Intensity

2

The house held a drowning depth of stillness as a dam held water, with tremendous pent-up power and pressure on the breast.

When Chyna found the courage to move, she cautiously approached the head of the stairs. She feared that the visitor had not fully descended to the first floor, that he was toying with her, standing just out of sight, waiting, smiling. He would reach for her, palms up, and say, Come to me.

She held her breath, risked exposure, and looked down. The stairs curved through gradients of gloom to the foyer below. She could see just well enough to be sure that he wasn't there.

As far as Chyna could discern, no lamps were on downstairs. She wondered what he was doing in that darkness, guided only by the pale moon glow at the windows. Perhaps he was in a corner, crouched like a spider, sensitive to the faintest changes in the patterns of the air, dreaming of silent stalkings and the frenzied rending of prey.

She went quickly past the head of the stairs, into the last length of hallway, to the next open door and the second source of amber light, dreading what she might find. But she could cope with both the dread and the finding. It was always not knowing, turning away from truth, that caused night sweats and bad dreams.

This room was smaller than the master suite, with no sitting area. A corner desk. A double bed. One nightstand with a brass lamp, a dresser, a vanity with a padded bench.

On the wall above the bed was a poster-size portrait of Freud. Chyna loathed Freud. But Laura, dear of heart and idealistic, clung to a belief in many aspects of Freudian theory; she embraced the dream of a guiltless world, with everyone a victim of his troubled past and yearning for rehabilitation.

Laura was lying facedown on the bed, atop the sheets and the blankets. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her. A second pair of handcuffs secured her ankles. Linking both of those shiny steel restraints was a shackling chain.

She had been violated. The pants of her baggy blue pajamas had been cut off with a neatness worthy of a conscientious tailor; the blue panels of cloth had been smoothed across the blankets to both sides of her. The pajama shirt had been shoved up her back; now it was gathered in rumpled folds across her shoulders and the nape of her neck.

Chyna moved deeper into the room, her fear equaled now by a swelling sorrow that seemed to enlarge her heart yet leave it cold and empty. When she caught a faint odor of spilled semen, her fear and sorrow were matched by anger. As she stooped beside the bed, her hands curled into such hard fists that her fingernails pressed painfully into her palms.

Sweat-damp blond hair was pasted to the side of Laura's face. Her delicate features were salt-pale and clenched in anxiety, and her eyes were squeezed tightly shut.

She was not dead. Not dead. It seemed impossible.

The girl-terror had reduced her to the condition of a girl-was murmuring so softly that the words couldn't be heard even from a distance of inches, yet so urgently that the meaning was harrowingly clear. It was a prayer, one that Chyna had recited on numerous nights long ago, in far places: a prayer for mercy, a plea to be delivered from this horror untouched and alive, dear God, please, untouched and alive.

On those other nights, Chyna had been spared both violation and death. Already, half of Laura's petition had gone unanswered.

Chyna's throat tightened with anguish, and she could barely speak: "It's me."

Laura's eyelids sprang open, and her blue eyes rolled like those of a terrified horse, wide with disbelief. "All dead."

"Ssshhh," Chyna whispered.

"Blood. His hands."

"Ssshhh. I'll get you out of here."

"Stank like blood. Jack's dead. Nina. Everyone."

Jack, her brother, whom Chyna had not met. Nina, her sister-in-law. Evidently the killer had been to the vineyard manager's bungalow before coming to the main house. Four dead. There was no help to be found anywhere on the sprawling property.

Chyna glanced worriedly at the open door, then quickly rose to test the handcuffs on Laura's wrists. Securely locked.

With fettered hands and fettered ankles linked by a chain, Laura was thoroughly hobbled. She wouldn't be able to stand, let alone walk.

Chyna wasn't strong enough to carry her.

She saw her reflection in the vanity mirror across the room, and she realized with a shock how nakedly her terror was revealed in her wrenched face.

Trying to look more composed for Laura's sake, Chyna stopped beside the bed again and murmured almost as softly as her friend had been praying: "Is there a gun?"

"What?"

"A gun in the house?"

"No."

"Nowhere in the house?"

"No, no."

"Shit."

"Jack."

"What?"

"Has one."

"A gun? At the bungalow?" Chyna asked.

"Jack has a gun."

Chyna didn't have time to get to the bungalow and back before the killer returned to Laura's room. Anyway, more likely than not, he had already found the gun and confiscated it.

"Do you know who he is?"

"No." Laura's sky-blue eyes appeared to darken with despair. "Get out."

"I'll find a weapon."

"Get out," Laura whispered more urgently, cold sweat glistening on her brow.

"A knife," Chyna said.

"Don't die for me." Then, sotto voce, tremulously but fiercely, fiercely she said: "Run, Chyna. Oh, God, please run!"

"I'll be back."

"Run."

From outside, a sound arose. A truck engine. Approaching.

Astonished, Chyna shot to her feet. "Someone's coming. Help's coming."

Laura's bedroom was toward the front of the house. Chyna stepped to the nearer of two windows, which provided a view of the half-mile driveway leading in from the two-lane county road.

A quarter of a mile away, bright headlights pierced the night. Judging by the height of the lights from the ground, Chyna concluded that the truck was big.

How miraculous that anyone would show up at this hour, in this lonely place.

As a thrill of hope swept through Chyna, she realized that the killer would have heard the engine too. The man or men in the truck wouldn't know what trouble they were getting into. When they stopped in front of the house, they would be dead men breathing.

"Hold on," she said, touched Laura's damp forehead to reassure her, and then crossed the room to the door, leaving her friend under the smug and somber gaze of Sigmund Freud.

The hallway was deserted.

Chyna hurried to the head of the curved stairs, hesitated to commit herself to the tenebrous lair below, but then realized that she had nowhere else to go. She went down as fast as she dared without the support of the handrail. Staying clear of the balustrade. Too exposed there. Close to the wall was better.

She quickly passed a series of large landscape paintings in ornate frames, which seemed almost to be windows on actual pastoral vistas. Earlier, they had been bright and cheerful scenes. Now they were ominous: goblin forests, black rivers, killing fields.

The foyer. An oval area rug on polished oak. Through a closed door to the right was Paul Templeton's study. Through the archway on the left was the dark living room.

The killer could be anywhere.

Outside, the roar of the truck grew louder. It was almost to the house. The driver would be shot through the windshield the moment that he braked to a stop. Or gunned down when he stepped out from behind the steering wheel.

Chyna had to warn him, not solely for his sake but for her own, for Laura's. He was their only hope.

Certain that the spider-eating intruder was nearby, she expected a savage attack and, abandoning caution, flew at the front door. The oval rug rucked beneath her feet, twisted, and nearly spun out from under her. She stumbled, reached out to break her fall, and slammed both palms flat against the front door.

Such a noise, hellacious noise, booming through the house, had surely drawn the killer's attention away from the approaching truck.

Chyna fumbled, found the knob, and twisted it. The door was unlocked. Gasping, she pulled it open.

A cool breeze out of the northwest, faintly scented by freshly turned vineyard earth and fungicide, whistled through the bare limbs of the maple trees that flanked the front walkway. Snuffling like a pack of hounds, it rushed past her into the foyer as she stepped out onto the front porch.

The truck had already passed the house and was heading away from her. It would come around for a second approach on the end-loop of the driveway, which was wide enough to accommodate produce haulers in the harvest season, and park facing out toward the county road. But it wasn't a truck after all. A motor home. An older model with rounded lines, well kept, forty feet long, either blue or green. Its chrome glimmered like quicksilver under the late-winter moon.

Amazed that she had not yet been stabbed or shot or struck from behind, glancing back at the open front door where the killer hadn't yet appeared, Chyna headed for the porch steps.

The motor home rounded the end of the loop, beginning to turn toward her. Its twin beams swept across the Templetons' barn and other outbuildings.

Larch and maple and evergreen shadows fled before the arcing headlights. They flickered darkly through the trellis at the end of the porch, along the white balustrade, across the lawn and the stone walkway, stretching impossibly, swooping into the night as if trying frantically to tear free of the trees that cast them.

The deep quiet in the house, the lack of lights downstairs, the killer's failure to attack her as she escaped, the timely arrival of the motor home-suddenly all of those things made chilling sense. The killer was driving the motor home.

"No."

Chyna swiftly retreated from the porch steps and scrambled back into the foyer.

At her heels, the headlights came all the way around the end of the driveway loop. They pierced the trellis grid, projecting geometric patterns across the porch floor and the front wall of the house.

She closed the door and fumbled for the big lock above the knob. Found the thumb-turn. Engaged the heavy deadbolt.

Then she realized her mistake. The front door had been unlocked because the killer had gone out that way. If he found it locked now, he would know that Laura wasn't the only person alive in the house, and the hunt would begin.

Her sweaty fingers slipped on the brass thumb-turn, but the bolt snapped open with a hard clack.

Earlier, he must have parked the vehicle near the end of the halfmile-long driveway, out toward the county road, and must have walked to the house.

Now tires crunched through gravel. Air brakes issued a soft whoosh and a softer whine, and the motor home came to a full stop in front of the house.

Remembering the oval rug that had turned under her feet and had nearly sent her sprawling, Chyna dropped to her knees. She crawled across the wool, smoothing the rumples with her hands. If the killer tripped over the disarranged rug, he would know that it hadn't been in that condition when he'd left.

Footsteps arose outside: boot heels ringing off the flagstone walkway.

Chyna came to her feet and turned toward the study. No good. She couldn't know for sure where he would go when he reentered the house, and if he stepped into the study, she would be trapped in there with him.

His tread echoed hollowly from the wooden porch steps.

Chyna lunged across the foyer, through the archway, into the dark living room-and immediately came to a halt, afraid of stumbling into furniture and knocking it over. She edged forward, feeling her way with both hands, vision hampered by the muddy-red ghost images of the motor-home headlights, which still floated faintly across her retinas.

The front door opened.

Less than halfway across the living room, Chyna squatted beside an armchair. If the killer entered and switched on the lights, he would see her.

Without closing the door behind him, the man appeared in the foyer, beyond the arch. He was dimly limned by the glow from the second-floor hallway. He passed the living room and went directly to the stairs.

Laura.

Chyna still had no weapon.

She thought of the fireplace poker. Not good enough. Unless she caved in his skull on the first blow or broke his arm, he would wrest the poker away from her. She had the strength of terror, but maybe that wouldn't be enough.

Rather than rise to her feet and blunder blindly across the living room, she stayed down and crawled because it was safer and quicker. She reached the dining-room archway and angled toward where she thought she'd find the kitchen door.

She thumped into a chair. It rattled against a table leg. On the table, something shifted with a clink-clink, and she remembered seeing carefully arranged ceramic fruit in a copper bowl.

She didn't think that he could have heard these sounds all the way upstairs, so she kept going. There was nothing to do but keep going anyway, whether he had heard or not.

When she reached the swinging door sooner than she had expected, she got to her feet.

Though the infiltrating moonlight was already dim, it suddenly faded away, causing the flesh on the nape of her neck to crawl with a dire expectation. She turned, pressing her back against the doorframe, certain that the killer was close behind her, silhouetted in front of a window, blocking the lunar glow, but he wasn't there. The silver radiance no longer painted the glass. Evidently the storm clouds, rolling out of the northwest since before midnight, had finally shrouded the moon.

Pushing on the swinging door, she went into the kitchen.

She wouldn't need to switch on the overhead fluorescent panels. The upper of the double ovens featured a digital clock with green numerals that emitted a surprising amount of light, enough to allow her to find her way around the room.

She recalled having seen a section of butcher-block countertop to one side of the stainless-steel sinks. The sinks were in front of the wider of the two windows. She slid her hand along the cold granite counters until she located the remembered wooden surface.

The house above her seemed filled with a higher order of silence than ever before.

What's the bastard doing up there in all that silence, up there in all that silence with Laura?

Under the butcher block was a drawer where she expected to find knives. Found them. Neatly slotted in a holder.

She withdrew one. Too short. Another. This one was a bread knife with a blunt round end. The third that she selected proved to be a butcher knife. She carefully tested the cutting edge against the ball of her thumb and found it satisfyingly sharp.

Upstairs, Laura screamed.

Chyna started toward the dining-room door but sensed intuitively that she dared not go that way. She rushed instead to the back stairs, even though they couldn't be climbed without making noise.

She switched on the light in the stairwell. The killer could not see her here.

From the second floor, Laura cried out again-a terrible wail of despair, pain, horror, like a cry that might have been heard in the poison gas chambers at Dachau or in the windowless interrogation rooms of Siberian prisons during the era of the gulags. It was not a scream for help or even a begging for mercy, but a plea for release at any cost, even death.

Chyna clambered up the stairs into that scream, which presented her with real resistance, as if she were a swimmer struggling toward the surface of a sea, against a great weight of water. As cold as an Arctic current, the cry chilled her, numbed her, throbbed icily in the hollows of her bones. She was overcome by a compulsion to scream with Laura as a dog wails in sympathy when it hears another dog suffering, a primal need to howl in misery at the sheer helplessness of human existence in a universe full of dead stars, and she had to fight that urge.

Laura's scream spiraled into a bawling for her mother, though she must know that her mother was dead. "Mommy, Mommy, Mommeeeeee." She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb.

And then sudden quiet.

Bleak silence.

On the landing, halfway to the second floor, Chyna was surprised to realize that the thousand-fathom weight of the scream had brought her to a standstill. Her legs were weak; her calf and thigh muscles quivered as if she had ran a marathon. She seemed on the brink of collapse.

Because it might signify the end of hope, the silence was now as oppressive as the scream. She bent her head under a hush as heavy as an iron crown, hunched her shoulders, and huddled miserably upon herself.

It would be so easy to lean against the wall, slide down to the floor, put the knife aside, and curl defensively. Just wait until he had gone away. Wait until a relative or a friend of the family arrived, discovered the bodies, went for the police, and took care of everything.

Instead, after pausing only a few seconds on the landing, Chyna forced herself to continue the climb, heart pounding so hard that it seemed as if each blow might knock her down.

Her arms shook uncontrollably. In her white-knuckle grip, the butcher knife carved wobbly patterns in the air in front of her, and she wondered if she would have the strength, in any confrontation, to thrust and slash effectively.

That was the thinking of a loser, and she hated herself for it. During the past ten years she had transformed herself into a winner, and she was determined not to backslide.

The old wooden stairs protested under her, but she moved fast, heedless of the noise. Whether Laura was alive or dead, the killer would be at play, distracted by his games, unlikely to hear anything other than the thunderous rush of his own blood in his ears and over whatever urgent inner voices spoke to him at that very moment when he held a life in his hands.

She stepped into the upstairs hall. Propelled by her fear for Laura and by a rage born from self-disgust at her moment of weakness on the landing, she hurried past the closed door of the guest room to the turn in the L-shaped corridor, around the corner, past the half-open door of the master suite and through the amber light that spilled from it. She dashed along the arbor of faded roses, rage swelling into fury as she went, shocked by her own boldness, seeming to glide along the carpet, as swift as if sliding down an icy slope, straight to the open door of Laura's room, without hesitation, knife raised high, her arm no longer shaking, steady and sure, crazy with terror and despair and righteousness, across the threshold and into the bedroom, where Freud was unshaken by what had happened under his gaze-and where the rumpled bed was empty.

Chyna whirled around in disbelief. Laura was gone. The room was deserted.

Over the rush of her breathing and the booming of her heart, she heard the rattle-clink of a shackle chain. Not in the room. Elsewhere.

Careless of danger, she returned to the hall, to the balustrade that overlooked the foyer.

Below, barely illuminated by the pale light from the upstairs hallway, the killer went through the open front door onto the porch. He was carrying Laura in his arms. She was wrapped in a bedsheet, one pale arm trailing limply, head lolling to the side, and face concealed by her golden hair: unconscious, offering no resistance.

He must have been descending the shadowy stairs when Chyna had passed them. She had been so focused on getting to Laura's room, so pumped for the attack, that she hadn't been aware of him, even though the chain and the cuffs must have been rattling then as well.

Evidently, he'd been making enough noise that he hadn't heard Chyna either.

Instinct had told her to take the back stairs, and she'd been wise to listen. If she'd been ascending the front stairs, she'd have met him as he'd been coming down. He would have thrown Laura at her, followed the two of them as they tumbled into the foyer, kicked the knife out of Chyna's hand if she hadn't lost it already, and savaged her where she'd fallen.

She couldn't let him take Laura away.

Afraid that thinking about the situation would paralyze her again, Chyna recklessly descended the stairs. If she could take him by surprise and plunge the knife into his back, Laura might yet have a chance.

She could do it too. She wasn't squeamish. She could slam the blade deep, try for his heart from the back, puncture a lung, yank the knife out of him and ram it in again, stab the son of a bitch and listen to him squealing for mercy and stab stab stab him until he was silent forever. Never had she done anything like that; never had she hurt anyone. But she could do it now, waste him, because she was terrified for Laura, because she was sick at the thought of failing her friend and because she was a natural-born vengeance machine, a human being.

At the bottom of the stairs, the oval rug didn't spin out from under her as it had done before, and she went straight toward the open door.

She no longer held the knife high but held it low, at her side. If he heard her coming, he would turn, and then she could swing the knife up in an arc, under the girl that he held in his arms, and into his belly. That was better than trying to plunge it into his back, where the point might be deflected by a shoulder blade or rib, or might skid off his spine. Go for the softest part of him. She'd be face-to-face with him that way. Looking straight into his eyes. Would that make her hesitate? He had it coming. The bastard. She thought of Sarah on the floor of the shower stall, huddled naked in the cold drizzle. She could do it. She could do it.

Into the doorway, across the threshold, onto the porch, she was not only ready to kill but prepared to die in the attempt to get him. Yet as swift as she had been, she hadn't been swift enough, because he was not just that moment going down the porch steps, as she had hoped, but was already nearing the motor home. The burden of Laura hadn't slowed him at all. He was inhumanly quick.

She landed on only one stair tread from the front porch to the walkway, and the rubber soles of her shoes slapped the flagstones loud enough to carry even over the moaning of the wind. The moon was gone, and half the stars as well, displaced by towering palisades of clouds, but if the killer heard her and turned, he would be able to see her clearly.

Evidently, he didn't hear, for he didn't glance back, and Chyna angled off the walkway, onto the quieter grass, determinedly going after him.

Two doors were open on the motor home: one at the driver's side of the cockpit, the other on that same flank of the vehicle but two thirds of the way toward the back. The killer chose the rear door.

With Laura in his arms, he was forced to turn sideways, pulling her tightly to him as he squeezed through the open door and crabbed up the two interior steps, but he was as agile as he was strong. He disappeared into the vehicle before Chyna could reach him.

She considered going inside after him. But all the windows were curtained, so she didn't know if he had turned left or right. And if he had put Laura down immediately upon entering, he would now be better able to defend himself against an attack. That was his turf, beyond the door, and she wasn't sufficiently reckless with vengeance to want to confront him there.

She pressed her back to the wall of the motor home, beside the open door, waiting for him. If he came outside again, she'd go at him even as his foot was reaching for the ground. The element of surprise was still working for her, maybe better than ever-because the killer was close to a clean getaway and feeling so good about himself that he might be careless.

Maybe he wouldn't come outside again, but at least he would have to reach out to pull the door shut. Standing on the step, leaning to grab at the handle, he would not be well balanced, and she would have the knife deep into him before he had a chance to jerk back.

Movement inside. A thump.

She tensed.

He didn't appear.

Silence again.

The scent of blood was suddenly heavy out of the northwest, as though a slaughterhouse lay upwind of her. Then it passed, and she realized that she hadn't actually smelled blood but had flashed back on the smell of the sodden sheets in the Templetons' master suite.

The aluminum wall of the motor home was cold against her spine, and she shivered because it seemed that some of the coldness of the man inside was seeping through to her.

Waiting, she began to lose her nerve. Resurgent fear tempered her rage, shifting the balance from vengeance to survival. But she could still do it. She could do it. She struggled to hold on to her crazy-hot anger.

Then the killer came out of the motor home, but he didn't use the exit beside her. He stepped from the open cab door at the front of the vehicle.

Chyna's breath caught in her throat, and the chill wind from the oncoming storm seemed bitter with the scent of failure.

He was too far away. No longer distracted by the weight of Laura in his arms and the rattling of her shackles, he would hear Chyna coming. She no longer had the element of surprise to even the odds.

He stood just outside the cab door, thirty feet from her, stretching almost lazily. He rolled his big shoulders as if to shake weariness from them, and he massaged the back of his neck.

If he turned his head to the left, he would see her at once. If she didn't remain absolutely still, he would surely spot her slightest movement even from the corner of his eye.

He was downwind of her, and she was half afraid that he would smell her fear. He seemed more animal than human, even in the fluid grace with which he moved, and she had no trouble believing that he was gifted with wild talents and preternatural senses.

Although he wasn't holding the silencer-fitted gun with which he had killed Paul Templeton, it might be tucked under his belt. If she tried to flee, he could draw the weapon and shoot her dead before she got far.

But he wouldn't shoot her dead. Nothing that easy. He'd pop her in the leg, bring her down, and take her captive. Load her into the motor home with Laura. He'd want to play with her later.

Finished stretching, he moved briskly toward the house. Up the walkway. Onto the porch. Inside.

He never looked back. Chyna's pent-up breath stuttered from her in a tattoo of fear, and she inhaled with a shudder.

Before her courage faded further, she hurried forward to the cab door and climbed behind the steering wheel. Her best hope was to find keys in the ignition, in which case she would be able to start the engine and drive away with Laura, go into Napa to the police.

No keys.

She glanced at the house, wondering how long he would be gone. Maybe he was searching for valuables now that the killing was done. Or selecting souvenirs. That could take five minutes, ten minutes, even longer. Which might be enough time to get Laura out of the motor home and hide her somewhere. Somehow.

She still had the knife. And now that she was in the killer's domain without his knowledge, she had regained the precious element of surprise.

Nevertheless, her heart raced, and her dry mouth was filled with the slightly metallic taste of feverish anxiety.

The seat swiveled, clearing the console. She was able to step from behind the steering wheel into the lounge area, which featured built-in sofas upholstered in a hunter-plaid fabric.

The steel floor was carpeted, of course, but after long years of hard travel, it creaked softly under her feet.

She had expected the place to smell like a Grand Guignol theater where the sadistic plays involved no make-believe, but instead the air was redolent of recently brewed coffee and cinnamon rolls. How odd-and somehow profoundly disturbing-that a man like this should find any satisfaction at all in innocent pleasures.

"Laura," she whispered, as though the killer might hear her all the way from the house. Then more fiercely than ever, yet in a whisper: "Laura!"

Beyond the lounge and open to it were a kitchenette and a cozy dining alcove with a booth upholstered in red vinyl. Running off the battery, a lamp hung aglow over the dining-nook table.

Laura was not to be seen anywhere.

Moving swiftly out of the dining area, Chyna came to the rear door standing open on the right, through which the killer had entered with the unconscious girl in his arms.

"Laura."

Aft of the outer door, a short cramped hall led along the driver's side of the vehicle, illuminated by a low-voltage safety fixture. There was also a skylight, now black. On the left were two closed doors, and at the end a third stood ajar.

The first door opened into a tiny bath. The space was a marvel of efficient design: a toilet, a sink, a medicine cabinet, and a corner shower stall.

Behind the second door was a closet. A few changes of clothes hung from a chrome rod.

At the end of the hall was a small bedroom with imitation-wood paneling and a closet with an accordion-style vinyl door. The meager light from the hall didn't brighten the place much, but Chyna could see well enough to identify Laura; the girl was lying facedown on the narrow bed, swaddled in a sheet, with only her small bare feet and her golden hair revealed.

Urgently whispering her friend's name, Chyna stepped to the bed and dropped to her knees.

Laura didn't respond. Still unconscious.

Chyna couldn't lift the girl, couldn't carry her as the killer had done, so she had to try to rouse her instead. She pulled aside a flap of sheet and was eye-to-eye with her friend.

They were sapphire-blue eyes now, not pale-sky blue, perhaps because the light in the room was so poor or perhaps because they were occluded with death. Her mouth was open, and blood moistened her lips.

The crazy fucking hateful bastard had taken her with him even though she was dead, for God-knew-what purposes, maybe because she was something he could touch and look at and talk to for a few days to remind him of the glory. A souvenir.

Chyna's stomach cramped painfully, not with revulsion or disgust but with guilt, with failure and futility and sheer black despair.

"Oh, baby," she said to the dead girl. "Oh, baby, sweetie, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry."

Not that she could have done anything more than she had tried to do. What could she have done? She couldn't have attacked the bastard bare-handed when she had stood behind him in the upstairs hall, when he had been cooing to the dangling spider. What could she have done? She couldn't have gotten to the kitchen any sooner, found the knife any faster, climbed the back stairs any quicker.

"I'm so sorry."

This beautiful girl, this dear heart, would never find the husband about whom she had fantasized, never have the children who would have been a betterment to the world by the simple virtue of having been her children. Twenty-three years of getting ready to make a contribution, to make a difference in the lives of others, so full of ideals and hope: But now her gift would never be given, and the world would be immeasurably poorer for it.

"I love you, Laura. We all love you."

Any words, any sentiment, any expression of grief was horribly inadequate; worse than inadequate-meaningless. Laura was gone, all that warmth and kindness gone forever, and even the most heartfelt words were only words.

Chyna's stomach cramped with a sense of loss, clenched tight and pulled her relentlessly into a black hole within herself.

At the same time she felt her breast swelling with a sob that, if voiced, would be explosive. A single tear would loose a flood. Even one soft sob would bring on an uncontrollable wail.

She couldn't risk grief. Not while she was in the motor home. The killer would be returning at any minute, and she couldn't mourn Laura until she was safely out of there and until he was gone. She no longer had any reason to stay, for Laura was indisputably dead and irretrievable.

Nearby a door slammed hard, shaking the thin metal walls around Chyna.

The killer was back.

Something rattled. Rattled.

With the butcher knife in hand, Chyna swiftly backed away from Laura to the wall next to the open door. Unexpressed grief was a high octane fuel for rage, and in an instant she was burning with fury, afire with the need to hurt him, slash him, spill his guts, hear him scream, and bring the haunting awareness of mortality to his eyes as he had brought it to Laura's.

He'll come into the room. I'll cut him. He'll come and I'll cut him. It was a prayer, not a plan. He'll come. I'll cut him. He'll come. I'll cut him.

The shadowy room darkened. He was at the door, blocking the meager light from the hall.

Silently, the knife in her hand jittered furiously up and down like the needle on a sewing machine, stitching the pattern of her fear in the air.

He was at the threshold. Right there. Right there. He would come in for one more look at the pretty blond dead girl, for one more feel of her cool skin, and Chyna would get him when he crossed the threshold, cut him.

Instead, he closed the door and went away.

Aghast, she listened to his retreating footsteps, the creaking as the carpeted steel floor torqued under his boots, and she wondered what to do now.

The driver's door slammed. The engine started. The brakes released with a brief faint shriek.

They were on the move.