He underestimated you."

"You're reading too much into one word. Here's the cell number."

After Mitch read the number and then repeated it, the man on the phone said, "We want a smooth simple trade, Mitch. The best piece of business is one from which everyone walks away a winner."

Mitch considered that this was the first time the man with the gentle voice had said we instead of I.

"Three o'clock," the caller reminded him, and hung up.

Chapter 50

Everything in the laundry room was white, everything except the red chair and Anson in it and the small yellow puddle.

Reeking, restless, rocking side to side on the chair, Anson was resigned to cooperation. "Yeah, there's one of them talks like that. Name's Jimmy Null. He's a pro, but he's not a front guy. If he's on the phone with you, the others are dead."

"Dead how?"

"Something went wrong, a disagreement about something, and he decided to bag the whole payoff."

"So you think there's just one of them now?"

"That makes it harder for you, not easier."

"Why harder?"

"Once he's wasted the others, his tendency will be to clean up totally behind himself."

"Holly and me."

"Only when he's got the money." In his misery, Anson found a ghastly smile. "You want to know about the money, bro? You want to know what I do for a living?"

Anson would be offering this information only if he believed that the knowledge would do his brother harm.

Mitch knew that the glint of vicious glee in Anson's eyes was an argument for continued ignorance, but his curiosity outweighed his caution.

Before either of them could speak, the telephone rang.

Mitch returned to the kitchen, briefly considered not answering, but worried that it might be Jimmy Null calling with additional instructions.

"Hello?"

"Anson?"

"He's not here."

"Who's this?"

The voice didn't belong to Jimmy Null.

"I'm a friend of Anson's," Mitch said.

Now that he'd taken the call, the best thing was to carry through with it as if all were normal here.

"When will he be back?" the caller asked.

"Tomorrow."

"Should I try his cell?"

The voice teased Mitch's memory.

Picking up Anson's cell phone from the counter, Mitch said, "He forgot to take it with him."

"Can you give him a message?"

"Sure. Go ahead."

"Tell him that Julian Campbell called."

The glimmer of the gray eyes, the glitter of the gold Rolex. "Anything else?" Mitch asked.

"That's everything. Although I do have one concern, friend of Anson."

Mitch said nothing.

"Friend of Anson, are you there?"

"Yes."

"I hope you're taking good care of my Chrysler Windsor. I love that car. See you later."

Chapter 51

Mitch located the kitchen drawer in which Anson kept two boxes of plastic trash-can liners. He chose the smaller of the sizes, a white thirteen-gallon bag.

He put the blocks of cash and the envelope of bearer bonds in the bag. He twisted the top but didn't tie a knot.

At this hour, in the usual traffic, Rancho Santa Fe was as much as two hours from Corona del Mar. Even if Campbell had associates at work here in Orange County, they wouldn't arrive immediately.

When Mitch returned to the laundry room, Anson said, "Who called?"

"He was selling something."

Sea-green and bloodshot, Anson's eyes were oceans murky with shark's work. "It didn't sound like sales."

"If you were going to tell me what you do for a living."

Malicious glee swam into Anson's eyes again. He wanted to share his triumph less out of pride than because somehow it was knowledge that would wound Mitch.

"Imagine you send data to a customer over the Internet, and on receipt it appears to be innocent material — say photos and a text history of Ireland."

"Appears to be."

"It's not like encrypted data, which is meaningless if you don't have the code. Instead it appears clear, unremarkable. But when you process it with a special software, the photos and text combine and re-form into completely different material, into the hidden truth.'"

"What is the truth?"

"Wait. First…your customer downloads the software and never has a hard copy. If police search his computer and try to copy or analyze the operative software, the program self-destructs beyond reconstitution. Likewise documents stored on the computer in either original or converted form."

Having striven to keep his computer knowledge to the minimum that the modern world would allow, Mitch wasn't sure that he saw the most useful applications of this, but one occurred to him.

"So terrorists could communicate over the Internet, and anyone sampling their transmissions would find them sharing only a history of Ireland."

"Or France or Tahiti, or long analyses of John Wayne's films. No sinister material, no obvious encryption to raise suspicion. But terrorists aren't a stable, profitable market."

"Who is?"

"There are many. But I want you to know especially about the work I did for Julian Campbell."

"The entertainment entrepreneur," Mitch said.

"It's true he owns casinos in several countries. Partly he uses them to launder money from other activities."

Mitch thought he knew the real Anson, a man far different from the one who had ridden south with him to Rancho Santa Fe. No more illusions. No more self-imposed blindness.

Yet in this essential moment, a chilling third iteration of the man revealed itself, almost as much a stranger to Mitch as had been the second Anson who first appeared in Campbell's library.

His face seemed to acquire a new tenant that slouched through the chambers of his skull and brought a darker light to those two familiar green windows.

Something about his body changed, as well. A more primitive hulk seemed to occupy the chair than he who'd sat there a minute previous, still a man but a man in whom the animal was more clearly visible.

This awareness came to Mitch before his brother had begun to reveal the business done with Campbell. He could not pretend that the effect was psychological, that Anson's revelation had transformed him in Mitch's eyes, for the change preceded the disclosure.

"One-half of one percent of men are pedophiles," Anson said. "In the U.S. — one and a half million. And millions of others worldwide."

In this bright white room, Mitch felt on the threshold of a darkness, a terrible gate opening before him, and no turning back.

"Pedophiles are eager consumers of child pornography,"

Anson continued. "Though they might be buying it through a police sting operation that will destroy them, they risk everything to get it."

Who did Hitler's work, Stalin's, Mao Tse-tung's? Neighbors did the work, friends, mothers and fathers did the work, and brothers.

"If the stuff comes in the form of dull text about the history of British theater and converts into exciting pictures and even video, if they can get their need filled safely, their appetite becomes insatiable."

Mitch had left the pistol on the kitchen table. Perhaps he had unconsciously suspected some outrage like this and had not trusted himself with the weapon.

"Campbell has two hundred thousand customers. In two years, he expects a million worldwide, and revenues of five billion dollars."

Mitch remembered the scrambled eggs and toast he had made in this creature's kitchen, and his stomach curdled at the thought of having eaten off plates, with utensils, that those hands had touched.

"Profit on gross sales is sixty percent. The adult performers do it for the fun. The young stars aren't paid. What do they need with money at their age? And I've got a little piece of Julian's business. I told you I have eight million, but it's three times that much."

The laundry room was intolerably crowded. Mitch sensed that in addition to him and his brother, unseen legions were attendant.

"Bro, I just wanted you to understand how filthy the money is that's going to buy Holly. The rest of your life, when you kiss her, touch her, you're going to think about the source of all that dirty, dirty money."

Chained helpless to the chair, sitting in urine, soaked in the fear sweat that earlier the darkness had wrung from him, Anson raised his head defiantly and thrust out his chest, and his eyes shone with triumph, as though having done what he had done, having facilitated Campbell's vile enterprise, was payment enough, that having had the opportunity to serve the appetite of the depraved at the expense of the innocent was all the reward he would need to sustain him through his current humiliation and through the personal ruination to come.

Some might call this madness, but Mitch knew its real name.

"I'm leaving," he announced, for there was nothing else to be said that would matter.

"Taser me," Anson demanded, as if to assert that Mitch did not have the power to hurt him in any lasting way.

"The deal we made?" Mitch said. "Screw it."

He switched out the lights and pulled shut the door. Because there are forces against which it is wise to take extra — and even irrational — precautions, he wedged the door shut with a chair. He might have nailed it shut, as well, if he'd had time.

He wondered if he would ever feel clean again.

A fit of the shakes took him. He felt as if he would be sick.

At the sink, he splashed cold water in his face.

The doorbell rang.

Chapter 52

The chimes played a few bars of "Ode to Joy." Only minutes had passed since Julian Campbell terminated their phone call. Five billion a year in revenues was a treasure that he would do anything to protect, but he couldn't have gotten a fresh pair of gunmen to Anson's place this quickly.

Mitch cranked off the water at the sink and, face dripping, tried to think if there was any reason he should risk checking on the identity of the visitor through a living-room window. His imagination failed him.

Time to get out of here.

He grabbed the trash bag that held the ransom and plucked the pistol off the table. He headed for the back door.

The Taser. He had left it on a counter by the ovens. He returned for it.

Again the unknown visitor rang the bell.

"Who's that?" Anson asked from the laundry room.

"The postman. Now shut up."

Nearing the back door once more, Mitch remembered his brother's cell phone. It had been on the table beside the ransom, yet he had grabbed the bag and left the phone.

Julian Campbell's call, Anson's hideous revelations, and the doorbell, coming one on the heels of the other, had rocked him off balance.

After retrieving the cell phone, Mitch turned in a circle, surveying the kitchen. As far as he could tell, he had forgotten nothing else.

He turned off the lights, stepped out of the house, and locked the door behind him.

The inexhaustible wind played chase-and-hide with itself among the ferns and bamboo. Leathery, wind-seared banyan leaves, blown in from another property, scrabbled this way and that across the patio, scratching at the bricks.

Mitch went to the first of the two garages, entering by the courtyard door. Here his Honda waited, and John Knox ripened in the back of the Buick Super Woody Wagon.

He'd had a vague plan for hanging Knox's death around Anson's neck at the same time that he extricated himself from the setup for Daniel's and Kathy's murders. But Campbell's looming reentry into the situation left him feeling that he was roller-skating on ice, and the vague plan was now no plan at all.

None of that mattered at the moment anyway. When Holly was safe, John Knox and the bodies in the learning room and Anson handcuffed to the chair would matter again, and matter big-time, but now they were incidental to the main problem.

More than two and a half hours remained before he could swap the money for Holly. He opened the trunk of the Honda and tucked the bag into the wheel well.

In the front seat of the Woody, he found a garage-door remote. He clipped it to the Honda's sun visor, so he could close the roll-up door from the alleyway.

He put the pistol and the Taser in the storage pocket in the driver's door. Sitting behind the steering wheel, he could look down and see the weapons, and they were easier to reach than they would have been under the seat.

Triggering the remote control, he watched in the rearview mirror as the big door rolled up.

Backing out of the garage, he glanced to his right, saw the alleyway was clear — and stamped on the brakes in surprise as someone rapped on the driver's-door window. Snapping his head to the left, he discovered that he was face-to-face with Detective Taggart.

Chapter 53

Muffled by glass: "Hello there, Mr. Rafferty." Mitch stared at the detective too long before putting down the car window. His surprise would have been expected; however, he must have looked shocked, fearful.

Warm wind tossed Taggart's sports coat and flapped the collar of his yellow-and-tan Hawaiian shirt as he leaned close to the window. "Do you have time for me?"

"Well, I do have a doctor's appointment," Mitch said.

"Good. I won't keep you too long. Should we talk in the garage, out of this wind?"

John Knox's body lay exposed in the back of the station wagon. The homicide detective might be drawn to it by a keen nose for the earliest odors of decomposition, or by admiration for the beautiful old Buick.

"Sit with me in the car," Mitch said, and he put up the window as he finished backing out of the garage.

He remoted the big door and parked parallel to it, out of the center of the alley, as it rolled down.

Getting into the passenger's seat, Taggart said, "Have you called an exterminator about those termites?"

"Not yet."

"Don't put it off too long."

"I won't."

Mitch sat facing forward, staring at the alley, determined to glance at Taggart only from time to time, because he remembered the penetrating power of the cop's stare.

"If it's pesticides you're worried about, they don't have to use them anymore."

"I know. They can freeze the creepers in the walls."

"Better yet, they've got this highly condensed orange extract that kills them on contact. All natural, and the house smells great."

"Oranges. I'll have to look into that."

"I guess you've been too busy to think about termites."

An innocent man might wonder what this was about and might be impatient to get on with his day, so Mitch risked asking, "Why are you here, Lieutenant?"

"I came to see your brother, but he didn't answer the door."

"He's away until tomorrow."

"Where's he gone?"

"Vegas."

"Do you know his hotel?"

"He didn't say."

"Didn't you hear the doorbell?" Taggart asked.

"I must have left before it rang. I had a few things to do in the garage."

"Looking after the place for your brother while he's away?"

"That's right. Why do you want to talk to him?"

The detective drew up one leg and turned sideways in his seat, facing Mitch directly, as though to compel more eye contact. "Your brother's phone numbers were in Jason Osteen's address book."

Glad to have something truthful to say, Mitch reported: "They met when Jason and I were roommates."

"You didn't stay in touch with Jason, but your brother did?"

"I don't know Maybe. They got along well."

During the night and the morning, all the loose leaves and the litter and the dust had been blown to the sea. Now the wind carried no debris to suggest its form. As invisible as shock waves, massive slabs of crystalline air slammed along the alleyway, rocking the Honda.

Taggart said, "Jason was hooked up with this girl named Leelee Morheim. You know her?"

"No."

"Leelee says Jason hated your brother. Says your brother cheated Jason in some deal."

"What deal?"

"Leelee doesn't know. But one thing's pretty clear about Jason — he didn't do honest work."

That statement required Mitch to meet the detective's eyes and to frown with convincing puzzlement. "Are you saying Anson was involved in something illegal?"

"Do you think that's possible?"

"He's got a Ph.D. in linguistics, and he's a computer geek."

"I knew a professor of physics who murdered his wife, and a minister who murdered a child."

Considering recent events, Mitch no longer believed that the detective might be one of the kidnappers.

If you had spilled your guts to him, Mitch, Holly would be dead now.

Neither did he any longer worry that the kidnappers were keeping him under surveillance or were monitoring his conversations. The Honda might be fitted out with a transponder that allowed it to be tracked easily, but that was of no concern anymore, either.

If Anson was right, Jimmy Null — he of the gentle voice, with concern that Mitch should remain hopeful — had killed his partners. He was the whole show now. Here in the final hours of the operation, Null would be focused not on Mitch but on preparations to trade his hostage for the ransom.

This did not mean that Mitch could turn to Taggart for help. John Knox, laid out in the Woody Wagon as if it were a hearse, thrice dead of a broken neck and a crushed esophagus and a gunshot wound, would require some explaining. No homicide detective would be quickly convinced that Knox had perished in an accidental fall.

Daniel and Kathy would be no more easily explained than Knox.

When Anson was discovered in such miserable condition in the laundry room, he would appear to be a victim, not a victimizer. Given his talent for deception, he would play innocent with conviction, to the confusion of the authorities.

Only two and a half hours remained before the hostage swap.

Mitch had little confidence that the police, as bureaucratic as any arm of the government, would be able to process what had happened thus far and do the right thing for Holly.

Besides, John Knox had died in one local jurisdiction, Daniel and Kathy in another, and Jason Osteen in a third. Those were three separate sets of bureaucracies.

Because this was a kidnapping, the FBI would most likely also have to be involved.

The moment Mitch revealed what had happened and asked for help, his freedom of movement would be curtailed. The responsibility for Holly's survival would devolve from him to strangers.

Dread filled him at the thought of having to sit helplessly as the minutes ticked away and the authorities, even if well meaning, tried to get their minds around the current situation and the events that had led to it.

Taggart said, "How is Mrs. Rafferty?"

Mitch felt known to the bone, as if the detective had already untied many of the knots in the case and used that rope to snare him.

Reacting to Mitch's nonplussed expression, Taggart said, "Did she get some relief from her migraine?"

"Oh. "Yeah." Mitch almost could not conceal his relief that the source of Taggart's interest in Holly was the mythical migraine. "She's feeling better."

"Not entirely well, though? Aspirin really isn't the ideal treatment for a migraine."

Mitch sensed that a trap had been laid before him, but he could not tell its nature — bear, snare, or deadfall — and he didn't know how to avoid it. "Well, aspirin is what she's comfortable with."

"But now she's missed a second day of work," Taggart said.

The detective could have learned Holly's place of employment from Iggy Barnes. His knowledge didn't surprise Mitch, but that he had followed up on the migraine-headache story was alarming.

"Nancy Farasand says it's unusual for Mrs. Rafferty to take a sick day."

Nancy Farasand was another secretary at the Realtor's office where Holly was employed. Mitch himself had spoken to her the previous afternoon.

"Do you know Ms. Farasand, Mitch?"

"Yes."

"She strikes me as a very efficient person. She likes your wife very much, thinks very highly of her."

"Holly likes Nancy, too."

"And Ms. Farasand says it's not at all like your wife to fail to report in when she's going to miss work."

This morning Mitch should have called in sick for Holly. He had forgotten.

He'd also forgotten to phone Iggy to cancel the day's schedule.

Having triumphed over two professional killers, he had been tripped up by inattention to a mundane task or two.

"Yesterday," Detective Taggart said, "you told me that when you saw Jason Osteen shot, you were on the phone with your wife."

The car had gotten stuffy. Mitch wanted to open the window to the wind.

Lieutenant Taggart was approximately Mitch's size, but now he seemed to be larger than Anson. Mitch felt crowded, in a corner.

"Is that still what you remember, Mitch, that you were on the phone with your wife?"

In fact, he had been on the phone with the kidnapper. What had seemed a safe and easy lie at the time might now be a noose into which he was being invited to place his neck, but he could see no way to abandon this falsehood without having a better one to use in its place.

"Yeah. I was on the phone with Holly."

"You said she called to tell you that she was leaving work early because of a migraine."

"That's right."

"So you were on the phone with her when Osteen was shot."

"Yes."

"That was at eleven forty-three a.m. You said it was eleven forty-three."

"I checked my watch right after the shot."

"But Nancy Farasand tells me that Mrs. Rafferty called in sick early yesterday, that she wasn't in the office at all."

Mitch did not reply. He could feel the hammer coming down.

"And Ms. Farasand says that you called her between twelve-fifteen and twelve-thirty yesterday afternoon."

The interior of the Honda felt like a tighter space than the trunk of the Chrysler Windsor.

Taggart said, "You were still at the crime scene at that time, waiting for me to ask a series of follow-up questions. Your helper, Mr. Barnes, continued planting flowers. Do you remember?"

When the detective waited, Mitch said, "Do I remember what?"

"Being at the crime scene," Taggart said drily.

"Sure. Of course."

"Ms. Farasand says that when you called her between twelve-fifteen and twelve-thirty, you asked to speak to your wife."

"She's very efficient."

"What I can't understand," Taggart said, "is why you would call the Realtor's office and ask to speak to your wife as much as forty-five minutes after, according to your own testimony, your wife had already called you to say that she was leaving there with a terrible migraine."

Great clear turbulent tides of air drowned the alleyway.

As Mitch lowered his gaze to the dashboard clock, a helpless sinking of the heart overcame him.

"Mitch?"

"Yeah."

"Look at me."

Reluctantly, he met the detective's gaze.

Those hawkshaw eyes didn't pierce Mitch now, didn't drill at him as they had before. Instead, worse, they were sympathetic and invited confidence, encouraged trust.

Taggart said, "Mitch…where is your wife?"

Chapter 54

Mitch remembered the alley as it had been the previous evening, flooded with the crimson light of sunset, and the ginger cat stalking shadow to shadow behind radium-green eyes, and how the cat had seemed to morph into a bird.

He had allowed himself hope then. The hope had been Anson, and the hope had been a lie.

Now the sky was hard and wind-polished and a frigid blue, as if it were a dome of ice that borrowed its color by reflection from the ocean not far to the west of here.

The ginger cat was gone, and the bird, and nothing living moved. The sharp light was a flensing knife that stripped the shadows to the lean.

"Where is your wife?" Taggart asked again.

The money was in the car trunk. The time and place of the swap were set. The clock was ticking down to the moment. He had come so far, endured so much, gotten so close.

He had discovered Evil with an uppercase E, but he had also come to see something better in the world than he had seen

before, something pure and true. He perceived mysterious meaning where he had previously seen only the green machine.

If things happened for a purpose, then perhaps there was a purpose he must not ignore in this encounter with the persistent detective.

For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. To love, honor, and cherish. Until death us do part.

The vows were his. He had made them. Nobody else had made them to Holly. Only he had made them to her. He was the husband.

No one else would be so quick to kill for her, to die for her. To cherish means to hold dear and to treat as dear. To cherish means to do all you can for the welfare and the happiness of the one you cherish, to support and to comfort and to protect her.

Perhaps the purpose of bringing him together here with Taggart was to warn him that he had reached the limits of his ability to protect Holly without backup, to encourage him to realize that he could not go any further alone.

"Mitch, where is your wife?"

"What do you think of me?"

"In what sense?" Taggart asked.

"In every sense. What's your take on me?"

"People seem to think you're a stand-up guy."

"I asked what you think."

"I haven't known you until this. But inside you're all steel springs and ticking clocks."

"I wasn't always."

"No one could be. You'd blow up in a week. And you've changed."

"You've only known me one day."

"And you've changed."

"I'm not a bad man. I guess all bad men say that."

"Not so directly."

In the sky, perhaps high enough to be above the wind, miles too high to cast a shadow on the alley, a sun-silvered jet caught his eye as it sailed north. The world seemed shrunken now to this car, to this moment of peril, but the world was not shrunken, and the possible routes between any place and any other place were nearly infinite.

"Before I tell you where Holly is, I want a promise."

"I'm just a cop. I can't make plea bargains."

"So you think I've hurt her."

"No. I'm just being level with you."

"The thing is…we don't have much time. The promise I want is, when you hear the essence of it, you'll act fast, and not waste time picking at details."

"The devil's in the details, Mitch."

"When you hear this, you'll know where the devil is. But with so little time, I don't want to screw with police bureaucracies."

"I'm one cop. All I can promise is — I'll do my best for you."

Mitch took a deep breath. He blew it out. He said, "Holly has been kidnapped. She's being held for ransom."

Taggart stared at him. "Am I missing something?"

"They want two million dollars or they'll kill her."

"You're a gardener."

"Don't I know."

"Where would you get two million bucks?"

"They said I'd find a way. Then they shot Jason Osteen to impress on me how serious they are. I thought he was just a guy walking a dog, thought they shot some passerby to make a point."

The detective's eyes were too sharp to read. His gaze filleted.

"Jason thought they were going to shoot the dog. So they scared obedience into me and at the same time cut the eventual split from five ways to four."

"Go on," Taggart said.

"Once I got home and saw the scene they staged for me there, once they had me in knots, they sent me to my brother for the money."

"For real? He's got that much?"

"Anson once pulled some criminal operation with Jason Osteen, John Knox, Jimmy Null, and two others whose names I've never heard."

"What was the operation?"

"I don't know. I wasn't part of it. I didn't know Anson was into this crap. And even if I did know what the operation was, it's one of the details you don't need now."

"All right."

"The essence is…Anson cheated them on the split, and they only found out what the real take was a lot later."

"Why snatch your wife?" Taggart asked. "Why not go after him?"

"He's untouchable. He's too valuable to some very important and very hard people. So they went after him through his little brother. Me. They figured he wouldn't want to see me lose my wife."

Mitch thought he had made a flat statement, but Taggart saw the hidden hills in it. "He wouldn't give you the money."

"Worse. He turned me over to some people."

"Some people?"

"To be killed."

"Your brother did?"

"My brother."

"Why didn't they kill you?"

Mitch maintained eye contact. Everything was on the line now, and he could not hold back too much and expect cooperation. He said, "Some things went wrong for them."

"Sweet Jesus, Mitch."

"So I came back to see my brother."

"Must've been some reunion."

"No champagne, but he had second thoughts about helping me."

"He gave you the money?"

"He did."

"Where is your brother now?"

"Alive but restrained. The swap is at three o'clock, and I've got reason to believe one of the kidnappers popped the others. Jimmy Null. Now it's just him holding Holly."

"How much have you left out?"

"Most of it," Mitch said truthfully.

The detective stared through the windshield at the alley.

From a coat pocket, he withdrew a roll of hard-caramel candies. He peeled the end of the roll, extracted a candy. He held the sweet circlet between his teeth while he folded shut the roll. As he returned the roll to his pocket, his tongue took the caramel from between his teeth. This procedure had the quality of a ritual.

"So?" Mitch said. "You believe me?"

"I've got a bullshit detector even bigger than my prostate," said Taggart. "And it isn't ringing."

Mitch didn't know whether to be relieved or not.

If he went alone to ransom Holly, and if they were both killed, at least he would not have to live with the knowledge that he had failed her.

If the authorities took it out of his hands, however, and if then Holly was killed but he lived, the responsibility would be a burden of intolerable weight.

He had to acknowledge that no possible scenario would put him in control, that inevitably fate was his partner in this. He must do what seemed right for Holly, and hope that what seemed right turned out to be right.

"Now what?" he asked.

"Mitch, kidnapping is a federal offense. We have to notify the FBI."

"I'm afraid of the complication."

"They're good. Nobody's more experienced with this kind of crime. Anyway, because we have only two hours, they won't be able to get a specialty team in place. They'll probably want us to take the lead."

"How should I feel about that?"

"We're good. Our SWAT's first-rate. We have an experienced hostage negotiator."

"So many people," Mitch worried.

"I'll be running this. You think I'm trigger-happy?"

"No."

"You don't think I'm a dog for details?" Taggart asked.

"I think maybe you're best of show."

The detective grinned. "Okay. So we'll get your wife back."

Then he reached across the console and plucked the car key from the ignition.

Startled, Mitch said, "Why'd you do that?"

"I don't want you having second thoughts, bolting off on your own, after all. That isn't what's best for her, Mitch."

"I've made the decision. I need your help. You can trust me with the keys."

"In a little while. I'm only looking out for you here, for you and Holly. I've got a wife I love, too, and two daughters — I told you about the daughters — so I know where you are right now, in your head. I know where you are. Trust me."

The keys disappeared into a jacket pocket. From another pocket, the detective withdrew a cell phone.

As he switched on the phone, Taggart crunched what remained of the circlet of candy. A caramel aroma sweetened the air.

Mitch watched the detective speed-dial a number. A part of him felt that with the contact of that finger to that button, not only a call had been placed but also Holly's fate had been sealed.

As Taggart spoke police code to a dispatcher and gave Anson's address, Mitch looked for another sun-silvered jet high above. The sky was empty.

Terminating the call, pocketing the phone, Taggart said, "So your brother's back there in the house?"

Mitch could no longer pretend Anson was in Vegas. "Yeah."

"Where?"

"In the laundry room."

"Let's go talk to him."

"Why?"

"He pulled some sort of job with this Jimmy Null, right?"

"Yeah."

"So he must know him well. If we're going to get Holly out of Null's hands smooth and easy, nice and safe, we need to know every damn thing about him we can learn."

When Taggart opened the passenger's door to get out, a clear wind blasted into the Honda, bringing neither dust nor litter, but the promise of chaos.

For better or worse, the situation was spinning out of Mitch's control. He didn't think it would be for the better.

Taggart slammed the passenger's door, but Mitch sat behind the wheel for a moment, his thoughts spinning, tumbling, his mind busy, and not just his mind, and then he got out into the whipping wind.

Chapter 55

The polished sky and the sharp light and the flaying wind, and from the overhead power lines, a keening like an animal in mourning.

Mitch led the detective to the painted wooden service gate. The wind tore it from his hand as he slipped the latch, and banged it against the garage wall.

Undoubtedly, Julian Campbell was sending men here, but they were no threat now, because they would not arrive before the police. The police were only minutes away.

Following the narrow brick walkway, which was sheltered from the worst of the wind, Mitch came upon a collection of dead beetles. Two were as big as quarters, one the diameter of a dime. On the underside they were yellow with stiff black legs. They were on their backs, balanced on curved shells, and a gentle eddy of wind spun them in slow circles.

Cuffed to a chair, sitting in urine, Anson would make a pathetic figure, and he would play the victim convincingly, with the skill of a cunning sociopath.

Even though Taggart had implied that he heard truth in Mitch's story, he might wonder at the hard treatment Anson had received. With no experience of Anson, having heard only the condensed version of events, the detective might think the treatment had been worse than hard, had been cruel.

Crossing the courtyard, where the wind badgered again, Mitch was aware of the detective close behind him. Although they were in the open, he felt crowded, pinched by claustrophobia.

He could hear Anson's voice in his mind: He told me that he killed our mom and dad. He stabbed them with garden tools. He said he'd come back to kill me, too.

At the back door, Mitch's hands were shaking so much that he had trouble fitting the key in the lock.

He killed Holly, Detective Taggart. He made up a story about her being kidnapped, and he came to me for money, but then he admitted killing her.

Taggart knew that Jason Osteen hadn't earned an honest living. He knew from Leelee Morheim that Jason had done a job with Anson and had been cheated. So he knew Anson was bent.

Nevertheless, when Anson told a story conflicting with Mitch's, Taggart would consider it. Cops were always presented with competing stories. Surely the truth most often lay somewhere between them.

Finding the truth will take time, and time is a rat gnawing at Mitch's nerves. Time is a trapdoor under Holly, and time is a noose tightening around her neck.

The key found the keyway. The deadbolt clacked open.

Standing on the threshold, Mitch switched on the lights. At once he saw on the floor a long blood smear that hadn't concerned him before, but which alarmed him now.

When Anson had been clubbed alongside the head, his ear had torn. As he'd been dragged to the laundry room, he'd left a trail.

The wound had been minor. The smears on the floor suggested something worse than a bleeding ear.

By such misleading evidence were doubts raised and suspicions sharpened.

Trapdoor, noose, and gnawing rat, time sprung a coiled spring in Mitch, and as he entered the kitchen, he slipped open a button on his shirt, reached inside, and withdrew the Taser that was tucked under his belt, against his abdomen. As he'd delayed getting out of the Honda, he had retrieved the weapon from the storage pocket in the driver's door.

"The laundry room is this way," Mitch said, leading Taggart a few steps forward before turning suddenly with the Taser.

The detective wasn't following as close as Mitch had thought. He was a prudent two steps back.

Some Tasers fire darts trailing wires, which deliver a disabling shock from a moderate distance. Others require that the business end be thrust against the target, resulting in an intimacy equal to that of an assault with a knife.

This was the second Taser model, and Mitch had to get in close, get in fast.

As Mitch thrust with his right arm, Taggart blocked with his left. The Taser was almost knocked out of Mitch's hand.

Retreating, the detective reached cross-body, under his sports jacket, with his right hand, surely going for a weapon in a shoulder holster.

Taggart backed into a counter, Mitch feinted left, thrust right, and here came the gun hand from under the jacket. Mitch wanted bare skin, didn't want to risk fabric providing partial insulation against the shock, and he got the detective in the throat.

Eyes rolling back in his head, jaw sagging, Taggart fired one round, his knees folded, and he dropped.

The shot seemed unusually loud. The shot shook the room.

Chapter 56

Mitch was not wounded, but he thought about John Knox self-shot in the fall from the garage loft, and he knelt worriedly beside the detective.

On the floor at Taggart's side lay his pistol. Mitch shoved it out of reach.

Taggart shuddered as if chilled to the marrow, his hands clawed at the floor tiles, and bubbles of spit sputtered on his lips.

Faint, thin, pungent, a ribbon of smoke unraveled from Taggart's sports jacket. The bullet had burned a hole through it.

Mitch pulled back the jacket, looking for a wound. He didn't find one.

The relief he felt did not much buoy him. He was still guilty of assaulting a police officer.

This was the first time he had hurt an innocent person. Remorse, he found, actually had a taste: a bitterness rising at the back of the throat.

Pawing at Mitch's arm, the detective could not close his hand into a grip. He tried to say something, but his throat must be tight, his tongue thick, his lips numb.

Mitch wanted to avoid having to Taser him a second time. He said, "I'm sorry," and set to work.

The car key had vanished into Taggart's jacket. Mitch found it in the second pocket he searched.

In the laundry room, having digested the gunshot and having come to a conclusion about what it might mean, Anson began shouting. Mitch ignored him.

Taking Taggart by the feet, Mitch dragged him out of the house, onto the brick patio. He left the detective's pistol in the kitchen.

As he pulled the back door shut, he heard the doorbell ring inside. The police were at the front of the house.

As Mitch took time to lock the door to delay their exposure to Anson and his lies, he said to Taggart, "I love her too much to trust anyone else with this. I'm sorry."

He sprinted across the courtyard, along the side of the garage, and through the open back gate into the windswept alleyway.

When no one answered the doorbell, the cops would come around the side of the house, into the courtyard, and find Taggart on the bricks. They would be in the alley seconds later.

He threw the Taser on the passenger's seat as he got behind the wheel. Key, switch, the roar of the engine.

In the storage pocket of the door was the pistol that belonged to one of Campbell's hired killers. Seven rounds remained in the magazine.

He wasn't going to pull a gun on the police. His only option was to get the hell out of there.

He drove east, fully expecting that a squad car would suddenly hove across the end of the alleyway, thwarting him.

Panic is fear expressed by numbers of people simultaneously, by an audience or a mob. But Mitch had enough fear for a crowd, and panic seized him.

At the end of the alleyway, he turned right into the street. At the next intersection, he turned left, heading east again.

This area of Corona del Mar, itself a part of Newport Beach, was called the Village. A grid of streets, it could be sealed off with perhaps as few as three roadblocks.

He needed to get beyond those choke points. Fast.

In Julian Campbell's library, in the trunk of the Chrysler, and in that trunk a second time, he'd known fear, but nothing as intense as this. Then he had been afraid for himself; now he was afraid for Holly.

The worst that could happen to him was that he would be captured or shot by the police. He had weighed the costs of his options and had chosen the best game. Now he didn't care what happened to him except to the extent that if anything happened to him, Holly would stand alone.

In the Village, some of the streets were narrow. Mitch was on one of them. Vehicles were parked on both sides. With too much speed, he risked sheering a door off if somebody opened one.

Taggart could describe the Honda. In minutes, they would have the license-plate number from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He could not afford to rack up body damage that would make the car even more identifiable.

He arrived at a traffic signal at Pacific Coast Highway. Red.

Heavy traffic surged north and south on the divided highway.

He couldn't jump the light and weave into the flow without precipitating a chain reaction of collisions, with himself at the center of the ultimate snarl.

He glanced at the rearview mirror. Some kind of paneled truck or muscle van approached, still a block away. The roof appeared to be outfitted with an array of emergency beacons, like those on a police vehicle.

This was a street lined with mature trees. The dappling shadows and piercework of light rippled in veils across the moving vehicle, making it difficult to identify.

Out on northbound lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, a police car passed, parting the traffic before it with emergency beacons but not with a siren.

Behind the Honda, the worrisome vehicle cruised within half a block, at which point Mitch could read the word ambulance on the brow above the windshield. They were in no hurry. They must be off duty or carrying the dead.

He exhaled a pent-up breath. The ambulance braked to a stop behind him, and his relief was short-lived when he wondered whether paramedics usually listened to a police scanner.

The traffic light changed to green. He crossed the southbound lanes and turned left, north on Coast Highway.

One bead of sweat chased another down the nape of his neck, under his collar, along the spillway of his spine.

He had traveled only a block on Coast Highway when a siren shrilled behind him: this time, in the rearview mirror, a police car.

Only fools led cops on a chase. They had air resources as well as a lot of iron on the ground.

Defeated, Mitch steered toward the curb. As he vacated the lane, the squad car shot past him and away.

From the curb, Mitch watched until the cruiser left the highway two blocks ahead. It turned left into the north end of the Village.

Evidently Taggart hadn't yet sufficiently recovered his wits to give them a description of the Honda.

Mitch took a very deep breath. He took another. He wiped the back of his neck with one hand. He blotted his hands on his jeans.

He had assaulted a police officer.

Easing the Honda back into the northbound traffic, he wondered if he had lost his mind. He felt resolved, and perhaps reckless in a venturous sense, but not shortsighted. Of course, a lunatic could not recognize madness from the inside of his bubble.

Chapter 57

After Holly extracts the nail from the plank, she turns it. over and over in her stiff sore fingers, assessing whether or not it is as lethal as she imagined when it was sheathed in wood.

Straight, more than three but less than four inches long, with a thick shank, it qualifies as a spike, all right. The point is not as sharp as, say, the wicked point of a poultry skewer, but plenty sharp enough.

While the wind sings of violence, she spends time imagining the ways the spike might be employed against the creep. Her imagination is fertile enough to disturb her.

After quickly grossing herself out, she changes the subject from the uses of the spike to the places where it might be hidden. What value it has is the value of surprise.

Although the spike probably won't show if tucked in a pocket of her jeans, she worries that she'll not be able to extract it quickly in a crisis. When they had transported her from her

house to this place, they had bound her wrists tightly with a scarf. If he does the same when he takes her away from here, she will not be able to pull her hands apart and, therefore, might not be able to get her fingers easily into a particular pocket.

Her belt offers no possibilities, but in the dark, by touch, she considers her sneakers. She can't carry the nail inside the shoe; it will rub and blister her foot, at the least. Maybe she can conceal it on the outside of the shoe.

She loosens the laces on her left sneaker, carefully tucks the nail between the tongue and one of the flaps, and reties the shoe.

When she gets to her feet and walks a circle around the ringbolt to which she is tethered, she quickly discovers that the rigid nail is an impediment to a smoothly flexed step. She can't avoid limping.

Finally she pulls up her sweater and secrets the nail in her bra. She isn't as extravagantly endowed as the average female mud wrestler, but Nature has been more than fair. To prevent the nail from slipping out between the cups, she presses the point through the elastic facing, thus pinning it in place.

She has armed herself.

With the task complete, her preparations seem pathetic.

Restless, she turns to the ringbolt, wondering if she can set herself free or at least augment her meager weaponry.

With her questing hands, she had earlier determined that the ringbolt is welded to a half-inch-thick steel plate that measures about eight inches on a side. The plate is held to the floor by what must be four countersunk screws.

She is unable to say with certainty that they are screws, for some liquid has been poured into the sink around each one and has formed a hard puddle. This denies her access to the slot in the head of each screw, if indeed they are screws.

Discouraged, she lies on her back on the air mattress, her head raised on the pillow portion.

Earlier, she had slept fitfully. Her emotional exhaustion breeds physical fatigue, and she knows that she could sleep again. But she does not want to doze off.

She is afraid that she will wake only as he falls upon her.

She lies with her eyes open, though this darkness is deeper than the one behind her eyelids, and she listens to the wind, though there is no comfort in it.

A timeless time later, when she wakes, she is still in darkness absolute, but she knows she isn't alone. Some subtle scent alerts her or perhaps an intuitive sense of being encroached upon.

She sits up with a start, the air mattress squeaking under her, the chain rattling against the floor between manacle and ringbolt.

"It's only me," he assures her.

Holly's eyes strain at the blackness because it seems that the gravity of his madness ought to condense the darkness around him into something yet darker, but he remains invisible.

"I was watching you sleep," he says, "then after a while, I was concerned that my flashlight would wake you."

Judging his position by his voice is not as easy as she might have expected.

"This is nice," he says, "being with you in the numinous dark."

To her right. No more than three feet away. Perhaps on his knees, perhaps standing.

"Are you afraid?" he asks.

"No," she lies without hesitation.

"You would disappoint me if you were afraid. I believe you are arising into your full spirit, and one who is arising must be beyond fear."

As he speaks, he seems to move behind her. She turns her head, listening intently.

"In El Valle, New Mexico, one night the snow came down as thick as ever it has anywhere."

If she is correct, he has moved to her right side and stands over her, having made no sound that the wind failed to mask.

"The valley floor received six inches in four hours, and the land was eerie in the snowlight…"

Hairs quiver, flesh prickles on the back of her neck at the thought of him moving confidently in pitch-black conditions. He does not reveal himself even by eyeshine, as might a cat.

"…eerie in a way it is nowhere else in the world, the flats receding and the low hills rising as if they are just fields of mist and walls of fog, illusions of shapes and dimensions, reflections of reflections, and those reflections only reflections of a dream."

The gentle voice is in front of her now, and Holly chooses to believe that it has not moved, that it has always been in front of her.

Startled from sleep, she should expect her senses to be at first unreliable. Such perfect darkness displaces sound, disorients.

He says, "The storm was windless at ground level, but hard wind blew at higher elevations, because when the snow abated, most of the clouds were quickly torn into rags and were flung away. Between the remaining clouds, the sky was black, festooned with ornate necklaces of stars."

She can feel the nail between her breasts, warmed by her body heat, and tries to take comfort from it.

"The glassmaker had fireworks left over from the past July, and the woman who dreamed of dead horses offered to help him set them up and set them off."

His stories always lead somewhere, although Holly has learned to dread their destinations.

"There were star shells, Catherine wheels, fizgigs, girandoles, twice-changing chrysanthemums, and golden palm trees…."

His voice grows softer, and he is close now. He may be leaning toward her, his face but a foot from her face.

"Red and green and sapphire-blue and gold bursts brightened the black sky, but they were also colorful and diffusely reflected on the fields of snow, soft swaths of pulsing color on the fields of snow."

As the killer talks, Holly has the feeling that he will kiss her here in the darkness. What will his reaction be when inevitably she recoils in revulsion?

"Some last snow was falling, a few late flakes as big as silver dollars, descending in wide lazy gyres. They caught the color, too."

She leans back and turns her head aside in fearful anticipation of the kiss. Then she thinks it might come not on her lips but on the nape of her neck.

"Shimmering with red and blue and gold fire, the flakes slowly glimmered to the ground, as if something magical were aflame high in the night, some glorious palace burning on the other side of Heaven, shedding jewel-bright embers."

He pauses, clearly expecting a response.

As long as he is kept talking, he will not kiss.

Holly says, "It sounds so magnificent, so beautiful. I wish I'd been there."

"/wish you'd been there," he agrees.

Realizing that what she's said might be taken as an invitation, she hurries to entreat him: "There must be more. What else happened in El Valle that night? Tell me more."

"The woman who dreamed of dead horses had a friend who claimed to be a countess from some eastern European country. Have you ever known a countess?"

"No."

"The countess had a problem with depression. She balanced it by taking ecstasy. She took too much ecstasy and walked into that field of snow transfigured by fireworks. Happier than she had ever been in her life, she killed herself."

Another pause requires a response, and Holly can think of nothing she dares to say except, "How sad."

"I knew you would see. Yes, sad. Sad and stupid. El Valle is a portal that makes possible a journey to great change. On that night, and in that special moment, transcendence was offered to everyone present. Yet there are always some who cannot see."

"The countess."

"Yes. The countess."

The pressurized darkness seems to brew itself into an ever blacker reduction.

She feels his warm breath upon her brow, upon her eyes. It has no scent. And then it is gone.

Maybe she didn't feel his breath, after all, only a draft.

She wishes to believe it was a draft, and she thinks of clean things like her husband and the baby, and the bright sun.

He says, "Do you believe in signs, Holly Rafferty?"

"Yes."

"Omens. Portents. Harbingers, oracle owls, storm petrels, black cats and broken mirrors, mysterious lights in the sky. Have you ever seen a sign, Holly Rafferty?"

"I don't think so."

"Do you hope to see a sign?"

She knows what he wants her to say, and she is quick to say it. "Yes. I hope to see one."

Upon her left cheek, she feels warm breath, and then upon her lips.

If this is him — and in her heart she knows there is no if — he remains undifferentiated from the gloom although only inches separate them.

The darkness of the room calls forth a darkness in her mind. She imagines him kneeling naked before her, his pale body decorated by arcane symbols painted with the blood of those he killed.

Struggling to keep her quickening fear from her voice, she says, "You've seen many signs, haven't you?"

The breath, the breath, the breath upon her lips, but not the kiss, and then not the breath, either, as he withdraws and says, "I've seen scores. I have the eye for them."

"Please tell me about one."

He is silent. His silence is a sharp and looming weight, a sword above her head.

Perhaps he has begun to wonder if she is talking to forestall the kiss.

If at all possible, she must avoid offending him. As important as it is to leave this place without being violated, it is likewise important to leave this place without disabusing him of the strange dark romantic fantasy that appears to have him in its grip-He seems to believe that she will eventually decide that she must go to Guadalupita, New Mexico, with him and that in Guadalupita she will "be amazed." As long as he continues in this belief, which she has so subtly tried to reinforce without raising suspicion, she might be able to find some advantage over him when it matters most, in the moment of her greatest crisis.

When his silence begins to seem ominously long, he says, "This was just as summer became autumn that year, and everyone said the birds had left early for the south, and wolves were seen where they had not been in a decade."

Wary in the dark, Holly sits very erect, with her arms crossed over her breasts.

"The sky had a hollow look. You felt like you could shatter it with a stone. Have you ever been to Eagle Nest, New Mexico?"

"No."

"I was driving south from Eagle Nest, on a two-lane blacktop, at least twenty miles east of Taos. These two girls were across the highway, hitchhiking north."

Along the roof, the wind finds a new niche or protrusion from which to strike another voice for itself, and now it imitates the ululant cry of hunting coyotes.

"They were college age but not college girls. They were serious seekers, you could see, and confident in their good hiking boots and backpacks, with their walking sticks, and all their experience."

He pauses, perhaps for drama, perhaps savoring the memory.

"I saw the sign and knew at once that it was a sign. Hovering above their heads, a blackbird, its wings spread wide, not flapping, the bird riding so effortlessly on a thermal, but moving precisely no faster or slower than the girls were walking."

She regrets having elicited this story. She closes her eyes against the images that she fears he might describe.

"Only six feet above their heads and a foot or two behind them, the bird hovered, but the girls were unaware of it. They were unaware of it, and I knew what that meant."

Holly fears the darkness around her too much to close her eyes to it. She opens them even though she can see nothing.

"Do you know what the sign of the bird meant, Holly Rafferty?"

"Death," she says.

"Yes, exactly right. You are arising into full spirit. I saw the bird and believed that death was settling on the girls, that they were not long for this world."

"And…were they?"

"Winter came early that year. Many snows followed one another, and the cold was very hard. The spring thaw extended into summer, and when the snow melted, their bodies were found in late June, dumped in a field near Arroyo Hondo, all the way around Wheeler Peak from where I'd seen them on the road. I recognized their pictures in the paper."

Holly says a silent prayer for the families of the unknown girls.

"Who knows what happened to them?" he continues. "They were found naked, so we can imagine some of what they endured. But though it seems to us a horrible death, and tragic because of their youth, there is always a possibility of enlightenment even in the worst of situations. If we're seekers, we learn from everything, and grow. Perhaps any death involves moments of illuminating beauty and the potential for transcendence."

He switches on his flashlight and is sitting immediately before her, cross-legged on the floor.

Had the light surprised her earlier in their conversation, she might have flinched. Now she is not as easily surprised, nor is she likely to flinch from any light, so welcome is it.

He wears the ski mask in which are visible only his chewed-sore lips and his beryl-blue eyes. He is neither naked nor painted with the blood of those he killed.

"It's time to go," he says. "You will be ransomed for a million four hundred thousand, and when I have the money, then the time will have come for decision."

The dollar figure stuns her. It might be a lie.

Holly has lost all track of time, but she is confused and amazed by what his words imply. "Is it already…midnight Wednesday?"

Within his knitted mask, he smiles. "Only a few minutes before one o'clock Tuesday afternoon," he says. "Your persuasive husband has encouraged his brother to come through with

the money quicker than ever seemed possible. This whole thing has moved so smoothly that it's obviously coasting on the wheels of destiny."

Rising to his feet, he gestures for her to rise, as well, and she obeys.

Behind her back, he binds her wrists together with a blue silk scarf, as before.

Stepping in front of her again, he tenderly smoothes her hair back from her forehead, for some of it has fallen over her face. As he performs this grooming, with hands as cold as they are pale, he stares continuously into her eyes in a spirit of romantic challenge.

She dares not look away from him, and she closes her eyes only when he presses to them thick gauze pads that have been moistened to make them stick. He binds the pads in place with a longer length of silk, which he loops three times around her head and ties firmly at the back of her skull.

His hands brush her right ankle, and he unlocks the manacle, freeing her from the chain and the ringbolt.

He plays the flashlight over her blindfold, and she sees dim light penetrate the gauze and silk. Evidently satisfied by the job he's done, he lowers the light.

"When we've reached the ransom drop," he promises, "the scarves will come off. They're only to incapacitate you during transport."

Because he is not the one who hit her and pulled her hair to make her scream, she can sound credible when she says, "You've never been cruel to me."

He studies her in silence. She assumes that he studies her, for she feels naked, undressed by his stare.

The wind, the dark again, the hideous expectation all make her heart jump like a rabbit battering itself against the wire walls of a trap cage.

Holly feels his breath brush lightly across her lips, and she endures it.

After he exhales four times upon her, he whispers, "At night in Guadalupita, the sky is so vast that the moon seems shrunken, small, and the stars you can see, horizon to horizon, number more than all the human deaths in history. Now we must go."

He takes Holly by one arm, and she does not shrink from his repulsive touch, but moves with him across the room and through an open doorway.

Here are the steps again, up which they led her the previous day. He patiently guides her descent, but she cannot hold a railing and therefore places each foot tentatively.

From attic to second floor, to first floor, and then into the garage, he encourages her: "A landing now. Very good. Duck your head. And now to the left. Be careful here. And now a threshold."

In the garage, she hears him open the door of a vehicle.

"This is the van that brought you here," he says, and helps her through the rear entrance, into the cargo space. The carpeted floor smells as foul as she remembered it. "Lie on your side."

He exits, closes the door behind him. The signature metallic sound of a key in a lock eliminates any consideration that she might be able to let herself out somewhere en route.

The driver's door opens, and he gets in behind the wheel. "This is a two-seat van. The seats are open to the cargo area, which is why you hear me so clearly. You do hear me clearly?"

"Yes."

He closes his door. "I can turn in my seat and see you. On our trip here, there were men to sit with you, to make sure that you behaved. I'm alone now. So…somewhere along the way, if we stop at a red light and you think a scream will be heard, I'll have to deal with you more harshly than I would like."

"I won't scream."

"Good. But please let me explain. On the passenger's seat beside me is a pistol fitted with a silencer. The instant that you begin to scream, I'll pick up the pistol, turn around in my seat, and shoot you dead. Whether you're dead or alive, I'll collect the ransom. You see the way it is?"

"Yes."

"That sounded cold, didn't it?" he asks.

"I understand…your position."

"Be honest now. It did sound cold."

"Yes."

"Consider this. I could have gagged you, but I didn't. I could have shoved a rubber ball in your pretty mouth and sealed your lips with duct tape. Couldn't I have done that easily?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't I?"

"Because you know you can trust me," she says.

"I hope that I can trust you. And because I'm a man of hope, who lives his life with hope in every hour, I did not gag you, Holly. A gag of the type I described is effective but extremely unpleasant. I didn't want an unpleasantness like that between us in case…in hope of Gaudalupita."

Her mind works to deceive more smoothly than she would have thought possible one day ago.

In a voice not at all seductive but solemn with respect, she recites for him details that suggest he has indeed cast a spell over her: "Guadalupita, Rodarte, Rio Lucio, Penasco, where your life was changed, and Chamisal, where it was also changed, Vallecito, Las Trampas, and Espanola, where your life will be changed again."

He is silent for a moment. Then: "I'm sorry for the discomfort, Holly. It will be over soon, and then transcendence…if you want it."

Chapter 58

The architecture of the gun shop had been inspired by dry-goods stores in countless Western movies. A flat railed roof, vertical-clapboard walls, a covered boardwalk the length of the long building, and a hitching post raised the expectation that at any moment John Wayne would walk out of the front door, dressed as he had been in The Searchers.

Feeling less like John Wayne than like any supporting character who gets shot in the second act, Mitch sat in the Honda, in the gun-shop parking lot, examining the pistol that he had brought back from Rancho Santa Fe.

Several things were engraved in the steel, if it was steel. Some were numbers and letters that meant nothing to him. Others provided useful information for a guy who knew squat about handguns.

Near the muzzle, in script, were the words Super Tuned. Farther back on the slide the word champion looked as if it had been laser-incised in block letters, and cal.45 was directly under it.

Mitch preferred not to deliver the ransom with only seven rounds in the magazine. Now he knew that he needed to purchase.45-caliber ammunition.

Seven rounds were probably more than enough. Gunfights most likely dragged on only in movies. In real life, somebody fired the first shot, somebody responded, and within a total of four rounds, one of the somebodies was wounded or dead.

Buying more ammunition was not about fulfilling a genuine need, but a psychological one. He didn't care. Additional ammo would make him feel better prepared.

On the other side of the slide, he found the word spring-field. He took this to be the maker.

The word champion most likely referred to the model of the gun. He had a Springfield Champion.45 pistol. That sounded more likely than a Champion Springfield.45 pistol.

He wanted to avoid drawing attention to himself when he went into the shop. He hoped to sound like he knew what he was talking about.

After ejecting the magazine from the pistol, he extracted a cartridge from the magazine. The casing identified it as.45 ACP, but he didn't know what the letters meant.

He returned the cartridge to the magazine and put the magazine in a pocket of his jeans. He slid the pistol under the driver's seat.

From the glove box, he retrieved John Knox's wallet. Using the dead man's money pricked his conscience, but he had no choice. His own wallet had been taken from him in Julian Campbell's library. He took the entire $585 and returned the wallet to the glove box.

He got out into the wind, locked the car, and went into the gun shop. The word shop seemed inadequate for such a large store. There were aisles and aisles of gun-related paraphernalia.

At the long cashier's counter, he got help from a large man with a walrus mustache. His name tag identified him as ROLAND.

"A Springfield Champion," Roland said. "That's a stainless-steel version of a Colt Commander, isn't it?"

Mitch had no clue if it was or not, but he suspected that Roland knew his stuff. "That's right."

"Beveled magazine well, throated barrel, a lowered and flared ejection port all come standard."

"It's a sweet gun," Mitch said, hoping people actually talked that way. "I want three extra magazines. For target shooting."

He added the last three words because it seemed that most people wouldn't have a use for spare magazines unless they were planning to knock over a bank or take potshots at people from a clock tower.

Roland appeared not in the least suspicious. "Did you go for Springfield's whole Super Tuned package?"

Remembering the words engraved near the muzzle, Mitch said, "Yes. The whole package."

"Any further customization?"

"No," Mitch guessed.

"You didn't bring the gun? I'd feel better if I could see it."

Incorrectly, Mitch had thought if he carried a pistol into the store, he'd look like a shoplifter or a stickup artist or something.

"I've got this." He put the magazine on the counter.

"I'd rather have the gun, but let's see if we can work with this."

Five minutes later, Mitch had paid for three magazines and a box of one hundred.45 ACP cartridges.

Throughout the transaction, he had expected alarm bells to go off. He felt suspected, watched, and known for what he was. Clearly, his nerves didn't have the tensile strength required of a fugitive from the law.

As he was about to leave the shop, he looked through the glass door and saw a police cruiser in the parking lot, blocking his car. A cop stood at the driver's door, peering into the locked Honda.

Chapter 59

On second look, Mitch realized that the driver's door of the cruiser wasn't emblazoned with the seal of a city but with the name — First Enforcement — and ornate logo of a private-security firm. The uniformed man at the Honda must be a security guard, not a police officer.

Nevertheless, the Honda would be of interest to him only if he knew an all-points bulletin had been put out for it. Evidently this guy did listen to a police scanner.

The guard left his car athwart the Honda and approached the gun shop. He appeared purposeful.

He had most likely stopped to do some personal business and had lucked onto the Honda. Now he was psyched up for a citizen's arrest and a taste of glory.

A real cop would have called for backup before coming into the store. Mitch supposed he should be grateful for getting even that much of a break.

The parking lot wrapped two sides of the freestanding building, and there were two entrances. Mitch backed away from this door and headed quickly for the other.

He left by the side exit and hurried to the front of the store. The security guard had gone inside.

Mitch was alone in the wind. Not for long. He sprinted to the Honda.

The First Enforcement car trapped him. The back of the parking space featured a steel-pipe safety barrier atop a six-inch concrete curb because, from the lot, the land sloped steeply down six feet to a sidewalk.

No good. No way out. He would have to abandon the Honda.

He unlocked the driver's door and retrieved the Springfield Champion.45 from under the seat.

As he closed the car door, somebody coming out of the gun shop drew his attention. Not the security guard.

He popped the trunk and snatched the white plastic trash bag from the wheel well. He put the pistol and the gun-shop purchases with the money, twisted the neck of the bag, closed the trunk, and walked away.

After passing behind five parked vehicles, he stepped between two SUVs. He peered in each, hoping one of the drivers had left the keys in the ignition, but he wasn't lucky.

He walked briskly — did not run — diagonally across the blacktop, toward the side of the building from which he had recently exited.

As he reached the corner, his peripheral vision caught movement at the front door of the gun shop. When he glanced along the covered boardwalk, he glimpsed the security guard coming out of the store.

He did not think that the guard had seen him, and then he was out of sight, past the corner.

The side parking lot ended at a low concrete-block wall. He vaulted it, onto a property belonging to a fast-food franchise.

Cautioning himself not to run like a fugitive, he crossed the parking lot, passed a queue of vehicles waiting in line for takeout, the air redolent of exhaust fumes and greasy French fries, rounded the back of the restaurant, came to another low wall, vaulted it.

Ahead lay a small strip center with six or eight stores. He slowed down, looking in the windows as he passed, just a guy out on an errand, with one point four million to spend.

As he came to the end of the block, a squad car went by on the main boulevard, emergency beacons flashing red-blue, red-blue, red-blue, heading in the direction of the gun shop. And immediately behind it sped another one.

Mitch turned left on the small cross street, away from the boulevard. He picked up his pace again.

The commercial zone was only one lot wide, facing the boulevard. Behind lay a residential neighborhood.

In the first block were condos and apartment houses. After that he found single-family homes, most of them two stories, occasionally a bungalow.

The street trees were huge old podocarpuses that cast a lot of shade. Most lawns were green, trimmed, shrubs well kept. But every community has landscape slobs eager to exert their rights to be bad neighbors.

When the police didn't find him at the gun shop, they would search surrounding neighborhoods. In a few minutes, they could have half a dozen or more units cruising the area.

He had assaulted a police officer. They tended to put his kind at the top of their priority list.

Most of the vehicles parked on this residential street were SUVs. He slowed down, squinting through the passenger-door windows at the ignitions, hoping to spot a key.

When he glanced at his watch, he saw the time was 1:14. The exchange was set for 3:00, and now he didn't have wheels.

Chapter 60

The ride lasts about fifteen minutes, and Holly, bound and blindfolded, is too busy scheming to consider a scream.

This time when her lunatic chauffeur stops, she hears him put the van in park and apply the hand brake. He gets out, leaving his door open.

In Rio Lucio, New Mexico, a saintly woman named Ermina Something lives in a blue-and-green or maybe blue-and-yellow stucco house. She is seventy-two.

The killer returns to the van and drives it forward about twenty feet, and then gets out again.

In Ermina Something's living room are maybe forty-two or thirty-nine images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by thorns.

This has given Holly an idea. The idea is daring. And scary. But it feels right.

When the killer returns to the van, Holly guesses that he has opened a gate to admit them to someplace, and then has closed it behind them.

In Ermina Something's backyard, the killer buried a "treasure" of which the old woman would not approve. Holly wonders what that treasure might be, but hopes she will never know.

The van coasts forward maybe sixty feet, on an unpaved surface. Small stones crunch together and rattle under the tires.

He stops again and this time switches off the engine. "We're here."

"Good," she says, for she is trying to play this not as if she is a frightened hostage but as if she is a woman whose spirit is arising to its fullness.

He unlocks the back door and helps her out of the van.

The warm wind smells vaguely of wood smoke. Maybe canyons are afire far to the east.

For the first time in more than twenty-four hours, she feels sun on her face. The sun feels so good she could cry.

Supporting her right arm, escorting her in an almost courtly fashion, he leads her across bare earth, through weeds. Then they follow a hard surface with a vague limy smell.

When they stop, a strange muffled sound is repeated three times — thup, thup, thup — accompanied by splintering-wood and shrieking-metal noises.

"What's that?" she asks.

"I shot open the door."

Now she knows what a pistol fitted with a silencer sounds like. Thup, thup, thup. Three shots.

He conducts her across the threshold of the place into which he has shot his way. "Not much farther."

The echoes of their slow footsteps give her a sense of cavernous spaces. "It feels like a church."

"In a way it is," he says. "We are in the cathedral of excessive exuberance."

She smells plaster and sawdust. She can still hear the wind, but the walls must be well insulated and the windows triple-pane, for the blustery voice is muted.

Eventually they come into a space that sounds smaller than those before it, with a lower ceiling.

After halting her, the killer says, "Wait here." He lets go of her arm.

She hears a familiar sound that makes her heart sink: the rattle of a chain.

Here the scent of sawdust is not as strong as in previous spaces, but when she remembers their threat to cut off her fingers, she wonders if the room contains a table saw.

"One point four million dollars," she says calculatedly. "That buys a lot of seeking."

"It buys a lot of everything," he replies.

He touches her arm again, and she does not recoil. Around her left wrist, he wraps a chain and makes some kind of connection.

"When there's always a need to work," she says, "there's never really time to seek," and though she knows this is ignorance, she hopes it is the kind of ignorance to which he relates.

"Work is a toad squatting on our lives," he says, and she knows she has struck a chord with him.

He unties the scarf that binds her hands, and she thanks him.

When he removes her blindfold, she squints and blinks, adjusting to the light, and discovers that she's in a house under construction.

After entering this place, he has put on his ski mask again. He is at least pretending that she can choose her husband over him and that he will let them live.

"This would have been the kitchen," he says.

The space is enormous for a kitchen, maybe fifty feet by thirty feet, the ultimate for catering large parties. The limestone floor is adrift in dust. Finished drywall is in place, although no cabinets or appliances have been installed.

A metal pipe about two inches in diameter, perhaps a gas line, protrudes from low in a wall. The other end of her chain has been padlocked to this pipe, as it was padlocked to her wrist. The metal cap on the end of the pipe, almost a full inch wider than the pipe itself, prevents the chain from being slipped loose.

He has given her eight feet of links. She can sit, stand, and even move around a little.

"Where are we?" she wonders.

"The Turnbridge house."

"Ah. But why? Do you have some connection with it?"

"I've been here a few times," he says, "though I've always made a more discreet entrance than shooting out the lock. He draws me. He's still here."

"Who?"

"Turnbridge. He hasn't moved on. His spirit's here, curled up tight on itself like one of the ten thousand dead pill bugs that litter the place."

Holly says, "I've been thinking about Ermina in Rio Lucio."

"Ermina Lavato."

"Yes," she says, as if she had not forgotten the surname. "I can almost see the rooms of her house, each a different soothing color. I don't know why I keep thinking of her."

Within his knitted mask, his blue eyes regard her with feverish intensity.

Closing her eyes, standing with her arms limp at her sides and with her face tilted toward the ceiling, she speaks in a murmur. "I can see her bedroom walls covered with images of the Holy Mother."

"Forty-two," he says.

"And there are candles, aren't there?" she guesses.

"Yes. Votive candles."

"It's a lovely room. She's happy there."

"She's very poor," he says, "but happier than any rich man."

"And her quaint kitchen from the 1920s, the aroma of chicken fajitas." She takes a deep breath, savoring, and lets it out.

He says nothing.

Opening her eyes, Holly says, "I've never been there, I've never met her. Why can't I get her and her house out of my mind?"

His continued silence begins to worry her. She is afraid that she has overacted, struck a false note.

Finally he says, "Sometimes people who've never met can resonate with each other."

She considers the word: "Resonate."

"In one sense, you live far from her, but in another sense you might be neighbors."

If Holly reads him right, she has sparked more interest than suspicion. Of course, it may be a fatal mistake to think that she can ever read him right.

"Strange," she says, and drops the subject.

He wets his peeled lips with his tongue, licks them again, and yet again. Then: "I've got some preparations to make. I'm sorry for the chain. It won't be necessary much longer."

After he has left the kitchen, she listens to his footsteps fading through vast hollow rooms.

The cold shakes seize her. She isn't able to get them under control, and the links of her chain sing against one another.

Chapter 61

Mitch in the shuddering shade of the wind-tossed podocarpuses, squinting through windows, finally began to test the doors of the vehicles parked at the curb. When they weren't locked, he opened them and leaned inside.

If keys weren't in the ignition, they might be in a cup holder or tucked behind a sun visor. Each time that he didn't find keys in those places, either, he closed the door and moved on.

Born of desperation, his boldness nevertheless surprised him. Because a police car might turn one corner or another momentarily, however, caution rather than assurance would be his downfall.

He hoped that these residents were not people with a sense of community, that they had not joined the Neighborhood Watch program. Their police mentor would have coached them to notice and report suspicious specimens exactly like him.

For laid-back southern California, for low-crime Newport Beach, a depressing percentage of these people locked their parked cars. Their paranoia gradually began to piss him off.

When he had gone over two blocks, he saw ahead a Lexus parked in a driveway, the engine idling, the driver's door open. No one sat behind the wheel.

The garage door also stood open. He cautiously approached the car, but no one was in the garage, either. The driver had dashed back into the house for a forgotten item.

The Lexus would be reported stolen within minutes, but the cops wouldn't be looking for it immediately. There would be a process for reporting a stolen car; a process was part of a system, a system the work of a bureaucracy, the business of bureaucracy delay.

He might have a couple of hours before the plates were on a hot sheet. He needed no more time than two hours.

Because the car faced the street, he slipped behind the wheel, dropped the trash bag on the passenger's seat, pulled the door shut, and rolled at once out of the driveway, turning right, away from the boulevard and the gun shop.

At the corner, ignoring the stop sign, he turned right once more and went a third of a block before he heard a thin shaky voice in the backseat say, "What is your name, honey?"

An elderly man slumped in a corner. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, a hearing aid, and his pants just under his breasts. He appeared to be a hundred years old. Time had shrunken him, though not every part in proportion to every other.

"Oh, you're Debbie," the old man said. "Where are we going, Debbie?"

Crime led to more crime, and here were the wages of crime: certain destruction. Mitch himself had now become a kidnapper.

"Are we going to the pie store?" the old man inquired, a note of hope in his quavery voice.

Maybe some Alzheimer's was happening here.

"Yes," Mitch said, "we're going to the pie store," and he turned right again at the next corner.

"I like pie."

"Everybody likes pie," Mitch agreed.

If his heart had not been knocking hard enough to hurt, if his wife's life had not depended on his remaining free, if he had not expected to encounter roving police at any moment, and if he had not expected them to shoot first and discuss the fine points of his civil rights later, he might have found this amusing. But it wasn't amusing; it was surreal.

"You aren't Debbie," the old man said. "I'm Norman, but you're not Debbie."

"No. You're right. I'm not."

"Who are you?"

"I'm just a guy who made a mistake."

Norman thought about that until Mitch turned right at the third corner, and then he said, "You're gonna hurt me. That's what you're gonna do."

The fear in the old man's voice inspired pity. "No, no. Nobody is gonna hurt you."

"You're gonna hurt me, you're a bad man."

"No, I just made a mistake. I'm taking you right back home," Mitch assured him.

"Where are we? This isn't home. We're nowhere near home." The voice, to this point wispy, suddenly gained volume and shrillness. "You're a bad sonofabitch!"

"Don't get yourself worked up. Please don't." Mitch felt sorry for the old man, responsible for him. "We're almost there. You'll be home in a minute."

"You're a bad sonofabitch! You're a bad sonofabitch!"

At the fourth corner, Mitch turned right, onto the street where he'd stolen the car.

"YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!"

In the desiccated depths of that time-ravaged body, Norman found the voice of a bellowing youth.

"YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!"

"Please, Norman. You're gonna give yourself a heart attack."

He had hoped to be able to pull the car into the driveway and leave it where he'd found it, with nobody the wiser. But a woman had come out of the house into the street. She spotted him turning the corner.

She looked terrified. She must have thought that Norman had gotten behind the wheel.

"YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH, A BAD, BAD SONOFABITCH!"

Mitch stopped in the street near the woman, put the car in park, tramped on the emergency brake, grabbed the trash bag, and got out, leaving the door open behind him.

Fortysomething, slightly stout, she was an attractive woman with Rod Stewart hair that a beautician had painstakingly streaked with blond highlights. She wore a business suit and heels too high to be sensible for a trip to the pie store.

"Are you Debbie?" Mitch asked.

Bewildered, she said, "Am I Debbie?"

Maybe there was no Debbie.

Norman still shrieked in the car, and Mitch said, "I'm so sorry. Big mistake."

He walked away from her, toward the first of the four corners around which he had driven Norman, and heard her say "Grandpapa? Are you all right, Grandpapa?"

When he reached the stop sign, he turned and saw the woman leaning in the car, comforting the old man.

Mitch rounded the corner and hurried out of her line of sight. Not running. Walking briskly.

A block later, as he reached the next corner, a horn blared behind him. The woman was pursuing him in the Lexus.

He could see her through the windshield: one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cell phone. She was not calling her sister in Omaha. She was not calling for a time check. She was calling 911.

Chapter 62

Leaning into the resisting wind, Mitch hurried along the sidewalk, and miraculously escaped being stung when a violent gust shook a cloud of bees out of a tree nest.

The determined woman in the Lexus stayed far enough back that she could hang a U-turn and elude him if he changed directions and sprinted toward her, but she maintained sight of him. He started to run, and she accelerated to match his pace.

Evidently she intended to keep him located until the police arrived. Mitch admired her guts even though he wanted to shoot out her tires.

The cops would be here soon. Having found his Honda, they knew that he was in the area. The attempted theft of a Lexus just a few blocks from the gun shop would ring all their bells.

The car horn blared, blared again, and then relentlessly. She hoped to alert her neighbors to the presence of a criminal in their midst. The over-the-top urgency of the horn blasts suggested Osama bin Laden was loose on the street.

Mitch left the sidewalk, crossed a yard, opened a gate, and hurried around the side of a house, hoping he wouldn't find a pit bull in the backyard. No doubt most pit bulls were as nice as nuns, but considering the way his luck was cutting, he wouldn't run into Sister Pit but instead would stumble over a demon dog.

The backyard proved to be shallow, encircled by a seven-foot cedar fence with pointed staves. He didn't see a gate. After tying the twisted neck of the trash bag to his belt, he climbed into a coral tree, crossed the fence on a limb, and dropped into an alley.

Police would expect him to prefer these service alleys to streets, so he couldn't use them.

He passed through a vacant lot, sheltered by the weeping boughs of long-untrimmed California pepper trees, which whirled and flounced like the many-layered skirts of eighteenth-century dancers in a waltz.

As he was crossing the next street in midblock, a police car swept through the intersection to the east. The shriek of its brakes told him that he had been seen.

Across a yard, over a fence, across an alley, through a gate, across a yard, across another street, very fast now, the plastic bag slapping against his leg. He worried that it would split, spilling bricks of hundred-dollar bills.

The last line of houses backed up to a small canyon, about two hundred feet deep and three hundred wide. He scaled a wrought-iron fence and was at once on a steep slope of loose eroded soil. Gravity and sliding earth carried him down.

Like a surfer chasing bliss along the treacherous face of a fully macking monolith, he tried to stay upright, but the sandy earth proved to be not as accommodating as the sea. His feet went out from under him, and on his back he slid the last ten yards, raising a wake of white dust, then thrashed feetfirst through a sudden wall of tall grass and taller weeds.

He came to a stop under a canopy of branches. From high above, the floor of the canyon had appeared to be choked with greenery, but Mitch hadn't expected large trees. Yet in addition to some of the scrub trees and brush that he had envisioned, he found an eclectic forest.

California buckeyes were garlanded with fragrant white flowers. Bristling windmill palms thrived with California laurels and black myrobalan plums. Many of the trees were gnarled and twisted and rough, junk specimens, as though the urban-canyon soil fed mutagens to their roots, but there were acer japonicums and Tasmanian snow gums that he would have been pleased to use in any high-end landscaping job.

A few rats scattered on his arrival, and a snake slithered away through the shadows. Maybe a rattlesnake. He couldn't be sure.

While he remained in the cover of the trees, no one could see him from the canyon rim. He no longer was at risk of immediate apprehension.

So many branches of different trees interlaced that even the raging wind could not peel back the canopy and let the sun shine in directly. The light was green and watery. Shadows trembled, swayed like sea anemones.

A shallow stream slipped through the canyon, no surprise this recently after the rainy season. The water table might be so close to the surface here that a small artesian well maintained the flow all year.

He untied the plastic trash-can liner from his belt and examined it. The bag had been punctured in three places and had sustained a one-inch tear, but nothing seemed to have fallen out of it.

Mitch fashioned a loose temporary knot in the neck of the bag and carried it against his body, in the crook of his left arm.

As he remembered the lay of the land, the canyon narrowed and the floor rose dramatically toward the west. The purling water eased lazily from that direction, and he paralleled it at a faster pace.

A damp carpet of dead leaves cushioned his step. The pleasant melange of moist earth, wet leaves, and sporing toadstools gave weight to the air.

Although the population of Orange County exceeded three million, the bottom of the canyon felt so remote that he might have been miles from civilization. Until he heard the helicopter.

He was surprised they were up in this wind.

Judging by sound alone, the chopper crossed the canyon directly over Mitch's head. It went north and circled the neighborhood through which he'd made his run, swelling louder, fading, then louder again.

They were searching for him from the air, but in the wrong place. They didn't know he'd descended into the canyon.

He kept moving — but then halted and cried out softly in surprise when Anson's phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, relieved that he hadn't lost or damaged it.

"This is Mitch."

Jimmy Null said, "Are you feeling hopeful?"

"Yes. Let me talk to Holly."

"Not this time. You'll see her soon. I'm moving the meet from three to two o'clock."

"You can't do that."

"I just did it."

"What time is it now?"

"One-thirty," Jimmy Null said.

"Hey, no, I can't make two o'clock."

"Why not? Anson's place is only minutes from the Turnbridge house."

"I'm not at Anson's place."

"Where are you, what are you doing?" Null asked.

Feet planted wide in wet leaves, Mitch said, "Driving around, passing time."

"That's stupid. You should've stayed at his place, been ready."

"Make it two-thirty. I've got the money right here. A million four. I've got it with me."

"Let me tell you something."

Mitch waited, and when Null didn't go on, he said, "What? Tell me what?"

"About the money. Let me tell you something about the money."

"All right."

"I don't live for money. I've got some money. There are things that mean more to me than money."

Something was wrong. Mitch had felt it before, when talking to Holly, when she had sounded constrained and had not told him that she loved him.

"Listen, I've come so far, we've come so far, it's only right we finish this."

"Two o'clock," Null said. "That's the new time. You aren't where you need to be at two sharp, it's over. No second chance."

"All right."

"Two o'clock."

"All right."

Jimmy Null terminated the call. Mitch ran.

Chapter 63

Chained to the gas pipe, Holly knows what she must do, what she will do, and therefore she can pass her time only by worrying about all the ways things could go wrong or by marveling at what she can see of the uncompleted mansion.

Thomas Turnbridge would have had one fantastic kitchen if he had lived. When all the equipment had been installed, a high-end caterer with platoons of staff could have cooked and served from here a sit-down dinner for six hundred on the terraces.

Turnbridge had been a dot-com billionaire. The company that he founded — and that made him rich — produced no product, but it had been on the cutting edge of advertising applications for the Internet.

By the time Forbes estimated Turnbridge's net worth at three billion, he was buying homes on a dramatic Pacific-view bluff in an established neighborhood. He bought nine, side by side, by paying more than twice the going price. He spent over sixty million dollars on the houses and tore them down to make a single three-acre estate, a parcel with few if any equals on the southern California coast.

A major architectural firm committed a team of thirty to the design of a three-level house encompassing eighty-five thousand square feet, a figure that excluded the massive subterranean garages and mechanical plant. It was to be in the style of an Alberto Pinto-designed residence in Brazil.

Such elements as interior-exterior waterfalls, an underground shooting range, and an indoor ice-skating rink required heroic work of the structural, systems, and soil engineers. Two years were required for plans. During the first two years of construction, the builder worked solely on the foundation and subterranean spaces.

No budget. Turnbridge spent whatever was required.

Exquisite marbles and granites were purchased in matched lots. The exterior of the house would be clad in French limestone; sixty seamless limestone columns, from plinth to abacus, were fabricated at a cost of seventy thousand dollars each.

Turnbridge had been as passionately committed to the company he had created as to the house he was building. He believed it would become one of the ten largest corporations in the world.

He believed this even after a rapidly evolving Internet exposed flaws in his business model. From the start, he sold his shares only to finance lifestyle, not to broaden investments. When his company's stock price fell, he borrowed to buy more shares at market. The price fell further, and he leveraged more purchases.

When the share price never recovered and the company imploded, Turnbridge was ruined. Construction of the house came to a halt.

Pursued by creditors, investors, and an angry ex-wife, Thomas Turnbridge came home to his unfinished house, sat in a folding chair on the master-bedroom balcony, and with a 240-degree ocean-and-city-lights view to enchant him, washed down an overdose of barbiturates with an icy bottle of Dom Perignon. Carrion birds found him a day before his ex-wife did. Although the three-acre coastal property is a plum, it has not sold after Turnbridge's death. A snarl of lawsuits entangle it. The actual value of the land now appraises at the sixty million dollars that Turnbridge overpaid for it, which allows only a small pool of potential buyers.

To complete this project as specified in the plans, a buyer will need to spend fifty million on the finish work, so he better like the style. If he demos existing construction and starts again, he needs to be prepared to spend five million on top of the sixty million for the land, because he will be dealing with steel-and-concrete construction meant to ride out an 8.2 quake with no damage.

As a hope-to-be real-estate agent, Holly doesn't dream of getting the commission for the Turnbridge house. She will be content selling properties in middle-class neighborhoods to people who are thrilled to have their own homes.

In fact, if she could trade her modest real-estate dream for a guarantee that she and Mitch would survive the ransom exchange, she would be content to remain a secretary. She is a good secretary and a good wife; she will try hard to be a good mom, too, and she will be happy with that, with life, with love.

But no such deal can be made; her fate remains in her own hands, literally and figuratively. She will have to act when the time comes for action. She has a plan. She is ready for the risk, the pain, the blood.

The creep returns. He has put on a gray windbreaker and a pair of thin, supple gloves.

She is sitting on the floor when he enters, but she gets to her feet as he approaches her.

Violating the concept of personal space, he stands as close to Holly as a man would stand just before taking her in his arms to dance.

"In Duvijio and Eloisa Pacheco's house in Rio Lucio, there are two red wooden chairs in the living room, railback chairs with carved cape tops."

He places his right hand on her left shoulder, and she is glad that it is gloved.

"On one red chair," he continues, "stands a cheap ceramic figurine of Saint Anthony. On the companion chair stands a ceramic of a boy dressed for church."

"Who is the boy?"

"The figurine represents their son, also named Anthony, who was run down and killed by a drunk driver when he was six. That was fifty years ago, when Duvijio and Eloisa were in their twenties."

Not yet a mother but hopeful of being one, she cannot imagine the pain of such a loss, the horror of its suddenness. She says, "A shrine."

"Yes, a shrine of red chairs. No one has sat in those chairs in fifty years. The chairs are for the two figurines."

"The two Anthonys," she corrects.

He may not recognize it as a correction.

"Imagine," he says, "the grief and the hope and the love and the despair that have been focused on those figurines. Haifa century of intense yearning has imbued those objects with tremendous power."

She remembers the girl in the lace-trimmed dress, buried with the Saint Christopher medal and the Cinderella figurine.

"I will visit Duvijio and Eloisa one day when they are not home, and take the ceramic of the boy."

This man is many things, including a cruel strip-miner of other people's faith and hope and treasured memories.

"I have no interest in the other Anthony, the saint, but the boy is a totem of magical potential. I will take the boy to Espanola—"

"Where your life will change again."

"Profoundly," he says. "And perhaps not only my life."

She closes her eyes and whispers, "Red chairs," as if she is picturing the scene.

This seems to be encouragement enough for him right now, because after a silence, he says, "Mitch will be here in a little more than twenty minutes."

Her heart races at this news, but her hope is tempered by her fear, and she does not open her eyes.

"I'll go now to watch for him. He'll bring the money into this room — and then it will be time to decide."

"In Espanola, is there a woman with two white dogs?"

"Is that what you see?"

"Dogs that seem to vanish in the snow."

"I don't know. But if you see them, then I'm sure they must be in Espanola."

"I see myself laughing with her, and the dogs so white." She opens her eyes and meets his. "You better go watch for him."

"Twenty minutes," he promises, and leaves the kitchen.

Holly stands quite still for a moment, amazed by herself.

White dogs, indeed. Where had that come from? White dogs and a laughing woman.

She almost laughs now at his gullibility, but there is no humor in the fact that she has gotten inside his head deep enough to know what imagery will work with him. That she could travel in his mad world at all does not seem entirely admirable.

The shakes seize her, and she sits down. Her hands are cold, and a chill traces every turn of her bowels.

She reaches under her sweater, between her breasts, and extracts the nail from her bra.

Although the nail is sharp, she wishes it were sharper. She has no means to file it to a keener point.

Using the head of the nail, she scratches industriously at the drywall until she has produced a small pile of powdered plaster.

The time has come.

When Holly was a little girl, for a while she feared an array of night monsters born of a good imagination: in closet, under bed, at the windows.

Her grandmother, good Dorothy, had taught her a poem that, she claimed, would repel every monster: vaporize those in the closet, turn to dust those under the bed, and send those at the windows away to swamps and caves where they belonged.

Years later, Holly learned that this poem, which cured her fear of monsters, was titled "A Soldier — His Prayer." It had been written by an unknown British soldier and had been found on a slip of paper in a trench in Tunisia during the battle of El Agheila. Quietly but aloud, she recites it now:

"Stay with me, God. The night is dark, The night is cold: My little spark Of courage dies. The night is long; Be with me, God, and make me strong."

She hesitates then, but only for a moment. The time has come.

Chapter 64

Shoes caked with mud and wet leaves, clothes rumpled and dirty, a white trash bag cradled in his arms and pressed against his chest as if it were a precious baby, eyes so bright with desperation that they might have been lamps to light his way if this had been night, Mitch hurried along the shoulder of the highway.

No officer of the law, happening to drive past, would fail to give him special scrutiny. He had the look of a fugitive or a madman, or both.

Fifty yards ahead stood a combination service station and minimart. Advertising a tire sale, scores of bright pennants snapped in the wind.

He wondered if ten thousand dollars cash would buy him a ride to the Turnbridge house. Probably not. The way he looked, most people would expect him to kill them en route.

A guy looking like a hobo, waving around ten thousand bucks, wanting to buy a ride, would make the station manager nervous. He might call the cops.

Yet buying a ride seemed to be his only option other than carjacking someone at gunpoint, which he would not do. The owner of the car might foolishly grab for the gun and be accidentally shot.

As he drew near the service station, a Cadillac Escalade angled off the highway and stopped at the outermost pumps. A tall blonde got out, clutching her purse, and strode into the mini-mart, leaving the driver's door open.

The two rows of pumps were both self-service. No attendants were in sight.

Another customer was fueling a Ford Explorer. He focused on his windows, working with a squeegee.

Mitch shambled up to the Escalade and peered through the open door. The keys were in the ignition.

Leaning inside, he checked the backseat. No grandpapa, no child in a safety seat, no pit bull.

He climbed in behind the wheel, pulled the door shut, started the engine, and drove onto the highway.

Although he half expected people to run after him, waving their arms and shouting, the rearview mirror revealed no one.

The highway was divided. He considered driving over the median planter strip. The Escalade could handle it. Fate being what fate is, a patrol car would happen by at just that moment.

He sped north a few hundred yards to a turning lane, and then headed south.

When he passed the service station, no tall angry blonde had yet put in an appearance. He raced past, but with respect for the posted speed limit.

Ordinarily, he was not an impatient driver who ranted at slow or clueless motorists. During this trip, he wished upon them all kinds of plagues and hideous misfortunes.

By 1:56, he arrived in the neighborhood where Turnbridge's folly stood incomplete. Out of sight of the mansion, he pulled to the curb.

Cursing the stubborn buttons, he stripped out of his shirt. Jimmy Null would most likely make him take it off anyway, to prove that he was not concealing a weapon.

He had been told to come unarmed. He wanted to appear to be in compliance with that demand.

From the trash bag, he retrieved the box of.45 ammunition, and from a pocket of his jeans, he withdrew the original magazine for the Springfield Champion. He added three cartridges to the seven already in the magazine.

A movie memory served him well. He pulled back the slide and inserted an eleventh round in the chamber.

The cartridges slipped in his sweaty trembling fingers, so he had time to load only two of the three spare magazines. He stashed the box of ammo and the extra magazine under the driver's seat.

One minute till two o'clock.

He shoved the two loaded magazines in the pockets of his jeans, put the loaded pistol in the bag with the money, twisted the top of the bag but didn't knot it, and drove to the Turnbridge place.

A long chain-link construction fence fitted with privacy panels of green plastic fabric separated the street from the big Turnbridge property. The nearby residents who had put up with this ugliness for years must wish the entrepreneur hadn't killed himself if only so they could now torment him with lawyers and neighborly invective.

The gate was closed, draped with chain. As Jimmy Null promised, it wasn't locked.

Mitch drove onto the property and parked with the back of the SUV facing the house. He got out and opened all five doors, hoping by this gesture to express his desire to fulfill the terms of the agreement to the best of his ability.

He closed the construction gate and draped the chain in place once more.

Carrying the trash bag, he walked to a spot between the Escalade and the house, stopped and waited.

The day was warm, not hot, but the sun was hard. The light cut at his eyes, and the wind.

Anson's cell phone rang.

He took the call. "This is Mitch."

Jimmy Null said, "It's a minute past two. Oh, now it's two past. You're late."

Chapter 65

The unfinished house appeared as large as a hotel. Jimmy Null could have been watching Mitch from any of scores of windows.

"You were supposed to come in your Honda," he said.

"It broke down."

"Where'd you get the Escalade?"

"Stole it."

"No shit."

"None."

"Park it parallel to the house, so I can see straight through the front and back seats."

Mitch did as told, leaving the doors open as he repositioned the vehicle. He stepped away from the SUV and waited with the trash bag, the phone to his ear.

He wondered if Null would shoot him dead from a distance and come take the money. He wondered why he wouldn't do that.

"I'm disturbed you didn't come in the Honda."

"I told you, it broke down."

"What happened?"

"Flat tire. You brought the swap forward an hour, so I didn't have time to change it."

"A stolen car — the cops could have chased your ass here."

"No one saw me take it."

"Where'd you learn to hot-wire a car?"

"The keys were in the ignition."

Null considered in silence. Then: "Enter the house by the front door. Stay on the phone."

Mitch saw that the door had been shot open. He went inside.

The entry hall was immense. Although no finish work had been done, even Julian Campbell would have been impressed.

After leaving Mitch to stew for a minute, Jimmy Null said, "Pass through the colonnade into the living room directly ahead of you."

Mitch went into the living room, where the west windows extended floor to ceiling. Even through dusty glass, the view was so stunning that he could understand why Turnbridge had wanted to die with it.

"All right. I'm here."

"Turn left and cross the room," Null directed. "A wide doorway leads into a secondary drawing room."

None of the doors were hung. Those separating these two rooms would have to be nine feet tall to fill the opening.

When Mitch reached the drawing room, which offered an equally spectacular view, Null said, "You'll see another wide doorway across from the one you're standing in, and a single door to your left."

"Yes."

"The single leads to a hallway. The hall passes other rooms and leads to the kitchen. She's in the kitchen. But don't go near her."

Moving across the drawing room toward the specified doorway, Mitch said, "Why not?"

"Because I'm still making the rules. She's chained to a pipe. I have the key. You stop just inside the kitchen."

The hallway seemed to recede from him the farther he followed it, but he knew the telescoping effect had to be psychological. He was frantic to see Holly.

He didn't look in any of the rooms he passed. Null might have been in one of them. It didn't matter.

When Mitch entered the kitchen, he saw her at once, and his heart swelled, and his mouth went dry. Everything that he had been through, every pain that he had suffered, every terrible thing that he had done was in that instant all worthwhile.

Chapter 66

Because the creep arrives in the kitchen to stand beside her during the last of his phone conversation, Holly hears him give the final directions.

She holds her breath, listening for footsteps. When she hears Mitch approaching, hot tears threaten, but she blinks them back.

A moment later Mitch enters the room. He says her name so tenderly. Her husband.

She has stood with her arms crossed over her breasts, her hands fisted in her armpits. Now she lowers her arms and stands with her hands fisted at her sides.

The creep, who has drawn a wicked-looking pistol, is intently focused on Mitch. "Arms straight out like a bird."

Mitch obeys, a white trash bag dangling from his right hand.

His clothes are filthy. His hair is windblown. His face has lost all color. He is beautiful.

The killer says, "Come slowly forward."

As instructed, Mitch approaches, and the creep tells him to stop fifteen feet away.

As Mitch halts, the killer says, "Put the bag on the floor."

Mitch lowers the bag to the dusty limestone. It settles but does not flop open.

Covering Mitch with the pistol, the killer says, "I want to see the money. Kneel in front of the bag."

Holly doesn't like to see Mitch kneeling. This is the position that executioners instruct their victims to take before the coup de grace.

She must act, but the time feels not quite right. If she makes her move too soon, the scheme might fail. Instinct tells her to wait, though waiting with Mitch on his knees is so hard.

"Show me the money," the killer says, and he has a two-hand grip on the pistol, finger tightened on the trigger.

Mitch opens the neck of the bag and withdraws a plastic-wrapped brick of cash. He tears off one end of the plastic, and riffles the hundred-dollar bills with his thumb.

"The bearer bonds?" the killer asks.

Mitch drops the cash into the sack.

The creep tenses, thrusting the pistol forward as Mitch reaches into the bag again, and he does not relax even when Mitch produces only a large envelope.

From the envelope, Mitch extracts half a dozen official-looking certificates. He holds one forward for the killer to read.

"All right. Put them back in the envelope."

Mitch obeys, still on his knees.

The creep says, "Mitch, if your wife had a chance for previously undreamed-of personal fulfillment, the opportunity for enlightenment, for transcendence, surely you would want her to follow that better destiny."

Bewildered by this turn, Mitch does not know what to say, but Holly does. The time has come.

She says, "I've been sent a sign, my future is New Mexico."

Raising her hands from her sides, opening her fists, she reveals her bloody wounds.

An involuntary cry escapes Mitch, the killer glances at Holly, and her stigmata drip for his astonishment.

The nail holes are not superficial, though they don't go all the way through her hands. She stabbed herself and worked the wounds with brutal determination.

The worst had been having to bite back every cry of pain. If he had heard her agony expressed, the killer would have come to see what she was doing.

At once, the wounds had bled too much. She had packed them with powdered plaster to stop the bleeding. Before the plaster worked, blood had dripped on the floor, but she had covered it with a quick redistribution of the thick dust.

With her hands fisted in her armpits, as Mitch entered the room, Holly had clawed the plugs of plaster from the wounds, tearing them open once more.

Blood flows now for the killer's fascination, and Holly says, "In Espanola, where your life will change, lives a woman named Rosa Gonzales with two white dogs."

With her left hand, she pulls down the neck of her sweater, revealing cleavage.

His gaze rises from her breasts to her eyes.

She slips her right hand between her breasts, palms the nail, and fears not being able to hold it in her slippery fingers.

The killer glances at Mitch.

She grips the nail well enough, reveals it, and rams it into the killer's face, going for his eye, but instead pinning his mask to him, piercing the hollow of his cheek and ripping.

Screaming, tongue flailing on the nail, he reels back from her, and his pistol fires wildly, bullets thudding into walls.

She sees Mitch rising and moving fast, with a gun of his own.

Chapter 67

Mitch shouted, "Holly, move," and she was moving on the first syllable of Holly, separating herself from Jimmy Null as much as her chain allowed.

Point-blank, aiming abdomen, hitting chest, pulling down from the recoil, firing again, pulling down, firing, firing, he thought a couple of shots went wide, but saw three or four rounds tearing into the windbreaker, each roar so big booming through the big house.

Null reeled backward, off balance. His pistol had an extended magazine. It seemed to be fully automatic. Bullets stitched a wall, part of the ceiling.

Because he now had only a one-hand grip on the weapon, maybe the recoil tore it from him, maybe he lost all strength, but for whatever reason, it flew. The gun hit the wall, clattered to the limestone.

Driven backward by the impact of the.45s, rocked on his heels, Null staggered, dropped on his side, rolled onto his face.

When the echoes of the echoes of the gunfire faded, Mitch could hear Jimmy Null's ragged wheezing. Maybe that was how you breathed when you had a fatal chest wound.

Mitch wasn't proud of what he did next, didn't even take any savage delight in it. In fact he almost didn't do it, but he knew that almost would buy no dispensation when the time came to reckon for the way he lived his life.

He stepped over the wheezing man and shot him twice in the back. He would have shot him a third time, but he had expended all eleven rounds in the pistol.

Crouching defensively during the gunfire, Holly rose to meet Mitch as he turned to her.

"Anyone else?" he asked.

"Just him, just him."

She exploded into him, threw her arms around him. He had never before been held so tight, with such sweet ferocity.

"Your hands."

"They're okay."

"Your hands," he insisted.

"They're okay, you're alive, they're okay."

He kissed every part of her face. Her mouth, her eyes, her brow, her eyes again, salty now with tears, her mouth.

The room stank of gunfire, a dead man lay on the floor, Holly was bleeding, and Mitch's legs felt weak. He wanted fresh air, the brisk wind, sunshine to kiss her in.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

"The chain."

A small stainless-steel padlock coupled the links around her wrist.

"He has the key," she said.

Staring at the body, Mitch withdrew a spare magazine from a pocket of his jeans. He ejected the spent clip, replaced it with the fresh.

Pressing the muzzle against the back of the kidnapper's head, he said, "One move, I'll blow your brains out," but of course he got no answer.

Nevertheless, he pressed hard on the gun and, with his free hand, was able to search the side pockets of the windbreaker. He found the key in the second one.

The chain fell away from her wrist as the dropped padlock rapped the limestone floor.

"Your hands," he said, "your beautiful hands."

The sight of her blood pierced him, and he thought of the staged scene in their kitchen, the bloody hand prints, but this was worse, so much worse to see her bleeding.

"What happened to your hands?"

"New Mexico. It's not as bad as it looks. I'll explain. Let's go. Let's get out of here."

He snatched the bag of ransom off the floor. She started toward a doorway, but he led her to the entrance from the hall, which was the only route he knew.

They walked with her right arm around his shoulders and his left arm around her waist, past empty rooms haunted or not, and his heart knocked no softer and no slower than when he had been in the quick of the gunfire. Maybe it would race like this for the rest of his life.

The hall was long, and in the drawing room, they could not help looking toward the vast, dust-filmed view.

As they stepped into the living room, an engine roared to life

elsewhere in the house. The racket rattled room to hall to room, and chattered off the high ceilings, making it impossible to determine where it originated.

"Motorcycle," she said.

"Bulletproof," Mitch said. "A vest under the windbreaker."

The impact of the slugs, especially the two in the back, jarring the spine, must have knocked Jimmy Null briefly unconscious.

He had not intended to leave in the van that he'd driven here. Having stashed a motorcycle near the kitchen, perhaps in the breakfast room, he'd been prepared to leave — if things went wrong — through any wing of the house, any door. Once outside the house, he could flee not only by the construction gate that led into the street but also by switchbacking down the bluff, or by some third route.

As the clatter of the engine swelled, Mitch knew that Jimmy was not intent on fleeing. It wasn't the ransom that drew him, either.

Whatever had happened between him and Holly — New Mexico and Rosa Gonzales and two white dogs and bloody stigmata — all that drew him, and he was drawn, too, by the humiliation of the nail in the face. For the nail, he wanted Holly more than money, wanted her dead.

Logic suggested that he was at their backs and would come from the drawing room.

Mitch hurried Holly across the enormous living room, toward the equally huge receiving hall and the front door beyond.

Logic flopped. They had crossed less than half the living room when Jimmy Null on a Kawasaki shot out of somewhere, bulleting along the colonnade that separated them from the receiving room.

Mitch drew her back as Null steered between columns into the receiving room. He made a wide turn out there and came straight at them, across that room, across the width of the colonnade, gaining speed.

Null didn't have his pistol. Out of ammunition. Or wild with rage, the gun forgotten.

Shoving Holly behind him, Mitch raised the Champion in both hands, remembering the front sight, a white dot, and opened fire as Null was passing across the colonnade.

Aiming chest this time, hoping for head. Fifty feet and closing, thunder crashing off walls. First shot high, pull it down, second, pull it down, thirty feet and closing, third shot. PULL IT DOWN! The fourth turned off Jimmy Null's brain so abruptly, his hands sprang away from the handlebars.

The dead man stopped, the cycle did not, rearing on its back wheel, tire barking, smoking, screaming forward until it toppled, tumbled toward them, past them, hit one of the big windows, and shattered through, gone.

Be sure. Evil has cockroach endurance. Be sure, be sure. The Champion in both hands, approach him cool, no hurry now, circle him. Step around the spatters on the floor. Gray-pink spatters, bits of bone and twists of hair. He can't be alive. Take nothing for granted.

Mitch peeled up the mask to see the face, but it wasn't a face anymore, and they were done now. They were done.

Chapter 68

In the summer that Anthony is three years old, they celebrate Mitch's thirty-second birthday with a backyard party.

Big Green owns three trucks now, and there are five employees besides Iggy Barnes. They all come with their wives and kids, and Iggy brings a wahine named Madelaine.

Holly has made good friends — as she always makes good friends — at the real-estate agency where she is second in sales so far this year.

Although Dorothy followed Anthony by just twelve months, they have not moved to a bigger house. Holly had been raised here; this house is her history. Besides, already they have made quite a history here together.

They will add a second story before there is a third child. And there will be a third.

Evil has been across this threshold, but the memory of it will not drive them from the place. Love scrubs the worst stains clean. Anyway, there can be no retreat in the face of evil, only resistance. And commitment.

Sandy Taggart comes, as well, with his wife, Jennifer, and their two daughters. He brings the day's newspaper, wondering if Mitch has seen the story, which he has not: Julian Campbell, between conviction and appeal, throat slit in prison — a contract hit suspected, but no inmate yet identified as the killer.

Although Anson is in a different prison from the one to which Campbell was sent, he will eventually hear about the hit. It will give him something to ponder as his attorneys work to stave off his own lethal injection.

Mitch's youngest sister, Portia, comes to the party all the way from Birmingham, Alabama, with her restaurateur husband Frank and their five children. Megan and Connie remain distant in more than one sense, but Mitch and Portia have grown close, and he entertains hope of finding a way to gather his other two sisters to him, in time.

Daniel and Kathy had produced five children because he said continuation of the species could not be left to the irrationalists. Materialists must breed as vigorously as believers or the world would go to Hell by way of God.

Portia had balanced her father's five with five of her own, and raised them by traditional standards that did not involve a learning room.

On this birthday evening, they eat a feast at tables on the patio and lawn, and Anthony sits proudly on his special chair. Mitch built it for him to a design sketched by Holly, and she painted it a cheerful red.

"This chair," she had told Anthony, "is in memory of a boy who was six years old for fifty years and much loved for fifty-six years. If you ever think that you aren't loved, you will sit in this chair and know you are loved as much as that other Anthony was loved, as much as any boy ever has been loved."

Anthony, being three, had said, "Can I have ice cream?" After dinner, there is a portable dance floor on the lawn, and the band is not as woofy as the one at their wedding. No tambourines and no accordion.

Later, much later, when the band has departed and all the guests are gone, when Anthony and Dorothy are sound asleep on the back-porch glider, Mitch asks Holly to dance to the music of a radio, now that they have the entire floor to themselves. He holds her close but not too tight, for she is breakable. As they dance, husband and wife, she puts a hand to his face, as though after all this time she is still amazed that he brought her home to him. He kisses the scar in the palm of her hand, and then the scar in the other. Under a great casting of stars, in the moonlight, she is so lovely that words fail him, as they have so often failed him before. Although he knows her as well as he knows himself, she is as mysterious as she is lovely, an eternal depth in her eyes, but she is no more mysterious than are the stars and the moon and all things on the earth.