Shadowfires

1 SHOCK

Brightness fell from the air, nearly as tangible as rain. It rippled down windows, formed colorful puddles on the hoods and trunks of parked cars, and imparted a wet sheen to the leaves of trees and to the chrome on the bustling traffic that filled the street. Miniature images of the California sun shimmered in every reflective surface, and downtown Santa Ana was drenched in the clear light of a late-June morning.

When Rachael Leben exited the lobby doors of the office building and stepped onto the sidewalk, the summer sunshine felt like warm water on her bare arms. She closed her eyes and, for a moment, turned her face to the heavens, bathing in the radiance, relishing it.

“You stand there smiling as if nothing better has ever happened to you or ever will,” Eric said sourly when he followed her out of the building and saw her luxuriating in the June heat.

“Please,” she said, face still tilted to the sun, “let's not have a scene.”

“You made a fool of me in there.”

“I certainly did not.”

“What the hell are you trying to prove, anyway?”

She did not respond, she was determined not to let him spoil the lovely day. She turned and started to walk away.

Eric stepped in front of her, blocking her way. His gray-blue eyes usually had an icy aspect, but now his gaze was hot.

“Let's not be childish,” she said.

“You're not satisfied just to leave me. You've got to let the world know you don't need me or any damn thing I can give you.”

“No, Eric. I don't care what the world thinks of you one way or the other.”

“You want to rub my face in it.”

“That's not true, Eric.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Hell, yes. You're just reveling in my humiliation. Wallowing in it.”

She saw him as she had never seen him before, a pathetic man. Previously he'd seemed strong to her, physically, emotionally, and mentally strong, strong-willed, strongly opinionated. He was aloof, too, and sometimes cold. He could be cruel. And there had been times during their seven years of marriage when he had been as distant as the moon. But until this moment, he'd never seemed weak or pitiable.

“Humiliation?” she said wonderingly. “Eric, I've done you an enormous favor. Any other man would buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate.”

They had just left the offices of Eric's attorneys, where their divorce settlement had been negotiated with a speed that had surprised everyone but Rachael. She had startled them by arriving without an attorney of her own and by failing to press for everything to which she was entitled under California's community-property laws. When Eric's attorney presented a first offer, she had insisted it was too generous and had given them another set of figures that had seemed more reasonable to her.

“Champagne, huh? You're going to be telling everyone you took twelve and a half million less than you deserved just so you could get a quick divorce and be done with me fast, and I'm supposed to stand here grinning? Christ.”

“Eric—”

“Couldn't wait to be done with me. Cut off a goddamn arm to be done with me. And I'm supposed to celebrate my humiliation?”

“It's a matter of principle with me not to take more than-”

“Principle, my ass.”

“Eric, you know I wouldn't—”

“Everyone'll be looking at me and saying, ‘Christ, just how insufferable must the guy have been if it was worth twelve and a half million to be rid of him!”

“I'm not going to tell anyone what we settled for,” Rachael said.

“Bullshit.”

“If you think I'd ever talk against you or gossip about you, then you know even less about me than I'd thought.”

Eric, twelve years her senior, had been thirty-five and worth four million when she'd married him. Now he was forty-two, and his fortune totaled more than thirty million, and by any interpretation of California law, she was entitled to thirteen million dollars in the divorce settlement — half the wealth accumulated during their marriage. Instead, she insisted on settling for her red Mercedes 560 SL sports car, five hundred thousand dollars, and no alimony — which was approximately one twenty-sixth of what she could have claimed. She had calculated that this nest egg would give her the time and resources to decide what to do with the rest of her life and to finance whatever plans she finally made.

Aware that passersby were staring as she and Eric confronted each other en the sun-splashed street, Rachael said quietly, “I didn't marry you for your money.”

“I wonder,” he said acidly and irrationally. His bold-featured face wasn't handsome at the moment. Anger had carved it into an ugly mask — all hard, deep, down-slashing lines.

Rachael spoke calmly, with no trace of bitterness, with no desire to put him in his place or to hurt him in any way. It was just over. She felt no rage. Only mild regret. “And now that it's finally over, I don't expect to be supported in high style and great luxury for the rest of my days. I don't want your millions. You earned them, not me. Your genius, your iron determination, your endless hours in the office and the lab. You built it all, you and you alone, and you alone deserve what you've built. You're an important man, maybe even a great man in your field, Eric, and I am only me, Rachael, and I'm not going to pretend I had anything to do with your triumphs.”

The lines of anger in his face deepened as she complimented him. He was accustomed to occupying the dominant role in all relationships, professional and private. From his position of absolute dominance, he relentlessly forced submission to his wishes — or crushed anyone who would not submit. Friends, employees, and business associates always did things Eric Leben's way, or they were history. Submit or be rejected and Destroyed — those were their only choices. He enjoyed the exercise of power, thrived on conquests as major as million-dollar deals and as minor as winning domestic arguments. Rachael had done as he wished for seven years, but she would not submit any longer.

The funny thing was that, by her docility and reasonableness, she had robbed him of the power on which he thrived. He had been looking forward to a protracted battle over the division of spoils, and she had walked away from it. He relished the prospect of acrimonious squabbling over alimony payments, but she thwarted him by rejecting all such assistance. He had pleasurably anticipated a court fight in which he would make her look like a gold-digging bitch and reduce her, at last, to a creature without dignity who would be willing to settle for far less than was her due. Then, although leaving her rich, he would have felt that the war had been won and he had beaten her into submission. But when she made it clear that his millions were of no importance to her, she had eliminated the one power he still had over her. She had cut him off at the knees, and his anger arose from his realization that, by her docility, she had somehow made herself his equal — if not his superior — in any further contact they might have.

She said, “Well, the way I see it, I've lost seven years, and all I want is reasonable compensation for that time. I'm twenty-nine, almost thirty, and in a way, I'm just beginning my life. Starting out later than other people. This settlement will give me a terrific start. If I lose the bundle, if someday I have reason to wish I'd gone for the whole thirteen million… well, then that's my tough luck, not yours. We've been through all this, Eric. It's finished.”

She stepped around him, trying to walk away, but he grabbed her arm, halting her.

“Please let me go,” she said evenly.

Glaring at her, he said, “How could I have been so wrong about you? I thought you were sweet, a bit shy, an unworldly little fluff of a girl. But you're a nasty little ball-buster, aren't you?”

“Really, this is an absolutely crazy attitude. And this crude behavior isn't worthy of you. Now let me go.”

He gripped her even tighter. “Or is this all just a negotiating ploy? Huh? When the papers are drawn up, when we come back to sign everything on Friday, will you suddenly have a change of heart? Will you want more?”

“No, I'm not playing any games.”

His grin was tight and mean. “I'll bet that's it. If we agree to such a ridiculously low settlement and draw up the papers, you'll refuse to sign them, but you'll use them in court to try to prove we were going to give you the shaft. You'll pretend the offer was ours and that we tried to strong-arm you into signing it. Make me look bad. Make me look as if I'm a real hard-hearted bastard. Huh? Is that the strategy? Is that the game?”

“I told you, there's no game. I'm sincere.”

He dug his fingers into her upper arm. “The truth, Rachael.”

“Stop it.”

“Is that the strategy?”

“You're hurting me.”

“And while you're at it, why don't you tell me all about Ben Shadway, too?”

She blinked in surprise, for she had never imagined that Eric knew about Benny.

His face seemed to harden in the hot sun, cracking with more deep lines of anger. “How long was he fucking you before you finally walked out on me?”

“You're disgusting, she said, immediately regretting the harsh words because she saw that he was pleased to have broken through her cool facade at last.

“How long?” he demanded, tightening his grip.

“I didn't meet Benny till six months after you and I separated,” she said, striving to keep a neutral tone that would deny him the noisy confrontation he apparently desired.

“How long was he poaching on,the Rachael?”

“If you know about Benny, you’ve had me watched, something you've no right to do.”

“Yeah, you want to keep your dirty little secrets.”

“If you have hired someone to watch me, you know I've been seeing Benny for just five months. Now let go. You're still hurting me.

A young bearded guy, passing by, hesitated, stepped toward them, and said, “You need help, lady?”

Eric turned on the stranger in such a rage that he seemed to spit the words out rather than speak them, “Butt out, mister. This is my wife, and it's none of your goddamn business.”

Rachael tried to wrench free of Eric's iron grip without success.

The bearded stranger said, “So she's your wife — that doesn't give you the right to hurt her.”

Letting go of Rachael, Eric fisted his hands and turned more directly toward the intruder.

Rachael spoke quickly to her would-be Galahad, eager to defuse the situation. “Thank you, but it's all right. Really. I'm fine. Just a minor disagreement.”

The young man shrugged and walked away, glancing back as he went.

The incident had at last made Eric aware that he was in danger of making a spectacle of himself, which a man of his high position and self-importance was loath to do. However, his temper had not cooled. His face was flushed, and his lips were bloodless. His eyes were the eyes of a dangerous man.

She said, “Be happy, Eric. You've saved millions of dollars and God knows how much more in attorneys fees. You won. You didn't get to crush me or muddy my reputation in court the way you had hoped to, but you still won. Be happy with that.”

With a seething hatred that shocked her, he said, “You stupid, rotten bitch. The day you walked out on me, I wanted to knock you down and kick your stupid face in. I should've done it. Wish I had. But I thought you'd come crawling back, so I didn't. I should've. Should've kicked your stupid face in.” He raised his hand as if to slap her. But he checked himself even as she flinched from the expected blow. Furious, he turned and hurried away.

As she watched him go, Rachael suddenly understood that his sick desire to dominate everyone was a far more fundamental need than she'd realized. By stripping him of his power over her, by turning her back on both him and his money, she had not merely reduced him to an equal but had, in his eyes, unmanned him. That had to he the case, for nothing else explained the degree of his rage or his urge to commit violence, an urge he had barely controlled.

She had grown to dislike him intensely, if not hate him, and she had feared him a little, too. But until now, she had not been fully aware of the immensity and intensity of the rage within him. She had not realized how thoroughly dangerous he was.

Although the golden sunshine still dazzled her eyes and forced her to squint, although it still baked her skin, she felt a cold shiver pass through her, spawned by the realization that she'd been wise to leave Eric when she had — and perhaps fortunate to escape with no more physical damage than the bruises his fingers were certain to have left on her arm.

Watching him step off the sidewalk into the street, she was relieved to see him go. A moment later, relief turned to horror.

He was heading toward his black Mercedes, which was parked along the other side of the avenue. Perhaps he actually was blinded by his anger. Or maybe it was the brilliant June sunlight flashing on every shiny surface that interfered with his vision. Whatever the reason, he dashed across the southbound lanes of Main Street, which were at the moment without traffic, and kept on going into the northbound lanes, directly into the path of a city garbage truck that was doing forty miles an hour.

Too late, Rachael screamed a warning.

The driver tramped his brake pedal to the floorboards. But the shriek of the truck's locked wheels came almost simultaneously with the sickening sound of impact.

Eric was hurled into the air and thrown back into the southbound lanes as if by the concussion wave of a bomb blast. He crashed into the pavement and tumbled twenty feet, stiffly at first, then with a horrible looseness, as if he were constructed of string and old rags. He came to rest facedown, unmoving.

A southbound yellow Subaru braked with a banshee screech and a hard flat wail of its horn, halting only two feet from him. A Chevy, following too close, rammed into the back of the Subaru and pushed it within a few inches of the body.

Rachael was the first to reach Eric. Heart hammering, shouting his name, she dropped to her knees and, by instinct, put one hand to his neck to feel for a pulse. His skin was wet with blood, and her fingers slipped on the slick flesh as she searched desperately for the throbbing artery.

Then she saw the hideous depression that had reshaped his skull. His head had been staved in along the right side, above the torn ear, and all the way forward past the temple to the edge of his pale brow. His head was turned so she could see one eye, which was open wide. staring in shock, though sightless now. Many wickedly sharp fragments of bone must have been driven deep into his brain. Death had been instantaneous.

She stood up abruptly, tottering, nauseated. Dizzy, she might have fallen if the driver of the garbage truck had not grabbed hold of her, provided support, and escorted her around the side of the Subaru, where she could lean against the car.

There was nothin' I could do,” he aid miserably.

“I know,” she said.

“Nothin' at all. He run in front of me. Didn't look. Nothin' I could do.”

At first Rachael had difficulty breathing. Then she realized she was absentmindedly scrubbing her blood-covered hand on her sundress, and the sight of those damp rusty-scarlet stains on the pastel-blue cotton made her breath come quicker, too quick. Hyperventilating, she slumped against the Subaru, closed her eyes, hugged herself, and clenched her teeth. She was determined not to faint. She strove to hold in each shallow breath as long as possible, and the very process of changing the rhythm of her breathing was a calming influence.

Around her she heard the voices of motorists who had left their cars in the snarl of stalled traffic. Some of them asked her if she was all right, and she nodded, others asked if she needed medical attention, and she shook her head — no.

If she had ever loved Eric, that love had been ground to dust beneath his heel. It had been a long time since she'd even liked him. Moments before the accident, he'd revealed a pure and terrifying hatred of her, so she supposed she should have been utterly unmoved by his death. Yet she was badly shaken. As she hugged herself and shivered, she was aware of a cold emptiness within, a hollow sense of loss that she could not quite understand. Not grief. Just… loss.

She heard sirens in the distance.

Gradually she regained control of her breathing.

Her shivering grew less violent, though it did not stop entirely.

The sirens grew nearer, louder.

She opened her eyes. The bright June sunshine no longer seemed clean and fresh. The darkness of death had passed through the day, and in its wake, the morning light had acquired a sour yellow cast that reminded her more of sulfur than of honey.

Red lights flashing, sirens dying, a paramedic van and a police sedan approached along the northbound lanes.

“Rachael?”

She turned and saw Herbert Tuleman, Eric's personal attorney, with whom she had met only minutes ago. She had always liked Herb, and he had liked her as well. He was a grandfatherly man with bushy gray eyebrows that were now drawn together in a single bar.

“One of my associates… returning to the office… saw it happen,” Herbert said, “hurried up to tell me. My God.”

Yes,” she said numbly.

“My God, Rachael.”

“Yes.”

“It's too… crazy.

“Yes.”

“But…”

“Yes,” she said.

And she knew what Herbert was thinking. Within the past hour, she had told them she would not fight for a large share of Eric's fortune but would settle for, proportionately, a pittance. Now, by virtue of the fact that Eric had no family and no children from his first marriage, the entire thirty million plus his currently unvalued stock in the company would almost certainly, by default, come into her sole possession.

2 SPOOKED

The hot, dry air was filled with the crackle of police radios, a metallic chorus of dispatchers' voices, and the smell of sun-softened asphalt.

The paramedics could do nothing for Eric Leben except convey his corpse to the city morgue, where it would lie in a refrigerated room until the medical examiner had time to attend to it. Because Eric had been killed in an accident, the law required an autopsy.

“The body should be available for release in twenty-four hours,” one of the policemen had told Rachael.

While they had filled out a brief report, she had sat in the back of one of the patrol cars. Now she was standing in the sun again.

She no longer felt sick. Just numb.

They loaded the draped cadaver into the van. In spots, the shroud was dark with blood.

Herbert Tuleman felt obliged to comfort Rachael and repeatedly suggested that she return with him to his law office. “You need to sit down, get a grip on yourself,” he said, one hand on her shoulder, his kindly face wrinkled with concern.

“I'm all right, Herb. Really, I am. Just a little shaken.”

“Some cognac. That's what you need. I've got a bottle of Remy Martin in the office bar.”

“No, thank you. I guess it'll be up to me to handle the funeral, so I've got things to attend to.”

The two paramedics closed the rear doors on the van and walked unhurriedly to the front of the vehicle. No need for sirens and flashing red emergency beacons. Speed would not help Eric now.

Herb said, “If you don't want brandy, then perhaps coffee. Or just come and sit with me for a while. I don't think you should get behind a wheel right away.”

Rachael touched his leathery cheek affectionately. He was a weekend sailor, and his skin had been toughened and creased less by age than by his time upon the sea. “I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I'm fine. I'm almost ashamed of how well I'm taking it. I mean… I feel no grief at all.”

He held her hand. “Don't be ashamed. He was my client, Rachael, so I'm aware that he was… a difficult man.”

“Yes.”

“He gave you no reason to grieve.”

“It still seems wrong to feel… so little. Nothing.”

“He wasn't just a difficult man, Rachael. He was also a fool for not recognizing what a jewel he had in you and for not doing whatever was necessary to make you want to stay with him.”

“You're a dear.”

“It's true. If it weren't very true, I wouldn't speak of a client like this, not even when he was… deceased.”

The van, bearing the corpse, pulled away from the accident scene. Paradoxically, there was a cold, wintry quality to the way the summer sun glimmered in the white paint and in the polished chrome bumpers, making it appear as if Eric were being borne away in a vehicle carved from ice.

Herb walked with her, through the gathered onlookers, past his office building, to her red 560 SL. He said, “I could have someone drive Eric's car back to his house, put it in the garage, and leave the keys at your place.”

“That would be helpful,” she said.

When Rachael was behind the wheel, belted in, Herb leaned down to the window and said, “We'll have to talk soon about the estate.”

“In a few days,” she said.

“And the company.”

“Things will run themselves for a few days, won't they?”

“Certainly. It's Monday, so shall we say you'll come see me Friday morning? That gives you four days to… adjust.”

“All right.”

“Ten o'clock?”

“Fine.”

“You sure you're okay?”

“Yes,” she said, and she drove home without incident, though she felt as though she were dreaming.

She lived in a quaint three-bedroom bungalow in Placentia. The neighborhood was solidly middle-class and friendly, and the house had loads of charm: French windows, window seats, coffered ceilings, a used-brick fireplace, and more. She'd made the down payment and moved a year ago, when she left Eric. Her house was far different from the place in Villa Park, which was set on an acre of manicured grounds and which boasted every luxury; however, she liked her cozy bungalow better than his Spanish-modern mansion, not merely because the scale seemed more human here but also because the Placentia house was not tainted by countless bad memories as was the house in Villa Park.

She took off her bloodstained blue sundress. She washed her hands and face, brushed her hair, and reapplied what little makeup she wore. Gradually the mundane task of grooming herself had a calming effect. Her hands stopped trembling. Although a hollow coldness remained at the core of her, she stopped shivering.

After dressing in one of the few somber outfits she owned — a charcoal-gray suit with a pale gray blouse, slightly too heavy for a hot summer day — she called Attison Brothers, a firm of prestigious morticians. Having ascertained that they could see her immediately, she drove directly to their imposing colonial-style funeral home in Yorba Linda.

She had never made funeral arrangements before, and she had never imagined that there would be anything amusing about the experience. But when she sat down with Paul Attison in his softly lighted, darkly paneled, plushly carpeted, uncannily quiet office and listened to him call himself a “grief counselor,” she saw dark humor in the situation. The atmosphere was so meticulously somber and so self-consciously reverent that it was stagy. His proffered sympathy was oily yet ponderous, relentless and calculated, but surprisingly she found herself playing along with him, responding to his condolences and platitudes with clichés of her own. She felt as if she were an actor trapped in a bad play by an incompetent playwright, forced to deliver her wooden lines of dialogue because it was less embarrassing to persevere to the end of the third act than to stalk off the stage in the middle of the performance. In addition to identifying himself as a grief counselor, Attison referred to a casket as an “eternal bower.” A suit of burial clothes, in which the corpse would be dressed, was called “the final raiments.” Attison said “preparations for preservation” instead of “embalming,” and “resting place” instead of “grave.”

Although the experience was riddled with macabre humor, Rachael was not able to laugh even when she left the funeral home after two and a half hours and was alone in her car again. Ordinarily she had a special fondness for black humor, for laughter that mocked the grim, dark aspects of life. Not today. It was neither grief nor any kind of sadness that kept her in a gray and humorless mood. Nor worry about widowhood. Nor shock. Nor the morbid recognition of Death's lurking presence in even the sunniest day. For a while, as she tended to other details of the funeral, and later, at home once more, as she called Eric's friends and business associates to convey the news, she could not quite understand the cause of her unremitting solemnity.

Then, late in the afternoon, she could no longer fool herself. She knew that her mental state resulted from fear. She tried to deny what was coming, tried not to think about it, and she had some success at not thinking, but in her heart she knew. She knew.

She went through the house, making sure that all the doors and windows were locked. She closed the blinds and drapes.

At five-thirty, Rachael put the telephone on the answering machine. Reporters had begun to call, wanting a few words with the widow of the Great Man, and she had no patience whatsoever for media types.

The house was a bit too cool, so she reset the air conditioner. But for the susurrant sound of cold air coming through the wall vents and the occasional single ring the telephone made before the machine answered it, the house was as silent as Paul Attison's gloom-shrouded office.

Today, deep silence was intolerable; it gave her the creeps. She switched on the stereo, tuned to an FM station playing easy-listening music. For a moment, she stood before the big speakers, eyes closed, swaying as she listened to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are.” Then she turned up the volume so the music could be heard throughout the house.

In the kitchen, she cut a small piece of semisweet dark chocolate from a bar and put it on a white saucer. She opened a split of fine, dry champagne. She took the chocolate, the champagne, and a glass into the master bathroom.

On the radio, Sinatra was singing “Days of Wine and Roses.”

Rachael drew a tub of water as hot as she could tolerate, added a drizzle of jasmine-scented oil, and undressed. Just as she was about to settle in to soak, the pulse of fear which had been beating quietly within her suddenly began to throb hard and fast. She tried to calm herself by closing her eyes and breathing deeply, tried telling herself that she was being childish, but nothing worked.

Naked, she went into the bedroom and got the.32-caliber pistol from the top drawer of the nightstand. She checked the magazine to be sure it was fully loaded. Switching off both safeties, she took the thirty-two into the bathroom and put it on the deep blue tile at the edge of the sunken tub, beside the champagne and chocolate.

Andy Williams was singing “Moon River.”

Wincing, she stepped into the hot bath and settled down until the water had slipped most of the way up the slopes of her breasts. It stung at first. Then she became accustomed to the temperature, and the heat was good, penetrating to her bones and finally dispelling the chill that had plagued her ever since Eric had dashed in front of the truck almost seven and a half hours ago.

She nibbled at the candy, taking only a few shavings from the edge of the piece. She let them melt slowly on her tongue.

She tried not to think. She tried to concentrate on just the mindless pleasure of a good hot steep. Just drift. Just be.

She leaned back in the tub, savoring the taste of chocolate, relishing the scent of jasmine in the rising steam.

After a couple of minutes, she opened her eyes and poured a glass of champagne from the ice-cold bottle. The crisp taste was a perfect complement to the lingering trace of chocolate and to the voice of Sinatra crooning the nostalgic and sweetly melancholy lines of “It Was a Very Good Year.”

For Rachael, this relaxing ritual was an important part of the day, perhaps the most important. Sometimes she nibbled at a small wedge of sharp cheese instead of chocolate and sipped a single glass of chardonnay instead of champagne. Sometimes it was an extremely cold bottle of dark beer — Heineken or Beck's — and a handful of the special plump peanuts that were sold by an expensive nut shop in Costa Mesa. Whatever her choice of the day, she consumed it with care and slow delight, in tiny bites and small sips, relishing every nuance of taste and scent and texture.

She was a “present-focused” person.

Benny Shadway, the man Eric had thought was Rachael's lover, said there were basically four types of people: past-, present-, future-, and omni-focused. Those focused primarily on the future had little interest in the past or present. They were often worriers, peering toward tomorrow to see what crisis or insoluble problem might be hurtling toward them — although some were shiftless dreamers rather than worriers, always looking ahead because they were unreasonably certain they were due for great good fortune of one kind or another. Some were also workaholics, dedicated achievers who believed that the future and opportunity were the same thing.

Eric had been such a one, forever brooding about and eagerly anticipating new challenges and conquests. He had been utterly bored with the past and impatient with the snail's pace at which the present sometimes crept by.

A present-focused person, on the other hand, expended most of his energy and interest in the joys and tribulations of the moment. Some present-focused types were merely sluggards, too lazy to prepare for tomorrow or even to contemplate it. Strokes of bad luck often caught them unaware, for they had difficulty accepting the possibility that the pleasantness of the moment might not go on forever. And when they found themselves mired in misfortune, they usually fell into ruinous despair, for they were incapable of embarking upon a course of action that would, at some point in the future, free them from their troubles. However, another type of present-focused person was the hard worker who could involve himself in the task at hand with a single-mindedness that made for splendid efficiency and craftsmanship. A first-rate cabinetmaker, for example, had to be a present-focused person, one who did not look forward impatiently to the final assembly and completion of a piece of furniture but who directed his attention entirely and lovingly to the meticulous shaping and finishing of each rung and arm of a chair, to each drawer face and knob and doorframe of a china hutch, taking his greatest satisfaction in the process of creation rather than in the culmination of the process.

Present-focused people, according to Benny, are more likely to find obvious solutions to problems than are other people, for they are not preoccupied with either what was or what might come to pass but only with what is. They are also the people most sensuously connected with the physical realities of life — therefore the most perceptive in some ways — and they most likely have more sheer pleasure and fun than any dozen past- or future-oriented citizens.

“You're the best kind of present-oriented woman,” Benny had once told her over a Chinese dinner at Peking Duck. “You prepare for the future but never at the expense of losing touch with now. And you're so admirably able to put the past behind you.”

She had said, “Ah, shut up and eat your moo goo gai pan.”

Essentially, what Benny said was true. Since leaving Eric, Rachael had taken five courses in business management at a Pepperdine extension, for she intended to launch a small business. Perhaps a clothing store for upscale women. A place that would be dramatic and fun, the kind of shop that people talked about as not only a source of well-made clothes but an experience. After all, she'd attended UCLA, majoring in dramatic arts, and had earned her bachelor's degree just before meeting Eric at a university function; and though she had no interest in acting, she had real talent for costume and set design, which might serve her well in creating an unusual decor for a clothing store and in acquiring merchandise for sale. However, she had not yet gone so far as to commit herself to the acquisition of an M.B.A. degree nor to choosing a particular enterprise. Rooted in the present, she proceeded to gather knowledge and ideas, waiting patiently for the moment when her plans would simply… crystallize. As for the past — well, to dwell on yesterday's pleasures was to risk missing out on pleasures of the moment, and to dwell on past pains and tragedies was a pointless waste of energy and time.

Now, resting languorously in her steaming bath, Rachael drew a deep breath of the jasmine-scented air.

She hummed along softly with Johnny Mathis as he sang “I'll Be Seeing You.”

She tasted the chocolate again. She sipped the champagne.

She tried to relax, to drift, to go with the flow and embrace the mellow mood in the best California tradition.

For a while she pretended to be completely at ease, and she did not entirely realize that her detachment was only pretense until the doorbell rang. The instant the bell sounded above the lulling music, she sat up in the water, heart hammering, and grabbed for the pistol with such panic that she knocked over her champagne glass.

When she had gotten out of the tub and put on her blue robe, she held the gun at her side, with the muzzle pointed at the floor, and walked slowly through the shadowy house to the front door. She was filled with dread at the prospect of answering the bell; at the same time, she was irresistibly drawn to the door as if in a trance, as if compelled by the mesmeric voice of a hypnotist.

She paused at the stereo to switch it off. The ensuing silence had an ominous quality.

In the foyer, with her hand upon the knob, she hesitated as the bell rang again. The front door had no window, no sidelights. She had been meaning to have a fish-eye security lens installed, through which she would be able to study the person on the doorstep, and now she ardently wished that she had not procrastinated. She stared at the dark oak before her, as if she might miraculously acquire the power to see through it and clearly identify the caller beyond. She was trembling.

She did not know why she faced the prospect of a visitor with such unmitigated dread.

Well, perhaps that was not exactly true. Deep down — or even not so deep — she knew why she was afraid. But she was reluctant to admit the source of her fear, as if admission would transform a horrible possibility into a deadly reality.

The bell rang again.

3 JUST VANISHED

While listening to news on the radio during the drive home from his office in Tustin, Ben Shadway heard about Dr. Eric Leben's sudden death. He wasn't sure how he felt. Shocked, yes. But he wasn't saddened, even though the world had lost a potentially great man. Leben had been brilliant, indisputably a genius, but he had also been arrogant, self-important, perhaps even dangerous.

Ben mostly felt relieved. He had been afraid that Eric, finally aware that he could never regain his wife, would harm her. The man hated to lose. There was a dark rage in him usually relieved by his obsessive commitment to his work, but it might have found expression in violence if he had felt deeply humiliated by Rachael's rejection.

Ben kept a cellular phone in his car — a meticulously restored 1956 Thunderbird, white with blue interior — and he immediately called Rachael. She had her answering machine on, and she did not pick up the receiver when he identified himself.

At the traffic light at the corner of Seventeenth Street and Newport Avenue, he hesitated, then turned left instead of continuing on to his own house in Orange Park Acres. Rachael might not be home right now, but she would get there eventually, and she might need support. He headed for her place in Placentia.

The June sun dappled the Thunderbird's windshield and made bright rippling patterns when he passed through the inconstant shadows of overhanging trees. He switched off the news and put on a Glenn Miller tape. Speeding through the California sun, with “String of Pearls” filling the car, he found it hard to believe that anyone could die on such a golden day.

By his own system of personality classification, Benjamin Lee Shadway was primarily a past-focused man. He liked old movies better than new ones. De Niro, Streep, Gere, Field, Travolta, and Penn were of less interest to him than Bogart, Bacall, Gable, Lombard, Tracy, Hepburn, Cary Grant, William Powell, Myrna Loy. His favorite books were from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, hard-boiled stuff by Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain, and the early Nero Wolfe novels. His music of choice was from the swing era, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, the incomparable Benny Goodman.

For relaxation, he built working models of locomotives from kits, and he collected all kinds of railroad memorabilia. There are no hobbies so reeking with nostalgia or more suited to a past-focused person than those dealing with trains.

He was not focused entirely on the past. At twenty-four, he had obtained a real-estate license, and by the time he was thirty-one, he had established his own brokerage. Now, at thirty-seven, he had six offices with thirty agents working under him. Part of the reason for his success was that he treated his employees and customers with a concern and courtesy that were old-fashioned and enormously appealing in the fast-paced, brusque, and plastic world of the present.

Lately, in addition to his work, there was one other thing that could distract Ben from railroads, old movies, swing music, and his general preoccupation with the past, Rachael Leben. Titian-haired, green-eyed, long-limbed, full-bodied Rachael Leben.

She was somehow both the girl next door and one of those elegant beauties to be found in any 1930s movie about high society, a cross between Grace Kelly and Carole Lombard. She was sweet-tempered. She was amusing. She was smart. She was everything Ben Shadway had ever dreamed about, and what he wanted to do was get in a time machine with her, travel back to 1940, take a private compartment on the Superchief, and cross the country by rail, making love for three thousand miles in time with the gently rocking rhythm of the train.

She'd come to his real-estate agency for help in finding a house, but the house had not been the end of it. They had been seeing each other frequently for five months. At first he had been fascinated by her in the same way any man might be fascinated by any exceptionally attractive woman, intrigued by the thought of what her lips would taste like and of how her body would fit against his, thrilled by the texture of her skin, the sleekness of her legs, the curve of hip and breast. However, soon after he got to know her, he found her sharp mind and generous heart as appealing as her appearance. Her intensely sensuous appreciation for the world around her was wondrous to behold, she could find as much pleasure in a red sunset or in a graceful configuration of shadows as in a hundred-dollar, seven-course dinner at the county's finest restaurant. Ben's lust had quickly turned to infatuation. And sometime within the past two months — he could not pinpoint the date-infatuation had turned to love.

Ben was relatively confident that Rachael loved him, too. They had not yet quite reached the stage where they could forthrightly and comfortably declare the true depth of their feelings for each other. But he felt love in the tenderness of her touch and in the weight of her gaze when he caught her looking secretly at him.

In love, they had not yet made love. Although she was a present-focused woman with the enviable ability to wring every last drop of pleasure from the moment, that did not mean she was promiscuous. She didn't speak bluntly of her feelings, but he sensed that she wanted to progress in small, easy steps. A leisurely romance provided plenty of time for her to explore and savor each new strand of affection in the steadily strengthening bond that bound them to each other, and when at last they succumbed to desire and surrendered to complete intimacy, sex would be all the sweeter for the delay.

He was willing to give her as much time as she required. For one thing, day by day he felt their need growing, and he derived a special thrill from contemplating the tremendous power and intensity of the lovemaking when they finally unleashed their desire. And through her, he had come to realize that they would be cheating themselves out of the more innocent pleasures of the moment if they rushed headlong through the early stages of courtship to satisfy a libidinal urge.

Also, as a man with an affinity for better and more genteel ages, Ben was old-fashioned about these matters and preferred not to jump straight into bed for quick and easy gratification. Neither he nor Rachael was a virgin, but he found it emotionally and spiritually satisfying — and erotic as hell — to wait until the many threads linking them had been woven tightly together, leaving sex for the last strand in the bond.

He parked the Thunderbird in Rachael's driveway, beside her red 560 SL, which she had not bothered to put in the garage.

Thick bougainvillea, ablaze with thousands of red blossoms, grew up one wall of the bungalow and over part of the roof. With the help of a latticework frame, it formed a living green-and-scarlet canopy above the front stoop.

Ben stood in cool bougainvillea shadows, with the warm sun at his back, and rang the bell half a dozen times, growing concerned when Rachael took so long to respond.

Inside, music was playing. Suddenly, it was cut off.

When at last Rachael opened the door, she had the security chain in place, and she looked warily through the narrow gap. She smiled when she saw him, though it seemed as much a smile of nervous relief as of pleasure. “Oh, Benny, I'm so glad it's you.”

She slipped the brass chain and let him in. She was barefoot, wearing a tightly belted silky blue robe — and carrying a gun.

Disconcerted, he said, “What're you doing with that?”

“I didn't know who it might be,” she said, switching on the two safeties and putting the pistol on the small foyer table. Then, seeing his frown and realizing that her explanation was inadequate, she said, “Oh, I don't know. I guess I'm just… shaky.”

“I heard about Eric on the radio. Just minutes ago.”

She came into his arms. Her hair was partially damp. Her skin was sweet with the fragrance of jasmine, and her breath smelled of chocolate. He knew she must have been taking one of her long lazy soaks in the tub.

Holding her close, he felt her trembling. He said, “According to the radio, you were there.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It was horrible, Benny.” She clung to him. “I'll never forget the sound of the truck hitting him. Or the way he bounced and rolled along the pavement.” She shuddered.

“Easy,” he said, pressing his cheek against her damp hair. “You don't have to talk about it.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I've got to talk it out if I'm ever going to get it off my mind.”

He put a hand under her chin and tilted her lovely face up to him. He kissed her once, gently. Her mouth tasted of chocolate.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's go sit down, and you can tell me what happened.”

“Lock the door,” she said.

“It's okay,” he said, leading her out of the foyer.

She stopped and refused to move. “Lock the door,” she insisted.

Puzzled, he went back and locked it.

She took the pistol from the foyer and carried it with her. Something was wrong, something more than Eric's death, but Ben did not understand what it was.

The living room was shrouded in deep shadows, for she had drawn all the drapes. That was distinctly odd. Ordinarily she loved the sun and reveled in its warm caress with the languid pleasure of a cat sunning on a windowsill. Me had never seen the drapes drawn in this house until now.

“Leave them closed,” Rachael said when Ben started to unveil the windows.

She switched on a single lamp and sat in its amber glow, in the corner of a peach-colored sofa. The room was very modern, all in shades of peach and white with dark blue accents, polished bronze lamps, and a bronze-and-glass coffee table. In her blue robe she was in harmony with the decor.

She put the pistol on the table beside the lamp. Near to hand.

Ben retrieved her champagne and chocolate from the bathroom and brought them to her. In the kitchen, he got another cold split of champagne and a glass for himself.

When he joined her on the living-room sofa, she said, “It doesn't seem right. The champagne and chocolate, I mean. It looks as if I'm celebrating his death.”

“Considering what a bastard he was to you, perhaps a celebration would be justified.”

She shook her head adamantly. “No. Death is never a cause for celebration, Benny. No matter what the circumstances. Never.”

But she unconsciously ran her fingertips back and forth along the pale, pencil-thin, barely visible three-inch scar that followed the edge of her delicate jawline on the right side of her face. A year ago, in one of his nastier moods, Eric had thrown a glass of Scotch at her. It had missed, hitting the wall and shattering, but a sharp fragment had caught her on the rebound, slicing her cheek, requiring fifteen expertly sewn little stitches to avoid a prominent scar. That was the day she finally walked out on him. Eric would never hurt her again. She had to be relieved by his death even if only on a subconscious level.

Pausing now and then to sip champagne, she told Ben about this morning's meeting in the attorney's office and about the subsequent altercation on the sidewalk when Eric took her by the arm and seemed on the verge of violence. She recounted the accident and the hideous condition of the corpse in vivid detail, as if she had to put every terrible, bloody image into words in order to be free of it. She told him about making the funeral arrangements as well, and as she spoke, her shaky hands gradually grew steadier.

He sat close, turned sideways to face her, with one hand on her shoulder. Sometimes he moved his hand to gently massage her neck or to stroke her copper-brown hair.

“Thirty million dollars,” he said when she had finished, shaking his head at the irony of her getting everything when she had been willing to settle for so little.

“I don't really want it,” she said. “I've half a mind to give it away. A large part of it, anyway.”

“It's yours to do with as you wish,” he said. “But don't make any decisions now that you'd regret later.”

She looked down into the champagne glass that she held in both hands. Frowning worriedly, she said, “Of course, he'd be furious if I gave it away.”

“Who?”

“Eric,” she said softly.

Ben thought it odd that she should be concerned about Eric's disapproval. Obviously she was still shaken by events and not yet quite herself. “Give yourself time to adjust to the circumstances.”

She sighed and nodded. “What time is it?”

He looked at his watch. “Ten minutes till seven.”

“I called a lot of people earlier this afternoon and told them what happened, let them know about the funeral. But there must be thirty or forty more to get in touch with. He had no close relatives — just a few cousins. And an aunt he loathed. Not many friends, either. He wasn't a man who cared much for friends, and he didn't have much talent for making them. But lots of business associates, you know. God, I'm not looking forward to the chore.”

“I have my cellular phone in the car,” Ben said. “I can help you call them. We'll get it done fast.”

She smiled vaguely. “And just how would that look the wife's boyfriend helping her contact the bereaved?”

“They don't have to know who I am. I'll just say I'm a friend of the family.”

“Since I'm all that's left of the family,” Rachael said, “I guess that wouldn't be a lie. You're my best friend in the world, Benny.”

“More than just a friend.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Much more, I hope”

“I hope,” she said.

She kissed him lightly and, for a moment, rested her head upon his shoulder.

They contacted all of Eric's friends and business associates by eight-thirty, at which time Rachael expressed surprise that she was hungry. “After a day like this and everything that I saw… isn't it sort of hard-boiled of me to have an appetite?”

“Not at all,” Ben said gently. “Life goes on, babe. The living have got to live. Fact is, I read somewhere that witnesses to sudden and violent death usually experience a sharp increase in all their appetites during the days and weeks that follow.”

“Proving to themselves that they're alive.”

“Trumpeting it.”

She said, “I can't offer much of a dinner, I'm afraid. I have the makings of a salad. And we could cook up a pot of rigatoni, open a jar of Ragu' sauce.

“A veritable feast fit for a king.”

She brought the pistol with her to the kitchen and put it down on the counter near the microwave oven.

She had closed the Levolor blinds. Tight. Ben liked the view from those rear windows — the lushly planted backyard with its azalea beds and leafy Indian laurels, the property wall that was completely covered by a riotously bright tangle of red and yellow bougainvillea — and he reached for the control rod to open the slats.

“Please don't,” she said. “I want… the privacy.”

“No one can see in from the yard. It's walled and gated.”

“Please.”

He left the blinds as she wanted them.

“What are you afraid of' Rachael?”

“Afraid? But I'm not.”

“The gun?”

“I told you — I didn't know who was at the door, and since it's been such an upsetting day..

“Now you know it was me at the door.”

“Yes.”

“And you don't need a gun to deal with me. Just the promise of another kiss or two will keep me in line.”

She smiled. “I guess I should put it back in the bedroom where it belongs. Does it make you nervous?”

“No. But I—”

“I'll put it away as soon as we've got dinner cooking,” she said, but there was a tone in her voice that made her statement seem less like a promise than a delaying tactic.

Intrigued and somewhat uneasy, he opted for diplomacy and said no more for the moment.

She put a big pot of water on the stove to boil while he emptied the jar of Ragú into a smaller pot. Together, they chopped lettuce, celery, tomatoes, onions, and black olives for the salad.

They talked as they worked, primarily about Italian food. Their conversation was not quite as fluid and natural as usual, perhaps because they were trying too hard to be lighthearted and to put all thoughts of death aside.

Rachael mostly kept her eyes on the vegetables as she prepared them, bringing her characteristically effortless concentration to the task, rendering each rib of celery into slices that were all precisely the same width, as if symmetry were a vital element in a successful salad and would enhance the taste.

Distracted by her beauty, Ben looked at her as much as at the culinary work before him. She was almost thirty, appeared to be twenty, yet had the elegance and poise of a grande dame who'd had a long lifetime in which to learn the angles and attitudes of perfect gracefulness. He never grew tired of looking at her. It wasn't just that she excited him. By some magic that he could not understand, the sight of her also relaxed him and made him feel that all was right with the world and that he, for the first time in his often lonely life, was a complete man with a hope of lasting happiness.

Impulsively he put down the knife with which he had been slicing a tomato, took the knife from her hand and set it aside, turned her toward him, pulled her against him, slipped his arms around her, and kissed her deeply. Now her soft mouth tasted of champagne instead of chocolate. She still smelled faintly of jasmine, though beneath that fragrance was her own clean and appealing scent. He moved his hands slowly down her back, tracing the concave arc to her bottom, feeling the firm and exquisitely sculpted contours of her body through the silky robe. She was wearing nothing underneath. His warm hands grew hot — then much hotter — as the heat of her was transmitted through the material to his own flesh.

She clung to him for a moment with what seemed like desperation, as if she were shipwrecked and he were a raft in a tossing sea. Her body was stiff. Her hands clutched tensely, fingers digging into him. Then, after a moment, she relaxed against him, and her hands began to move over his back and shoulders and upper arms, testing and kneading his muscles. Her mouth opened wider, and their kiss became hungrier. Her breathing quickened.

He could feel her full breasts pressing against his chest. As if with a will and intention of their own, his hands moved more urgently in exploration of her.

The phone rang.

Ben remembered at once that they had forgotten to put it on the answering machine again when they had finished contacting people with the news of Eric's death and funeral, and in confirmation it rang again, stridently.

“Damn,” Rachael said, pulling back from him.

“I'll get it.”

“Probably another reporter.”

He took the call on the wall phone by the refrigerator, and it was not a reporter. It was Everett Kordell, chief medical examiner for the city of Santa Ana, phoning from the morgue. A serious problem had arisen, and he needed to speak to Mrs. Leben.

“I’m a family friend,” Ben said. “I'm taking all calls for her.”

“But I've got to speak to her personally,” the medical examiner insisted. “It's urgent.

“Surely you can understand that Mrs. Leben has had a difficult day. I'm afraid you'll simply have to deal with me.”

“But she's got to come downtown,” Kordell said plaintively.

“Downtown? You mean to the morgue? Now?”

“Yes. Right away.”

“Why?”

Kordell hesitated. Then, “This is embarrassing and frustrating, and I assure you that it'll all he straightened out sooner or later, probably very soon, but… well, Eric Leben's corpse is missing.”

Certain that he'd misunderstood, Ben said, “Missing?”

“Well… perhaps misplaced,” Everett Kordell said nervously.

“Perhaps?”

“Or perhaps… stolen.”

Ben got a few more details, hung up, and turned to Rachael.

She was hugging herself, as if in the grip of a sudden chill. “The morgue, you said?”

He nodded. “The damn incompetent bureaucrats have apparently lost the body.”

Rachael was very pale, and her eyes had a haunted look. But, curiously, she did not appear to be surprised by the startling news.

Ben had the strange feeling that she had been waiting for this call all evening.

4 DOWN WHERE THEY KEEP THE DEAD

To Rachael, the condition of the medical examiner's office was evidence that Everett Kordell was an obsessive-compulsive personality. No papers, books, or files cluttered his desk. The blotter was new, crisp, unmarked. The pen-and-pencil set, letter opener, letter tray, and silver-framed pictures of his family were precisely arranged. On the shelves behind his desk were two hundred or three hundred books in such pristine condition and so evenly placed that they almost appeared to be part of a painted backdrop. His diplomas and two anatomy charts were hung on the walls with an exactitude that made Rachael wonder if he checked their alignment every morning with ruler and plumb line.

Kordell's preoccupation with neatness and orderliness was also evident in his appearance. He was tall and almost excessively lean, about fifty, with a sharp-featured ascetic face and clear brown eyes. Not a strand of his graying, razor-cut hair was out of place. His long-fingered hands were singularly spare of flesh, almost skeletal. His white shirt looked as if it had been laundered only five minutes ago, and the straight creases in each leg of his dark brown trousers were so sharp they almost glinted in the fluorescent light.

When Rachael and Benny were settled in a pair of dark pine chairs with forest-green leather cushions, Kordell went around the desk to his own chair. “This is most distressing to me, Mrs. Leben — to add this burden to what you've already been through today. It's quite inexcusable. I apologize again and extend my deepest sympathies, though I know nothing I say can make the matter any less disturbing. Are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water or anything?”

“I'm okay,” Rachael said, though she could not remember ever feeling worse.

Benny reached out and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. Sweet, reliable Benny. She was so glad he was with her. At five eleven and a hundred fifty pounds, he was not physically imposing. With brown hair, brown eyes, and a pleasing but ordinary face, he seemed like a man who would vanish in a crowd and be virtually invisible at a party. But when he spoke in that soft voice of his, or moved with his uncanny grace, or just looked hard at you, his sensitivity and intelligence were instantly discernible. In his own quiet way, he had the impact of a lion's roar. Everything would be easier with Benny at her side, but she worried about getting him involved in this.

To the medical examiner, Rachael said, “I just want to understand what's happened.”

But she was afraid that she understood more than Kordell.

“I'll be entirely candid, Mrs. Leben,” Kordell said. “No point in being otherwise.” He sighed and shook his head as if he still had difficulty believing such a screwup had happened. Then he blinked, frowned, and turned to Benny. “You're not Mrs. Leben's attorney, by any chance?”

“Just an old friend,” Benny said.

“Really?”

“I'm here for moral support.”

“Well, I'm hoping we can avoid attorneys,” Kordell said.

“I've absolutely no intention of retaining legal counsel,” Rachael assured him.

The medical examiner nodded glumly, clearly unconvinced of her sincerity. He said, “I'm not ordinarily in the office at this hour.” It was nine-thirty Monday night. “When work unexpectedly backs up and it's necessary to schedule late autopsies, I leave them to one of the assistant medical examiners. The only exceptions are when the deceased is a prominent citizen or the victim of a particularly bizarre and complex homicide. In that case, when there's certain to be a lot of heat involved — the media and politicians, I mean — then I prefer not to put the burden on my subordinates, and if a night autopsy is unavoidable, I stay after hours. Your husband was, of course, a very prominent citizen.”

As he seemed to expect a response, she nodded. She didn't trust herself to speak. Fear had risen and fallen in her ever since she had received the news of the body's disappearance, and at the moment it was at high tide.

“The body was delivered to the morgue and logged in at 12:14 this afternoon,” Kordell continued. “Because we were already behind schedule and because I had a speaking engagement this afternoon, I ordered my assistants to proceed with the cadavers in the order of their log entries, and I arranged to handle your husband's body myself at 6:30 this evening.” He put his fingertips to his temples, massaging lightly and wincing as if merely recounting these events had given him an excruciating headache. “At that time, when I'd prepared the autopsy chamber, I sent an assistant to bring Dr. Leben's body from the morgue… but the cadaver couldn't be found.”

“Misplaced?” Benny asked.

“That's rarely happened during my tenure in this office,” Kordell said with a brief flash of pride. “And on those few occasions when a cadaver has been misplaced — sent to a wrong autopsy table, stored in the wrong drawer, or left on a gurney with an improper ID tag — we've always located it within five minutes.”

“But tonight you couldn't find it,” Benny said.

“We looked for nearly an hour. Everywhere. Everywhere,” Kordell said with evident distress. “It makes no sense. No sense whatsoever. Given our procedures, it's an impossibility.”

Rachael realized that she was clutching the purse in her lap so tightly that her knuckles were sharp and white. She tried to relax her hands, folded them. Afraid that either Kordell or Benny would suddenly read a fragment of the monstrous truth in her unguarded eyes, she closed them and lowered her head, hoping the men would think she was simply reacting to the dreadful circumstances that had brought them here.

From within her private darkness, Rachael heard Benny say, “Dr. Kordell, is it possible that Dr. Leben's body was released in error to a private mortuary?”

“We'd been informed earlier today that the Attison Brothers' firm was handling funeral arrangements, so of course we called them when we couldn't find the body. We suspected they'd come for Dr. Leben and that a day employee of the morgue had mistakenly released the cadaver without authorization, prior to autopsy. But they tell us they never came to collect, were in fact waiting for a call from us, and don't have the deceased.”

“What I meant,” Benny said, “was that perhaps Dr. Leben's body was released in error to another mortician who had come to collect someone else.”

“That, of course, was another possibility that we explored with, I assure you, considerable urgency. Subsequent to the arrival of Dr. Leben's body at 12:14 this afternoon, four other bodies were released to private mortuaries. We sent employees to all of those funeral homes to confirm the identity of the cadavers and to make sure none of them was Dr. Leben. None of them was.”

“Then what do you suppose has happened to him?” Benny asked.

Eyes closed, Rachael listened to their macabre conversation in darkness, and gradually it began to seem as if she were asleep and as if their voices were the echoey phantom voices of characters in a nightmare.

Kordell said, “Insane as it seems, we were forced to conclude the body's been stolen.”

In her self-imposed blackness, Rachael tried unsuccessfully to block out the gruesome images that her imagination began to supply.

“You've contacted the police?” Benny asked the medical examiner.

“Yes, we brought them into it as soon as we realized theft was the only remaining explanation. They're downstairs right now, in the morgue, and of course they want to speak with you, Mrs. Leben.”

A soft rhythmic rasping noise was coming from Everett Kordell’s direction. Rachael opened her eyes. The medical examiner was nervously sliding his letter opener in and out of its protective sheath. Rachael closed her eyes again.

Benny said, “But are your security measures so inadequate that someone could waltz right in off the street and steal a corpse?”

“Certainly not,” Kordell said. “Nothing like this has happened before. I tell you, it's inexplicable. Oh, yes, a determined person might be clever enough to find a way through our security, but it wouldn't be an easy job. Not easy at all.”

“But not impossible,” Benny said.

The rasping noise stopped. From the new sounds that followed, Rachael figured that the medical examiner must be compulsively rearranging the silver-framed photographs on his desk.

She concentrated on that image to counteract the mad scenes that her darkly cunning imagination had conjured up for her horrified consideration.

Everett Kordell said, “I'd like to suggest that both of you accompany me to the morgue downstairs, so you can see firsthand exactly how tight our security is and how very difficult it would be to breach it. Mrs. Leben? Do you feel strong enough to take a tour of the facility?”

Rachael opened her eyes. Both Benny and Kordell were watching her with concern. She nodded.

“Are you sure?” Kordell asked, rising and coming out from behind his desk. “Please understand that I'm not insisting on it. But it would make me feel ever so much better if you would let me show you how careful we are, how responsibly we fulfill our duties here.”

“I'm okay,” she said.

Picking at a tiny piece of dark lint that he had just spotted on his sleeve, the medical examiner headed toward the door.

As Rachael got up from her chair and turned to follow Kordell, she was swept by a wave of dizziness. She swayed.

Benny took her arm, steadied her. “This tour isn't necessary.”

“Yes,” she said grimly. “Yes, it is. I've got to see. I've got to know.”

Benny looked at her strangely, and she couldn't meet his eyes. He knew something was wrong, something more than Eric's death and disappearance, but he didn't know what. He was unabashedly curious.

Rachael had intended to conceal her anxiety and keep him out of this hideous affair. But deceit was not one of her talents, and she knew he had been aware of her fear from the moment he'd stepped into her house. The dear man was both intrigued and concerned, staunchly determined to stay by her side, which was exactly what she didn't want, but she couldn't help that now. Later, she would have to find a way to get rid of Benny because, much as she needed him, it was not fair to drag him into this mess, not fair to put his life in jeopardy the way hers was.

Right now, however, she had to see where Eric's battered corpse had lain, for she hoped a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding the body's disappearance would allay her worst fears. She needed all her strength for the tour of the morgue.

They left the office and went down where the dead waited.

The broad, tile-floored, pale gray corridor ended at a heavy metal door. A white-uniformed attendant sat at a desk in an alcove to the right, this side of the door. When he saw Kordell approaching with Rachael and Benny, he got up and fished a set of bright jangling keys from the pocket of his uniform jacket.

“This is the only interior entrance to the morgue,” Kordell said. “The door is always locked. Isn't that right, Walt?”

“Absolutely,” the attendant said. “You did want to go in, Dr. Kordell?”

“Yes.”

When Walt slid the key into the lock, Rachael saw a tiny spark of static electricity.

Kordell said, “There's an attendant — Walt or someone else — on duty at this desk twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No one can get in without his assistance. And he keeps a registry of all visitors.”

The wide door was unlocked, and Walt was holding it open for them. They went inside, where the cool air smelled of antiseptics and of something unidentifiable that was less pungent and less clean. The door closed behind them with a faint creak of hinges that seemed to echo through Rachael's bones. The lock engaged automatically with a hollow thunk.

Two sets of double doors, both open, led to big rooms on both sides of the morgue corridor. A fourth windowless metal portal, like that through which they had just entered, lay at the far end of the chilly hallway.

“Now please let me show you the only exterior entrance, where the morgue wagons and the morticians' vehicles pull up,” Kordell said, leading the way toward the distant barrier.

Rachael followed him, though just being in this repository of the dead, where Eric had so recently lain, made her knees weak and broke her out in a sweat along the back of her neck and all over her scalp.

“Wait a second,” Benny said. He turned to the door through which they had come, pushed down on the bar handle, and opened it, startling Walt, who was just returning to his desk on the other side. Letting the heavy door fall shut again, Benny looked at Kordell and said, “Although it's always locked from the outside, it's always open from the inside?”

“That's right, of course,” Kordell said. “It'd be too much trouble to have to summon the attendant to be let out as well as in. Besides, we can't risk having someone accidentally locked in here during an emergency. Fire or earthquake, for example.”

Their footsteps echoed eerily off the highly polished tile floor as they continued along the corridor toward the exterior service door at the far end. When they passed the two large rooms, Rachael saw several people in the chamber on the left, standing and moving and talking softly in a glare of crisp, cold fluorescent light. Morgue workers wearing hospital whites. A fat man in beige slacks and a beige-yellow-red-green madras sports jacket. Two men in dark suits looked up as Rachael walked by.

She also saw three dead bodies: still, shrouded shapes lying on stainless-steel gurneys.

At the end of the hall, Everett Kordell pushed open the wide metal door. He stepped outside and beckoned them.

Rachael and Benny followed. She expected to find an alleyway beyond, but though they had left the building, they were not actually outside. The exterior morgue door opened onto one of the underground levels of an adjacent multistory parking garage. It was the same garage in which she'd parked her 560 SL just a short while ago, though she'd left it a few levels above this one.

The gray concrete floor, the blank walls, and the thick pillars holding up the gray concrete ceiling made the subterranean garage seem like an immense, starkly modernistic, Western version of a pharaoh's tomb. The sodium-vapor ceiling lights, widely spaced, provided a jaundice-yellow illumination that Rachael found fitting for a place that served as an antechamber to the hall of the dead.

The area around the morgue entrance was a no-parking zone. But a score of cars were scattered farther out in the vast room, half in the crepuscular bile-yellow light and half in purple-black shadows that had the velvet texture of a casket lining.

Looking at the cars, she had the extraordinary feeling that something was hiding among them, watching.

Watching her in particular.

Benny saw her shiver, and he put his arm around her shoulders.

Everett Kordell closed the heavy morgue door, then tried to open it, but the bar handle could not be depressed. “You see? It locks automatically. Ambulances, morgue wagons, and hearses drive down that ramp from the street and stop here. The only way to get in is to push this button.” He pushed a white button in the wall beside the door. “And speak into this intercom.” He brought his mouth close to a wire speaker set flush in the concrete. “Walt? This is Dr. Kordell at the outer door. Will you buzz us back in, please?”

Walt's voice came from the speaker. “Right away, sir.”

A buzzer sounded, and Kordell was able to open the door again.

“I assume the attendant doesn't just open for anyone who asks to be let in,” Benny said.

“Of course not,” Kordell said, standing in the open doorway. “If he's sure he recognizes the voice and if he knows the person, he buzzes him through. If he doesn't recognize the voice, or if it's someone new from a private mortuary, or if there's any reason to be suspicious, the attendant walks through the corridor that we just walked, all the way from the front desk, and he inspects whoever's seeking admittance.”

Rachael had lost all interest in these details and was concerned only about the gloom-mantled garage around them, which provided a hundred excellent hiding places.

Benny said, “At that point the attendant, not expecting violence, could be overpowered, and the intruder could force his way inside.”

“Possibly,” Kordell said, his thin face drawing into a sharp scowl. “But that's never happened.”

“The attendants on duty today swear that they logged in everyone who came and went — and allowed only authorized personnel to enter?”

“They swear,” Kordell said.

“And you trust them all?”

“Implicitly. Everyone who works here is aware that the bodies in our custody are the remains of other people's loved ones, and we know we have a solemn — even sacred — responsibility to protect those remains while we're in charge of them. I think that's evident in the security arrangements I've just shown you.”

“Then,” Benny said, “someone either had to pick the lock—“

“It's virtually unpickable.”

“Or someone slipped into the morgue while the outer door was open for legitimate visitors, hid out, waited until he was the only living person inside, then spirited Dr. Leben's body away.”

“Evidently yes. But it's so unlikely that—”

Rachael said, “Could we go back inside, please?”

“Certainly,” Kordell said at once, eager to please. He stepped out of her way.

She returned to the morgue corridor, where the cold air carried a faint foul smell beneath the heavy scent of pine disinfectant.

5 UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

In the holding room where the cadavers awaited autopsy, the air was even colder than in the morgue's corridor. Glimmering strangely in all metal surfaces, the stark fluorescent light imparted a wintry sheen to the stainless-steel gurneys and to the bright stainless-steel handles and hinges on the cabinets along the walls. The glossy white enamel finish of the chests and cabinets, though surely no thicker than an eighth of an inch, had a curiously deep — even bottomless — appearance similar to the mysterious, lustrous depth of a landscape of moon-washed snow.

She tried not to look at the shrouded bodies and refused to think about what might lie in some of the enormous cabinet drawers.

The fat man in the madras jacket was Ronald Tescanet, an attorney representing the city's interests. He had been called away from dinner to be on hand when Rachael spoke with the police and, afterward, to discuss the disappearance of her husband's body. His voice was too mellifluous, almost greasy, and he was so effusively sympathetic that his condolences poured forth like warm oil from a bottle. While the police questioned

Rachael, Tescanet paced in silence behind them, frequently smoothing his thick black hair with his plump white hands, each of which was brightened by two gold and diamond rings.

As she had suspected, the two men in dark suits were plainclothes police. They showed Rachael their ID cards and badges. Refreshingly, they did not burden her with unctuous sympathy.

The younger of the two, beetle-browed and burly, was Detective Hagerstrom. He said nothing at all, leaving the questioning entirely to his partner. He stood unmoving, like a rooted oak, in contrast to the attorney's ceaseless roaming. He watched with small brown eyes that gave Rachael the impression of stupidity at first; but after a while, on reconsideration, she realized that he possessed a higher than average intelligence which he kept carefully veiled.

She worried that somehow Hagerstrom, by virtue of a cop's almost magical sixth sense, would pierce her deception and see the knowledge that she was concealing. As inconspicuously as possible, she avoided meeting his gaze.

The older cop, Detective Julio Verdad, was a small man whose complexion was the shade of cinnamon and whose black eyes had a vague trace of purple like the skins of ripe plums. He was a sharp dresser: a well-tailored blue suit, dark but summerweight; a white shirt that might have been silk, with French cuffs held together by gold and pearl cuff links; a burgundy necktie with a gold tie chain instead of a clip or tack; dark burgundy Bally loafers.

Although Verdad spoke in clipped sentences and was almost curt, his voice was unfailingly quiet and gentle. The contrast between his lulling tone and his brisk manner was disconcerting. “You've seen their security, Mrs. Leben.”

“Yes.”

“And are satisfied?”

“I suppose.”

To Benny, Verdad said, “You are?”

“Ben Shadway. An old friend of Mrs. Leben's.”

“Old school friend?”

“No.”

“A friend from work?”

“No. Just a friend.”

The plum-dark eyes gleamed. “I see.” To Rachael, Verdad said, “I have a few questions.”

“About what?”

Instead of answering at once, Verdad said, “Like to sit down, Mrs. Leben?”

Everett Kordell said, “Yes, of course, a chair,” and both he and the fat attorney, Ronald Tescanet, hurried to draw one away from a corner desk.

Seeing that no one else intended to sit, concerned about being placed in a position of inferiority with the others peering down at her, Rachael said, “No, thank you. I'll stand. I can't see why this should take very long. I'm certainly in no mood to linger here. What is it you want to ask me, anyway?”

Verdad said, “An unusual crime.”

“Body snatching,” she said, pretending to be both baffled and sickened by what had happened. The first emotion had to be feigned; the second was more or less genuine.

“Who might have done it?” Verdad asked.

“I've no idea.”

“You know no one with a reason?”

“Someone with a motive for stealing Eric's body? No, of course not,” she said.

“He had enemies?”

“In addition to being a genius in his field, he was a successful businessman. Geniuses often unwittingly arouse jealousy on the part of colleagues. And, inevitably, some people envied his wealth. And some felt he'd… wronged them on his climb up the ladder.”

“Had he wronged people?”

“Yes. A few. He was a driven man. But I strongly doubt that any of his enemies are the type to take satisfaction from a revenge as pointless and macabre as this.”

“He was not just driven,” Verdad said.

“Oh?”

“He was ruthless.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I've read about him,” Verdad said. “Ruthless.”

“All right, yes, perhaps. And difficult. I won't deny it.”

“Ruthlessness makes passionate enemies.”

“You mean so passionate that body snatching would make sense?”

“Perhaps. I'll need the names of his enemies, people who might have reason to hold a grudge.”

“You can get that information from the people he worked with at Geneplan,” she said.

“His company? But you're his wife.”

“I knew very little about his business. He didn't want me to know. He had very strong opinions about… my proper place. Besides, for the past year I've been separated from him.”

Verdad looked surprised, but somehow Rachael sensed that he had already done some background work and knew what she was telling him.

“Divorcing?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Bitter?”

“On his part, yes.”

“So this explains it.”

“Explains what?” she asked.

“Your utter lack of grief.”

She had begun to suspect that Verdad was twice as dangerous as the silent, motionless, watchful Hagerstrom. Now she was sure of it.

“Dr. Leben treated her abominably,” Benny said in her defense.

“I see,” Verdad said.

“She had no reason to grieve for him,” Benny said.

“I see.”

Benny said, “You're acting as if this is a murder case, for God's sake.”

“Am I?” Verdad said.

“You're treating her as if she's a suspect.”

“Do you think so?” Verdad asked quietly.

“Dr. Leben was killed in a freak accident,” Benny said, “and if anyone was at fault, it was Leben himself.”

“So we understand.”

“There were at least a dozen witnesses.”

“Are you Mrs. Leben's attorney?” Verdad inquired.

“No, I told you—”

“Yes, the old friend,” Verdad said, making his point subtly.

“If you were an attorney, Mr. Shadway,” Ronald Tescanet said, stepping forward so quickly that his jowls trembled, “you'd understand why the police have no choice but to pursue this unpleasant line of questioning. They must, of course, consider the possibility that Dr. Leben's body was stolen to prevent an autopsy. To hide something.”

“How melodramatic,” Benny said scornfully.

“But conceivable. Which would mean that his death was not as cut-and-dried as it appeared to be,” Tescanet said.

“Exactly,” Verdad said.

“Nonsense,” Benny said.

Rachael appreciated Benny's determination to protect her honor. He was unfailingly sweet and supportive. But she was willing to let Verdad and Hagerstrom regard her as a possible murderess or at least an accomplice to murder. She was incapable of killing anyone, and Eric's death was entirely accidental, and in time that would be clear to the most suspicious homicide detective. But while Hagerstrom and Verdad were busy satisfying themselves on those points, they would not be free to pursue other avenues of inquiry closer to the terrible truth. They were in the process of dragging their own red herring across the trail, and she would not take offense at their misdirected suspicion as long as it kept them baying after the wrong scent.

She said, “Lieutenant Verdad, surely the most logical explanation is that, in spite of Dr. Kordell's assertions, the body has simply been misplaced.” Both the stork-thin medical examiner and Ronald Tescanet protested. She quietly but firmly cut them off. “Or maybe it was kids playing an elaborate joke. College kids. An initiation rite of some sort. They've been known to do worse.”

“I think I already know the answer to this question,” Benny said. “But is it possible that Eric Leben was not dead after all? Could his condition have been misjudged? Is it possible that he walked out of here in a daze?”

“No, no, no!” Tescanet said, blanching and suddenly sweating in spite of the cold air.

“Impossible,” Kordell said simultaneously. “I saw him. Massive head injuries. No vital signs whatsoever.”

But this off-the-wall theory seemed to intrigue Verdad. He said, “Didn't Dr. Leben receive medical attention immediately after the accident?”

“Paramedics,” Kordell said.

“Highly trained, reliable men,” Tescanet said, mopping his doughy face with a handkerchief. He had to be doing rapid mental arithmetic right now, calculating the difference between the financial settlement that might be necessitated by a morgue screwup and the far more major judgment that might be won against the city for the incompetence of its paramedics. “They would never, regardless of circumstances, never mistakenly pronounce a man dead when he wasn't.”

“One — there was no heartbeat whatsoever,” Kordell said, counting the proofs of death on fingers so long and supple that they would have served him equally well if he had been a concert pianist instead of a pathologist. “The paramedics had a perfectly flat line on the small EKG unit in their van. Two — no respiration. Three — steadily falling body temperature.”

“Unquestionably dead,” Tescanet murmured.

Lieutenant Verdad now regarded the attorney and the chief medical examiner with the same flat expression and hawkish eyes that he had turned on Rachael. He probably didn't think Tescanet and Kordell — or the paramedics — were covering up malpractice or malfeasance. But his nature and experience ensured his willingness to suspect anyone of anything at any time, given even the poorest reason for suspicion.

Scowling at Tescanet's interruption, Everett Kordell continued, “Four — there was absolutely no perceptible electrical activity in the brain. We have an EEG machine here in the morgue. We frequently use it in accident cases as a final test. That's a safety procedure I've instituted since taking this position. Dr. Leben was attached to the EEG the moment he was brought in, and we could find no perceptible brain waves. I was present. I saw the graph. Brain death. If there is any single, universally accepted standard for declaring a man dead, it's when the attending physician encounters a condition of full and irreversible cardiac arrest coupled with brain death. The pupils of Dr. Leben's eyes wouldn't dilate in bright light. And no respiration. With all due respect, Mrs. Leben, your husband was as dead as any man I've ever seen, and I will stake my reputation on that.”

Rachael had no doubt that Eric had been dead. She had seen his sightless, unblinking eyes as he lay on the blood-spattered pavement. She had seen, too well, the deep concavity running from behind his ear all the way to the curve of his brow: the crushed and splintered bone. However, she was thankful that Benny had unwittingly confused things and had given the detectives yet another false trail to pursue.

She said, “I'm sure he was dead. I've no doubt of it. I saw him at the scene of the accident, and I know there could have been no mistaken diagnosis.”

Kordell and Tescanet looked immeasurably relieved.

With a shrug, Verdad said, “Then we discard the hypothesis.”

But Rachael knew that, once the possibility of mis-diagnosis had been planted in the cops' minds, they would expend time and energy in the exploration of it, which was all that mattered. Delay. That was the name of the game. Delay, stall, confuse the issue. She needed time to confirm her own worst suspicions, time to decide what must be done to protect herself from various sources of danger.

Lieutenant Verdad led Rachael past the three draped bodies and stopped with her at an empty gurney that was bedecked with rumpled shrouds. On it lay a thick paper tag trailing two strands of plastic-coated wire. The tag was crumpled.

“That's all we've got to go on, I'm afraid. The cart that the corpse once occupied and the ID tag that was once tied to its foot.” Only inches from Rachael, the detective looked hard at her, his intense dark eyes as flat and unreadable as his face. “Now, why do you suppose a body snatcher, whatever his motivation, would take the time to untie the tag from the dead man's toe?”

“I don't have the slightest idea,” she said.

“The thief would be worried about getting caught. He'd be in a hurry. Untying the tag would take precious seconds.”

“It's crazy,” she said shakily.

“Yes, crazy,” Verdad said.

“But then the whole thing's crazy.”

“Yes.”

She stared down at the wrinkled and vaguely stained shroud, thinking of how it had wrapped her husband's cold and naked cadaver, and she shuddered uncontrollably.

“Enough of this,” Benny said, putting his arm around her for warmth and support. “I'm getting you the hell out of this place.”

Everett Kordell and Ronald Tescanet accompanied Rachael and Benny to the elevator in the parking garage, continuing to make a case for the morgue's and the city's complete lack of culpability in the body's disappearance. They were not convinced by her repeated assurances that she did not intend to sue anyone. There were so many things for her to think and worry about that she had neither the energy nor the inclination to persuade them that her intentions were benign. She just wanted to be rid of them so she could get on with the urgent tasks that awaited her.

When the elevator doors closed, finally separating her and Benny from the lean pathologist and the corpulent attorney, Benny said, “If it was me, I think I would sue them.”

“Lawsuits, countersuits, depositions, legal strategy meetings, courtrooms — boring, boring, boring,” Rachael said. She opened her purse as the elevator rose.

“Verdad is a cool son of a bitch, isn't he?” Benny said.

“Just doing his job, I guess.” Rachael took the thirty-two pistol out of her purse.

Benny, watching the light move on the board of numbers above the lift's doors, did not immediately see the gun. “Yeah, well, he could do his job with a little more compassion and a little less machinelike efficiency.”

They had risen one and a half floors from the basement. On the indicator panel, the 2 was about to light. Her Mercedes was one level farther up.

Benny had wanted to bring his car, but Rachael had insisted on driving her own. As long as she was behind the wheel, her hands were occupied and her attention was partly on the road, so she couldn't become morbidly preoccupied with the frightening situation in which she found herself. If she had nothing to do but brood about recent developments, she would very likely lose the tenuous self-control she now possessed. She had to remain busy in order to hold terror at arm's length and stave off panic.

They reached the second floor and kept going up.

She said, “Benny, step away from the door.”

“Huh?” He looked down from the lightboard, blinked in surprise when he saw the pistol. “Hey, where the hell did you get that?”

“Brought it from home.”

“Why?”

“Please step back. Quickly now, Benny,” she said shakily, aiming at the doors.

Still blinking, confused, he got out of the way. “What's going on? You're not going to shoot anybody.”

Her thunderous heartbeat was so loud that it muffled his voice and made it sound as if he were speaking to her from a distance.

They arrived at the third floor.

The indicator board went ping! The 3 lighted. The elevator stopped with a slight bounce.

“Rachael, answer me. What is this?”

She did not respond. She had gotten the gun after leaving Eric. A woman alone ought to have a gun… especially after walking out on a man like him. As the doors rolled open, she tried to remember what her pistol instructor had said: Don't jerk the trigger; squeeze it slowly, or you'll pull the muzzle off target and miss.

But no one was waiting for them, at least not in front of the elevator. The gray concrete floor, walls, pillars, and ceiling looked like those in the basement from which they'd begun their ascent. The silence was the same, too: sepulchral and somehow threatening. The air was less dank and far warmer than it had been three levels below, though it was every bit as still. A few of the ceiling lights were burned out or broken, so a greater number of shadows populated the huge room than had darkened the basement, and they seemed deeper as well, better suited for the complete concealment of an attacker, though perhaps her imagination painted them blacker than they really were.

Following her out of the elevator, Benny said, “Rachael, who are you afraid of?”

“Later. Right now let's just get the hell out of here.”

“But—”

“Later.”

Their footsteps echoed and reechoed hollowly off the concrete, and she felt as if they were walking not through an ordinary parking garage in Santa Ana but through the chambers of an alien temple, under the eye of an unimaginably strange deity.

At that late hour, her red 560 SL was one of only three cars parked on the entire floor. It stood alone, gleaming, a hundred feet from the elevator. She walked directly toward it, circled it warily. No one crouched on the far side. Through the windows, she could see that no one was inside, either. She opened the door, got in quickly. As soon as Benny climbed in and closed his door, she hit the master lock switch, started the engine, threw the car in gear, popped the emergency brake, and drove too fast toward the exit ramp.

As she drove, she engaged the safeties on her pistol and, with one hand, returned it to her purse.

When they reached the street, Benny said, “Okay, now tell me what this cloak-and-dagger stuff is all about.”

She hesitated, wishing she had not brought him this far into it. She should have come to the morgue alone. She'd been weak, needed to lean on him, but now if she didn't break her dependency on him, if she drew him further into it, she would without doubt be putting his life in jeopardy. She had no right to endanger him.

“Rachael?”

She stopped at a red traffic light at the intersection of Main Street and Fourth, where a hot summer wind blew a few scraps of litter into the center of the crossroads and spun them around for a moment before sweeping them away.

“Rachael?” Benny persisted.

A shabbily dressed derelict stood at the corner, only a few feet away. He was filthy, unshaven, and drunk. His nose was gnarled and hideous, half eaten away by melanoma. In his left hand he held a wine bottle imperfectly concealed in a paper bag. In his grubby right paw he gripped a broken alarm clock — no glass covering the face of it, the minute hand missing — as if he thought he possessed a great treasure. He stooped down, peered in at her. His eyes were fevered, blasted.

Ignoring the derelict, Benny said, “Don't withdraw from me, Rachael. What's wrong? Tell me. I can help.”

“I don't want to get you involved,” she said.

“I'm already involved.”

“No. Right now you don't know anything. And I really think that's best.”

“You promised—”

The traffic light changed, and she tramped the accelerator so suddenly that Benny was thrown against his seat belt and cut off in midsentence.

Behind them, the drunk with the clock shouted: “I'm Father Time!”

Rachael said, “Listen, Benny, I'll take you back to my place so you can get your car.”

“Like hell.”

“Please let me handle this myself.”

“Handle what? What's going on?”

“Benny, don't interrogate me. Just please don't do that. I've got a lot to think about, a lot to do…”

“Sounds like you're going somewhere else tonight.”

“It doesn't concern you,” she said.

“Where are you going?”

“There're things I've got to… check out. Never mind.”

Getting angry now, he said, “You going to shoot someone?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why're you packing a gun?”

She didn't answer.

He said, “You got a permit for a concealed weapon?”

She shook her head. “A permit, but just for home use.”

He glanced behind to see if anyone was near them, then leaned over from his seat, grabbed the steering wheel, and jerked it hard to the right.

The car whipped around with a screech of tires, and she hit the brakes, and they slid sideways six or eight yards, and when she tried to straighten the wheel he grabbed it again, and she shouted at him to stop it, and he let go of the wheel, which spun through her hands for a moment, but then she was firmly in control once more, pulled to the curb, stopped, looked at him, said, “What are you — crazy?”

“Just angry.”

“Let it be,” she said, staring out at the street.

“I want to help you.”

“You can't.”

“Try me. Where do you have to go?”

She sighed. “Just to Eric's place.”

“His house? In Villa Park? Why?”

“I can't tell you.”

“After his house, where?”

“Geneplan. His office.”

“Why?”

“I can't tell you that, either.”

“Why not?”

“Benny, it's dangerous. It could get violent.”

“So what the fuck am I — porcelain? Crystal? Shit, woman, do you think I'm going to fly into a million goddamn pieces at the tap of a goddamn finger?”

She looked at him. The amber glow of the streetlamp came through only her half of the windshield, leaving him in darkness, but his eyes shone in the shadows. She said, “My God, you're furious. I've never heard you use that kind of language before.”

He said, “Rachael, do we have something or not? I think we have something. Special, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“You really think so?”

“You know I do.”

“Then you can't freeze me out of this. You can't keep me from helping you when you need help. Not if we're to go on from here.”

She looked at him, feeling very tender toward him, wanting more than anything to bring him into her confidence, to have him as her ally, but involving him would be a rotten thing to do. He was right now thinking what kind of trouble she might be in, his mind churning furiously, listing possibilities, but nothing he could imagine would be half as dangerous as the truth. If he knew the truth, he might not be so eager to help, but she dared not tell him.

He said, “I mean, you know I'm a pretty old-fashioned guy. Not very with it by most standards. Staid in some ways. Hell, half the guys in California real estate wear white cords and pastel blazers when they go to work on a summer day like this, but I don't feel comfortable in less than a three-piece suit and wing tips. I may be the last guy in a real-estate office who even knows what a goddamn vest is. So when someone like me sees the woman he cares about in trouble, he has to help, it's the only thing he can do, the plain old-fashioned thing, the right thing, and if she won't let him help, then that's pretty much a slap in the face, an affront to all his values, a rejection of what he is, and no matter how much he likes her, he's got to walk, it's as simple as that.”

She said, “I never heard you make a speech before.”

“I never had to before.”

Both touched and frustrated by his ultimatum, Rachael closed her eyes and leaned back in the seat, unable to decide what to do. She kept her hands on the steering wheel, gripping it tightly, for if she let go, Benny would be sure to see how badly her hands were shaking.

He said, “Who are you afraid of, Rachael?”

She didn't answer.

He said, “You know what happened to his body, don't you?”

“Maybe.”

“You know who took it.”

“Maybe.”

“And you're afraid of them. Who are they, Rachael? For God's sake, who would do something like that — and why?”

She opened her eyes, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb. “Okay, you can come along with me.”

“To Eric's house, the office? What're we looking for?”

“That,” she said, “I'm not prepared to tell you.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Okay. All right. One step at a time. I can live with that.”

She drove north on Main Street to Katella Avenue, east on Katella to the expensive community of Villa Park, into the hills toward her dead husband's estate. In the upper reaches of Villa Park, the big houses, many priced well over a million dollars, were less than half visible beyond screens of shrubbery and the gathered cloaks of night. Eric's house, looming beyond a row of enormous Indian laurels, seemed darker than any other, a cold place even on a June night, the many windows like sheets of some strange obsidian that would not permit the passage of light in either direction.

6 THE TRUNK

The long driveway, made of rust-red Mexican paving tiles, curved past Eric Leben's enormous Spanish-modern house before finally turning out of sight to the garages in back. Rachael parked in front.

Although Ben Shadway delighted in authentic Spanish buildings with their multiplicity of arches and angles and deep-set leaded windows, he was no fan of Spanish modern. The stark lines, smooth surfaces, big plate-glass windows, and total lack of ornamentation might seem stylish and satisfyingly clean to some, but he found such architecture boring, without character, and perilously close to the cheap-looking stucco boxes of so many southern California neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, as he got out of the car and followed Rachael down a dark Mexican-tile walkway, across an unlighted veranda where yellow-flowering succulents and bloom-laden white azaleas glowed palely in enormous clay pots, to the front door of the house, Ben was impressed by the place. It was massive — certainly ten thousand square feet of living space — set on expansive, elaborately landscaped grounds. From the property, there was a view of most of Orange County to the west, a vast carpet of light stretching fifteen miles to the pitch-black ocean; in daylight, in clear weather, one could probably see all the way to Catalina. In spite of the spareness of the architecture, the Leben house reeked of wealth. To Ben, the crickets singing in the bushes even sounded different from those that chirruped in more modest neighborhoods, less shrill and more melodious, as if their minuscule brains encompassed awareness of — and respect for — their surroundings.

Ben had known that Eric Leben was a very rich man, but somehow that knowledge had had no impact until now. Suddenly he sensed what it meant to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Leben's wealth pressed on Ben, like a very real weight.

Until he was nineteen, Ben Shadway had never given much thought to money. His parents were neither rich enough to be preoccupied with investments nor poor enough to worry about paying next month's bills, nor had they much ambition, so wealth — or lack of it — had not been a topic of conversation in the Shadway household. However, by the time Ben completed two years of military service, his primary interest was money: making it, investing it, accumulating ever-larger piles.

He did not love money for its own sake. He did not even care all that much for the finer things that money could buy; imported sports cars, pleasure boats, Rolex watches, and two-thousand-dollar suits held no great appeal for him. He was happier with his meticulously restored 1956 Thunderbird than Rachael was with her new Mercedes, and he bought his suits off the rack at Harris & Frank. Some men loved money for the power it gave them, but Ben was no more interested in exercising power over others than he was in learning Swahili.

To him, money was primarily a time machine that would eventually allow him to do a lot of traveling back through the years to a more appealing age — the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which held so much interest for him. Thus far, he had worked long hours with a few days off. But he intended to build the company into one of the top real-estate powerhouses in Orange County within the next five years, then sell out and take a capital gain large enough to support him comfortably for most — if not the rest — of his life. Thereafter, he could devote himself almost entirely to swing music, old movies, the hard-boiled detective fiction he loved, and his miniature trains.

Although the Great Depression extended through more than a third of the period to which Ben was attracted, it seemed to him like a far better time than the present. During the twenties, thirties, and forties, there had been no terrorists, no end-of-the-world atomic threat, no street crime to speak of, no frustrating fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, no polyester or lite beer. Television, the moron box that is the curse of modern life, was not a major social force by the end of the forties. Currently, the world seemed a cesspool of easy sex, pornography, illiterate fiction, witless and graceless music. The second, third, and fourth decades of the century were so fresh and innocent by comparison with the present that Ben's nostalgia sometimes deepened into a melancholy longing, into a profound desire to have been born before his own time.

Now, as the respectful crickets offered trilling songs to the otherwise peaceful silence of the Leben estate, as a warm wind scented with star jasmine blew across the sea-facing hills and through the long veranda, Ben could almost believe that he had, in fact, been transported back in time to a more genteel, less hectic age. Only the architecture spoiled the halcyon illusion.

And Rachael's pistol.

That spoiled things, too.

She was an extraordinarily easygoing woman, quick to laugh and slow to anger, too self-confident to be easily frightened. Only a very real and very serious threat could compel her to arm herself.

Before getting out of the car, she had withdrawn the gun from her purse and had clicked off the safeties. She warned Ben to be alert and cautious, though she refused to say exactly what it was that he should be alert to and cautious of. Her dread was almost palpable, yet she declined to share her worry and thus relieve her mind; she jealously guarded her secret as she had done all evening.

He suppressed his impatience with her — not because he had the forbearance of a saint but simply because he had no choice but to let her proceed with her revelations at her own pace.

At the door of the house, she fumbled with her keys, trying to find the lock and keyhole in the gloom. When she had walked out a year ago, she'd kept her house key because she'd thought she would need to return later to collect some of her belongings, a task that had become unnecessary when Eric had everything packed and sent to her along with, she said, an infuriatingly smug note expressing his certainty that she would soon realize how foolish she had been and seek reconciliation.

The cold, hard scrape of key metal on lock metal gave rise to an unfortunate image in Ben's mind: a pair of murderously sharp and gleaming knives being stropped against each other.

He noticed a burglar-alarm box with indicator lights by the door, but the system was evidently not engaged because none of the bulbs on the panel was lit.

While Rachael continued to poke at the lock with the key, Ben said, “Maybe he had the locks changed after you moved out.”

“I doubt it. He was so confident that I'd move back in with him sooner or later. Eric was a very confident man.”

She found the keyhole. The key worked. She opened the door, nervously reached inside, snapped on the lights in the foyer, and went into the house with the pistol held out in front of her.

Ben followed, feeling as if the male and female roles had been wrongly reversed, feeling as if he ought to have the gun, feeling a bit foolish when you came right down to it.

The house was perfectly still.

“I think we're alone,” Rachael said.

“Who did you expect to find?” he asked.

She did not answer.

Although she had just expressed the opinion that they were alone, she advanced with her pistol ready.

They went slowly from room to room, turning on every light, and each new revelation of the interior made the house more imposing. The rooms were large, high-ceilinged, white-walled, airy, with Mexican-tile floors and lots of big windows; some had massive fireplaces of either stone or ceramic tile; a few boasted oak cabinets of superb craftsmanship. A party for two hundred guests would not have strained the capacity of the living room and adjacent library.

The furniture was as starkly modern and functional as the rather forbidding architecture. The upholstered white sofas and chairs were utterly free of ornamentation. Coffee tables, end tables, and all the occasional tables were also quite plain, finished in mirror-bright high-gloss enamel, some black and some white.

The only color and drama were provided by an eclectic group of paintings, antiques, and objets d'art. The bland decor was intended to serve as an unobtrusive backdrop against which to display those items of surpassing quality and value, each of which was artfully illuminated by indirect lighting or tightly focused overhead minispots. Over one fireplace was a tile panel of birds by William de Morgan, which had been done (Rachael said) for Czar Nicholas I. Here, a blazing Jackson Pollock canvas. There, a Roman torso carved from marble, dating to the first century B.C. The ancient was intermixed with the new in wildly unconventional but striking arrangements. Here, a nineteenth-century Kirman panel recording the lives of the greatest shahs of Persia. Here, a bold Mark Rothko canvas featuring only broad bands of color. There, a pair of Lalique crystal-deer consoles, each holding an exquisite Ming vase. The effect was both breathtaking and jarring — and altogether more like a museum than a real home.

Although he had known Rachael was married to a wealthy man, and although he had known that she had become a very wealthy widow as of this morning, Ben had given no thought to what her wealth might mean to their relationship. Now her new status impinged upon him like an elbow in his side, making him uncomfortable. Rich. Rachael was very damn rich. For the first time, that thought had meaning for him.

He realized he'd need to sit down and think about it at length, and he would need to talk with her forthrightly about the influence of so much money, about the changes for better and worse that it might cause between them. However, this was neither the time nor the place to pursue the matter, and he decided to put it out of his mind for the moment. That was not easy. A fortune in tens of millions was a powerful magnet relentlessly drawing the mind regardless of how many other urgent matters required attention.

“You lived here six years?” he asked disbelievingly as they moved through the cool sterile rooms, past the precisely arranged displays.

“Yes,” she said, relaxing slightly as they roamed deeper into the house without encountering a threat of any kind. “Six long years.”

As they inspected the white vaulted chambers, the place began to seem less like a house and more like a great mass of ice in which some primeval catastrophe had embedded scores of gorgeous artifacts from another, earlier civilization.

He said, “It seems… forbidding.”

“Eric didn't care about having a real home — a cozy, livable home, I mean. He never was much aware of his surroundings anyway. He lived in the future, not the present. All he wanted of his house was that it serve as a monument to his success, and that's what you see here.”

“I'd expect to see your touch — your sensual style — everywhere, somewhere, but it's nowhere in sight.”

“Eric allowed no changes in decor,” she said.

“And you could live with that?”

“I did, yes.”

“I can't picture you being happy in such a chilly place.”

“Oh, it wasn't that bad. Really, it wasn't. There are many amazingly beautiful things here. Any one of them can occupy hours of study… contemplation… and provide great pleasure, even spiritual pleasure.”

He always marveled at how Rachael routinely found the positive aspect of even difficult circumstances. She wrung every drop of enjoyment and delight from a situation and did her best to ignore the unpleasant aspects. Her present-focused, pleasure-oriented personality was an effective armor against the vicissitudes of life.

At the rear of the ground floor, in the billiards room that looked out upon the swimming pool, the largest object on display was an intricately carved, claw-footed, late-nineteenth-century billiards table that boasted teak rails inlaid with semiprecious stones.

“Eric never played,” Rachael said. “Never held a cue stick in his hands. All he cared about was that the table is one of a kind and that it cost more than thirty thousand dollars. The overhead lights aren't positioned to facilitate play; they're aimed to present the table to its best advantage.”

“The more I see of this place, the better I understand him,” Ben said, “but the less able I am to grasp why you ever married him.”

“I was young, unsure of myself, perhaps looking for the father figure that'd always been missing in my life. He was so calm. He had such tremendous self-assurance. In him, I saw a man of power, a man who could carve out a niche for himself, a ledge on the mountainside where I could find stability, safety. At the time, I thought that was all I wanted.”

Implicit in those words was the admission that her childhood and adolescence had been difficult at best, confirming a suspicion Ben had harbored for months. She seldom spoke of her parents or of her school years, and Ben believed that those formative experiences had been so negative as to leave her with a loathing for the past, a distrust of the uncertain future, and a defensive ability to focus intently upon whatever great or meager joys the moment offered.

He wanted to pursue that subject now, but before he could say anything, the mood abruptly changed. A sense of imminent danger had hung heavy in the air upon their entrance, then had faded as they progressed from one deserted white room to another with the growing conviction that no intruder lurked within the house. Rachael had stopped pointing the pistol ahead of her and had been holding it at her side with the muzzle aimed at the floor. But now the threatening atmosphere clouded the air again when she spotted three distinct fingerprints and a portion of a palmprint on one arm of a sofa, etched into the snowy fabric in a burgundy-dark substance which, on closer inspection, looked as if it might be blood.

She crouched beside the sofa, peering closely at the prints, and Ben saw her shiver. In a tremulous whisper she said, “Been here, damn it. I was afraid of this. Oh, God. Something's happened here.” She touched one finger to the ugly stain, instantly snatched her hand away, and shuddered. “Damp. My God, it's damp.”

“Who's been here?” Ben asked. “What's happened?”

She stared at the tip of her finger, the one with which she had touched the stain, and her face was distorted with horror. Slowly she raised her eyes and looked at Ben, who had stooped beside her, and for a moment he thought her terror had reached such a peak that she was prepared, at last, to tell him everything and seek his help. But after a moment he could see the resolve and self-control flooding back into her gaze and into her lovely face.

She said, “Come on. Let's check out the rest of the house. And for God's sake, be careful.”

He followed her as she resumed her search. Again she held the pistol in front of her.

In the huge kitchen, which was nearly as well equipped as that of a major restaurant, they found broken glass scattered across the floor. One pane had been smashed out of the French door that opened onto the patio.

“An alarm system's no good if you don't use it,” Ben said. “Why would Eric go off and leave a house like this unprotected?”

She didn't answer.

He said, “And doesn't a man like him have servants in residence?”

“Yes. A nice live-in couple with an apartment over the garage.”

“Where are they? Wouldn't they have heard a break-in?”

“They're off Monday and Tuesday,” she said. “They often drive up to Santa Barbara to spend the time with their daughter's family.”

“Forced entry,” Ben said, lightly kicking a shard of glass across the tile floor. “Okay, now hadn't we better call the police?”

She merely said, “Let's look upstairs.” As the sofa had been stained with blood, so her voice was stained with anxiety. But worse: there was a bleakness about her, a grim and sombrous air, that made it easy to believe she might never laugh again.

The thought of Rachael without laughter was unbearable.

They climbed the stairs with caution, entered the upstairs hall, and checked out the second-floor rooms with the wariness they might have shown if unraveling a mile of tangled rope with the knowledge that a poisonous serpent lay concealed in the snarled line.

At first nothing was out of order, and they discovered nothing untoward — until they entered the master bedroom, where all was chaos. The contents of the walk-in closet — shirts, slacks, sweaters, shoes, suits, ties, and more — lay in a torn and tangled mess. Sheets, a white quilted spread, and feather-leaking pillows were strewn across the floor. The mattress had been heaved off the springs, which had been knocked halfway off the frame. Two black ceramic lamps were smashed, the shades ripped and then apparently stomped. Enormously valuable paintings had been wrenched from the walls and slashed to ribbons, damaged beyond repair. Of a pair of graceful Klismos-style chairs, one was upended, and the other had been hammered against a wall until it had gouged out big chunks of plaster and was itself reduced to splintered rubble.

Ben felt the skin on his arms puckering with gooseflesh, and an icy current quivered along the back of his neck.

Initially he thought that the destruction had been perpetrated by someone engaged upon a methodical search for something of value, but on taking a second look, he realized that such was not the case. The guilty party had unquestionably been in a blind rage, violently trashing the bedroom with malevolent glee or in a frenzy of hatred. The intruder had been someone possessed of considerable strength and little sanity. Someone strange. Someone infinitely dangerous.

With a recklessness evidently born of fear, Rachael plunged into the adjacent bathroom, one of only two places in the house that they had not yet searched, but the intruder was not there, either. She stepped back into the bedroom and surveyed the ruins, shaky and pale.

“Breaking and entering, now vandalism,” Ben said. “You want me to call the cops, or should you do it?”

She did not reply but entered the last of the unsearched places, the enormous walk-in closet, returning a moment later, scowling. “The wall safe's been opened and emptied.”

“Burglary too. Now we've got to call the cops, Rachael.”

“No,” she said. The bleakness that had hung about her like a gray and sodden cloak now became a specific presence in her gaze, a dull sheen in those usually bright green eyes.

Ben was more alarmed by that dullness than he had been by her fear, for it implied fading hope. Rachael, his Rachael, had never seemed capable of despair, and he couldn't bear to see her in the grip of that emotion.

“No cops,” she said.

“Why not?” Ben said.

“If I bring the cops into it, I'll be killed for sure.”

He blinked. “What? Killed? By the police? What on earth do you mean?”

“No, not by the cops.”

“Then who? Why?”

Nervously chewing on the thumbnail of her left hand, she said, “I should never have brought you here.”

“You're stuck with me. Rachael, really now, isn't it time you told me more?”

Ignoring his plea, she said, “Let's check the garage, see if one of the cars is missing,” and she dashed from the room, leaving him no choice but to hurry after her with feeble protests.

A white Rolls-Royce. A Jaguar sedan the same deep green as Rachael's eyes. Then two empty stalls. And in the last space, a dusty, well-used, ten-year-old Ford with a broken radio antenna.

Rachael said, “There should be a black Mercedes 560 SEL.” Her voice echoed off the walls of the long garage. “Eric drove it to our meeting with the lawyers this morning. After the accident… after Eric was killed, Herb Tuleman — the attorney — said he'd have the car driven back here and left in the garage. Herb is reliable. He always does what he says. I'm sure it was returned. And now it's gone.”

“Car theft,” Ben said. “How long does the list of crimes have to get before you'll agree to calling the cops?”

She walked to the last stall, where the battered Ford was parked in the harsh bluish glare of a fluorescent ceiling strip. “And this one doesn't belong here at all. It's not Eric's.”

“It's probably what the burglar arrived in,” Ben said. “Decided to swap it for the Mercedes.”

With obvious reluctance, with the pistol raised, she opened one of the Ford's front doors, which squeaked, and looked inside. “Nothing.”

He said, “What did you expect?”

She opened one of the rear doors and peered into the back seat.

Again there was nothing to be found.

“Rachael, this silent sphinx act is irritating as hell.”

She returned to the driver's door, which she had opened first. She opened it again, looked in past the wheel, saw the keys in the ignition, and removed them.

“Rachael, damn it.”

Her face was not simply troubled. Her grim expression looked as if it had been carved in flesh that was really stone and would remain upon her visage from now until the end of time.

He followed her to the trunk. “What are you looking for now?”

At the back of the Ford, fumbling with the keys, she said, “The intruder wouldn't have left this here if it could be traced to him. A burglar wouldn't leave such an easy clue. No way. So maybe he came here in a stolen car that couldn't be traced to him.”

Ben said, “You're probably right. But you're not going to find the registration slip in the trunk. Let's try the glove compartment.”

Slipping a key into the trunk lock, she said, “I'm not looking for the registration slip.”

“Then what?”

Turning the key, she said, “I don't really know. Except…”

The lock clicked. The trunk lid popped up an inch.

She opened it all the way.

Inside, blood was puddled thinly on the floor of the trunk.

Rachael made a faint mournful sound.

Ben looked closer and saw that a woman's blue high-heeled shoe was on its side in one corner of the shallow compartment. In another corner lay a woman's eyeglasses, the bridge of which was broken, one lens missing and the other lens cracked.

“Oh, God,” Rachael said, “he not only stole the car. He killed the woman who was driving it. Killed her and stuffed the body in here until he had a chance to dispose of it. And now where will it end? Where will it end? Who will stop him?”

Badly shocked by what they'd found, Ben was nevertheless aware that when Rachael said “him,” she was talking about someone other than an unidentified burglar. Her fear was more specific than that.

7 NASTY LITTLE GAMES

Two snowflake moths swooped around the overhead fluorescent light, batting against the cool bulbs, as if in a frustrated suicidal urge to find the flame. Their shadows, greatly enlarged, darted back and forth across the walls, over the Ford, across the back of the hand that Rachael held to her face.

The metallic odor of blood rose out of the open trunk of the car. Ben took a step backward to avoid the noxious scent.

He said, “How did you know?”

“Know what?” Rachael asked, eyes still closed, head still bowed, coppery red-brown hair falling forward and half concealing her face.

“You knew what you might find in the trunk. How?”

“No. I didn't know. I was half afraid I'd find… something. Something else. But not this.”

“Then what did you expect?”

“Maybe something worse.”

“Like what?”

“Don't ask.”

“I have asked.”

The soft bodies of the moths tapped against the fire-filled tubes of glass above. Tap-tap-tick-tap.

Rachael opened her eyes, shook her head, started walking away from the battered Ford. “Let's get out of here.”

He grabbed her by the arm. “We have to call the cops now. And you'll have to tell them whatever it is you know about what's going on here. So you might as well tell me first.”

“No police,” she said, either unwilling or unable to look at him.

“I was ready to go along with you on that. Until now.”

“No police,” she insisted.

“But someone's been killed!”

“There's no body.”

“Christ, isn't the blood enough?”

She turned to him and finally met his eyes. “Benny, please, please, don't argue with me. There's no time to argue. If that poor woman's body were in the trunk, it might be different, and we might be able to call the cops, because with a body they'd have something to work on and they'd move a lot faster. But without a body to focus on, they'll ask a lot of questions, endless questions, and they won't believe the answers I could give them, so they'll waste a lot of time. But there's none to waste because soon there're going to be people looking for me… dangerous people.”

“Who?”

“If they aren't already looking for me. I don't think they could've learned that Eric's body is missing, not yet, but if they have heard about it, they'll be coming here. We've got to go.”

“Who?” he demanded exasperatedly. “Who are they? What are they after? What do they want? For God's sake, Rachael, let me in on it.”

She shook her head. “Our agreement was that you could come with me but that I wasn't going to answer questions.”

“I made no such promises.”

“Benny, damn it, my life is on the line.”

She was serious; she really meant it; she was desperately afraid for her life, and that was sufficient to break Ben's resolve and make him cooperate. Plaintively he said, “But the police could provide protection.”

“Not from the people who may be coming after me.”

“You make it sound as if you're being pursued by demons.”

“At least.”

She quickly embraced him, kissed him lightly on the mouth.

She felt good in his arms. He was badly shaken by the thought of a future without her.

Rachael said, “You're terrific. For wanting to stand by me. But go home now. Get out of it. Let me handle things myself.”

“Not very damn likely.”

“Then don't interfere. Now let's go.”

Pulling away from him, she headed back across the five-car garage toward the door that led into the house.

A moth dropped from the light and fluttered against his face, as if his feelings for Rachael were, at the moment, brighter than the fluorescent bulbs. He batted it away.

He slammed the lid on the Ford's trunk, leaving the wet blood to congeal and the gruesome smell to thicken.

He followed Rachael.

At the far end of the garage, near the door that led into the house through the laundry room, she stopped, staring down at something on the floor. When Ben caught up with her, he saw some clothes that had been discarded in the corner, which neither he nor she had noticed when they had entered the garage. There were a pair of soft white vinyl shoes with white rubber soles and heels, wide white laces. A pair of baggy pale green cotton pants with a drawstring waist. And a loose short-sleeve shirt that matched the pants.

Looking up from the clothes, he saw that Rachael's face was no longer merely pale and waxen. She appeared to have been dusted with ashes. Gray. Seared.

Ben looked down at the suit of clothes again. He realized it was an outfit of the sort surgeons wore when they went into an operating theater, what they called hospital whites. Hospital whites had once actually been white, but these days they were usually this soft shade of green. However, not only surgeons wore them. Many other hospital employees preferred the same basic uniform. Furthermore, he had seen the assistant pathologists and attendants dressed in exactly the same kind of clothes at the morgue, only a short while ago.

Rachael drew a deep hissing breath through clenched teeth, shook herself, and went into the house.

Ben hesitated, staring intently at the discarded pair of shoes and rumpled clothes. Riveted by the soft green hue. Half mesmerized by the random patterns of gentle folds and creases in the material. His mind spinning. His heart pounding. Breathlessly considering the implications.

When at last he broke the spell and hurried after Rachael, Ben discovered that sweat had popped out all over his face.

Rachael drove much too fast to the Geneplan building in Newport Beach. She handled the car with considerable skill, but Ben was glad to have a seat belt. Having ridden with her before, he knew she enjoyed driving even more than she enjoyed most other things in life; she was exhilarated by speed, delighted by the SL's maneuverability. But tonight she was in too much of a hurry to take any pleasure from her driving skill, and although she was not exactly reckless, she took some turns at such high speed and changed lanes so suddenly that she could not be accused of timidity.

He said, “Are you in some kind of trouble that rules out turning to the police? Is that it?”

“Do you mean — am I afraid the cops would get something on me?”

“Are you?”

“No,” she said without hesitation, in a tone that seemed devoid of deception.

“ 'Cause if somehow you've gotten in deep with the wrong kind of people, it's never too late to turn back.”

“Nothing like that.”

“Good. I'm glad to hear it.”

The backsplash of dim light from the dashboard meters and gauges was just bright enough to softly illuminate her face but not bright enough to reveal the tension in her or the unhealthy grayness that fear had brought to her complexion. She looked now as Ben always thought of her when they were separated: breathtaking.

In different circumstances, with a different destination, the moment would have been like something from a perfect dream or from one of those great old movies. After all, what could be more thrilling or exquisitely erotic than being with a gorgeous woman in a sleek sports car, barreling through the night toward some romantic destination, where they could forsake the snug contours of bucket seats for cool sheets, the excitement of high-speed travel having primed them for fiercely passionate lovemaking.

She said, “I've done nothing wrong, Benny.”

“I didn't really think you had.”

“You implied…”

“I had to ask.”

“Do I look like a villain to you?”

“You look like an angel.”

“There's no danger I'll land in jail. The worst that can happen to me is that I'll wind up a victim.”

“Damned if I'll let that happen.”

“You're really very sweet,” she said. She glanced away from the road and managed a thin smile. “Very sweet.”

The smile was confined to her lips and did not chase the fear from the rest of her face, did not even touch her troubled eyes. And no matter how sweet she thought he as, she was still not prepared to share any of her secrets with him.

They reached Geneplan at eleven-thirty.

Dr. Eric Leben's corporate headquarters was a four-story, glass-walled building in an expensive business park off Jamboree Road in Newport Beach, stylishly irregular in design with six sides that were not all of equal length, and with a modernistic polished marble and glass porte cochere. Ben usually despised such architecture, but he grudgingly had to admit that the Geneplan headquarters had a certain appealing boldness. The parking lot was divided into sections by long planters overflowing with vine geraniums heavily laden with wine-red and white blooms. The building was surrounded by an impressive amount of green space as well, with artfully arranged palm trees. Even at this late hour, the trees, grounds, and building were lit by cunningly placed spotlights that imparted a sense of drama and importance to the place.

Rachael pulled her Mercedes around to the rear of the building, where a short driveway sloped down to a large bronze-tinted door that evidently rolled up to admit delivery trucks to an interior loading bay on the basement level. She drove to the bottom and parked at the door, below ground level, with concrete walls rising on both sides. She said, “If anyone gets the idea I might come to Geneplan, and if they drive by looking for my car, they won't spot it down here.”

Getting out of the car, Ben noticed how much cooler and more pleasant the night was in Newport Beach, closer to the sea, than it had been in either Santa Ana or Villa Park. They were much too far from the ocean — a couple of miles — to hear the waves or to smell the salt and seaweed, but the Pacific air nevertheless had an effect.

A smaller, man-size door was set in the wall beside the larger entrance and also opened into the basement level. It had two locks.

Living with Eric, Rachael had run errands to and from Geneplan when he hadn't the time himself and when, for whatever reason, he did not trust a subordinate with the task, so she'd once possessed keys. But the day she walked out on him, she put the keys on a small table in the foyer of the Villa Park house. Tonight, she had found them exactly where she'd left them a year ago, on the table beside a tall nineteenth-century Japanese cloisonné vase, dust-filmed. Evidently Eric had instructed the maid not to move the keys even an inch. He must have intended that their undisturbed presence should be a subtle humiliation for Rachael when she came crawling back to him. Happily, she had denied him that sick satisfaction.

Clearly, Eric Leben had been a supremely arrogant bastard, and Ben was glad that he had never met the man.

Now Rachael opened the steel door, stepped into the building, and switched on the lights in the small underground shipping bay. An alarm box was set in the concrete wall. She tapped a series of numbers on its keyboard. The pair of glowing red lights winked out, and a green bulb lit up, indicating that the system was deactivated.

Ben followed her to the end of the chamber, which was sealed off from the rest of the subterranean level for security reasons. At the next door there was another alarm box for another system independent of that which had guarded the exterior door. Ben watched her switch it off with another number code.

She said, “The first one is based on Eric's birthday, this one on mine. There're more ahead.”

They proceeded by the beam of the flashlight that Rachael had brought from the house in Villa Park, for she did not want to turn on any lights that might be spotted from outside.

“But you've a perfect right to be here,” Ben said. “You're his widow, and you've almost certainly inherited everything.”

“Yes, but if the wrong people drive by and see lights on, they'll figure it's me, and they'll come in to get me.”

He wished to God she'd tell him who these “wrong people” were, but he knew better than to ask. Rachael as moving fast, eager to put her hands on whatever had drawn her to this place, then get out. She would have no more patience for his questions here than she'd had in the house in Villa Park.

As he accompanied her through the rest of the basement to the elevator, up to the second floor, Ben was increasingly intrigued by the extraordinary security system in operation after normal business hours. There was a third alarm to be penetrated before the elevator could be summoned to the basement. On the second floor, they debarked from the elevator into a reception lounge also designed with security in mind. In the searching beam of Rachael's flashlight, Ben saw a sculpted beige carpet, a striking desk of brown marble and brass for the receptionist, half a dozen brass and leather chairs for visitors, glass and brass coffee tables, and three large and ethereal paintings that might have been by Martin Green, but even if the flashlight had been switched off, he would have seen the blood-red alarm lights in the darkness. Three burnished brass doors — probably solid-core and virtually impenetrable — led out of the lounge, and alarm lights glowed beside each of them.

“This is nothing compared to the precautions taken on the third and fourth levels,” Rachael said.

“What's up there?”

“The computers and duplicate research data banks. Every inch is covered by infrared, sonic, and visual-motion detectors.”

“We going up there?”

“Fortunately, we don't have to. And we don't have to go out to Riverside County, either, thank God.”

“What's in Riverside?”

“The actual research labs. The entire facility is underground, not just for biological isolation but for better security against industrial espionage, too.”

Ben was aware that Geneplan was a leader in the most fiercely competitive and rapidly developing industry in the world. The frantic race to be first with a new product, when coupled with the natural competitiveness of the kind of men drawn into the industry, made it necessary o guard trade secrets and product development with a care that was explicitly paranoid. Still, he was not quite prepared for the obvious siege mentality that lay behind the design of Geneplan's electronic security.

Dr. Eric Leben had been a specialist in recombinant DNA, one of the most brilliant figures in the rapidly expanding science of gene splicing. And Geneplan was one of the companies on the cutting edge of the extremely profitable bio-business that had grown out of this new science since the late 1970s.

Eric Leben and Geneplan held valuable patents on a variety of genetically engineered microorganisms and new strains of plant life, including but not limited to: a microbe that produced an extremely effective hepatitis vaccine, which was currently undergoing the process of acquiring the FDA seal but was now only a year away from certain approval and marketing; another man-made microbe “factory” that produced a supervaccine against all types of herpes; a new variety of corn that could flourish even if irrigated with salt water, making it possible for farmers to cultivate abundant crops in arid lands within pumping distance of the seacoast, where nothing had previously grown; a new family of slightly altered oranges and lemons genetically modified to be impervious to fruit flies, citrus canker, and other diseases, thus eliminating the need for pesticides in a large portion of the citrus-fruit industry. Any one such patent might be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and Ben supposed it was only prudent for Geneplan to be paranoid and to spend a small fortune to guard the research data that led to the creation of each of these living gold mines.

Rachael went to the middle of the three doors, deactivated the alarm, and used another key to disengage the lock.

When Ben went through the door behind her and eased it shut, he discovered that it was enormously heavy and would have been immovable if it had not been hung in perfect balance on cunningly designed ball-bearing hinges.

She led him along a series of dark and silent corridors, through additional doors to Eric's private suite. There she required one more code for a final alarm box.

Inside the sanctum sanctorum at last, she quickly crossed a vast expanse of antique Chinese carpet in rose and beige to Eric's massive desk. It was as ultramodern as that of the company's front-lounge receptionist but even more stunning and expensive, constructed of rare gold-veined marble and polished malachite.

The bright but narrowly focused lance of the flashlight beam revealed only the middle of the big room as Rachael advanced through it, so Ben had only glimpses and shadowy impressions of the decor. It seemed even more determinedly modern than Eric Leben's other haunts, downright futuristic.

She put her purse and pistol on the desk as she passed it, went to the wall behind, where Ben joined her. She played the flashlight over a four-foot-square painting: broad bands of sombrous yellow and a particularly depressing gray separated by a thin swath of blood-dark maroon.

“Another Rothko?” Ben asked.

“Yeah. And with an important function besides just being a piece of art.”

She slipped her fingers under the burnished steel frame, feeling along the bottom. A latch clicked, and the big painting swung away from the wall, to which it had been firmly fixed rather than hung on wire. Behind the hinged Rothko was a large wall safe with a circular door about two feet in diameter. The steel face, dial, and handle gleamed.

“Trite,” Ben said.

“Not really. Not your ordinary wall safe. Four-inch-thick steel casing, six-inch face and door. Not just set in the wall but actually welded to the steel beams of the building itself. Requires not one but two combinations, the first forward, the second reverse. Fireproof and virtually blastproof, too.”

“What's he keep in there — the meaning of life?”

“Some money, I guess, like in the safe at the house,” she said, handing Ben the flashlight. She turned the dial and began to put in the first combination. “Important papers.”

He aimed the light at the safe door. “Okay, so what're we after exactly? The cash?”

“No. A file folder. Maybe a ring-binder notebook.”

“What's in it?”

“The essentials of an important research project. More or less an abstract of the developments to date, including copies of Morgan Lewis's regular reports to Eric. Lewis is the project head. And with any luck, Eric's personal project diary is in here, too. All of his practical and philosophical thoughts on the subject.”

Ben was surprised that she had answered. Was she finally prepared to let him in on at least some of her secrets?

“What subject?” he asked. “What's this particular research project all about?”

She did not respond but blotted her sweat-damp fingers on her blouse before easing the safe's dial backward toward the first number of the second combination.

“Concerning what?” he pressed.

“I have to concentrate, Benny,” she said. “If I overshoot one of these numbers, then I'll have to start all over and put the first set in again.”

He had gotten all he was going to get, the one little scrap about the file. But, not caring to stand idly by, having nothing else to do but pressure her, he said, “There must be hundreds of research files on scores of projects, so if he keeps just one of them here, it's got to involve the most important thing Geneplan's currently working on.”

Squinting, and with her tongue poked out between her teeth, she brought all of her attention to bear on the dial.

“Something big,” he said.

She said nothing.

He said, “Or it's research they're doing for the government, the military. Something extremely sensitive.”

Rachael put in the final number, twisted the handle, opened the small steel door, and said, “Oh, damn.”

The safe was empty.

“They got here before us,” she said.

“Who?” Ben demanded.

“They must've suspected that I knew.”

“Who suspected?”

“Otherwise, they wouldn't have been so quick to get rid of the file,” she said.

“Who?” Ben said.

“Surprise,” said a man behind them.

As Rachael gasped, Ben was already turning, seeking the intruder. The flashlight beam caught a tall, bald man in a tan leisure suit and a green-and-white-striped shirt. His head was so completely hairless that he must have shaved it. He had a square face, wide mouth, proud nose, Slavic cheekbones, and gray eyes the shade of dirty ice. He was standing on the other side of the desk. He resembled the late Otto Preminger, the film director. Sophisticated in spite of his leisure suit. Obviously intelligent. Potentially dangerous. He had confiscated the pistol that Rachael had put down with her purse when she had come into the office.

Worse, the guy was holding a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum. Ben was familiar with — and deeply respected — that revolver. Meticulously constructed, it had a four-inch barrel, was chambered for the.357 Magnum cartridge, weighed a moderate thirty-five ounces, and was so accurate and so powerful that it could even be used for deer hunting. Loaded with hollow-point expanding cartridges or with armor-piercing rounds, it was as deadly a handgun as any in the world, deadlier than most.

In the beam of the Eveready, the intruder's gray eyes glistened strangely.

“Lights on,” the bald man said, raising his voice slightly, and immediately the room's overhead lights blinked to life, evidently engaged by a voice-activated switch, a trick that suited Eric Leben's preference for ultramodern design.

Rachael said, “Vincent, put the gun away.”

“Not possible, I'm afraid,” the bald man said. Though his head was quite naked, the back of his big hand had plenty of hair, almost like a pelt, and it even bristled on his fingers between the knuckles.

“There's no need for violence,” Rachael said.

Vincent's smile was sour, imparting a cold viciousness to his broad face. “Indeed? No need for violence? I suppose that's why you brought a pistol,” he said, holding up the thirty-two that he had snatched off the desk.

Ben knew the S&W Combat Magnum had twice the recoil of a forty-five, which was why it featured large hand-filling stocks. In spite of the superb accuracy built into it, the weapon could be wildly inaccurate in the hands of an inexperienced shooter unprepared for the hard kick it delivered. If the bald man did not appreciate the tremendous power of the gun, if he were inexperienced, he would almost certainly fire the first couple of shots high into the wall, over their heads, which might give Ben time to reach him and take him out.

“We didn't really believe Eric would've been reckless enough to tell you about Wildcard,” Vincent said. “But apparently he did, the poor damn fool, or you wouldn't be here, rummaging in his office safe. No matter how badly he treated you, Rachael, he still had a weakness for you.”

“He was too proud,” she said. “Always was. He liked to brag about his accomplishments.”

“Ninety-five percent of Geneplan's staff is in the dark about the Wildcard Project,” Vincent said. “It's that sensitive. Believe me, no matter how much you may have hated him, he thought you were special, and he wouldn't have bragged about it to anyone else.”

“I didn't hate him,” she said. “I pity him. Especially now. Vincent, did you know he'd broken the cardinal rule?”

Vincent shook his head. “Not until… tonight. It was a mad thing to do.”

Intently watching the bald man, Ben reluctantly decided that the guy was experienced with the Combat Magnum and would not be startled by its recoil. is grip on it was not at all casual; his right hand was clenched tightly. His aim was not casual, either; his right arm was extended, stiff and straight, elbow locked, with the muzzle lined up between Rachael and Ben. He would only have to swing it a couple of inches in either direction to blow one or both of them away.

Unaware that Ben could be of more use in such a situation than he'd ever given her reason to believe, Rachael said, “Forget the damn gun, Vincent. We don't need guns. We're all in this together now.”

“No,” Vincent said. “No, as far as the rest of us are concerned, you're not in this. Never should've been. We simply don't trust you, Rachael. And this friend of yours…”

The dirty-gray eyes shifted focus from Rachael to Ben. His gaze was piercing, disconcerting. Although his eyes lingered on Ben only a second or two, there was an iciness in them that was transmitted to Ben, sending a chill along his spine.

Then, having failed to detect that he was dealing with someone far less innocent than appearances indicated, Vincent looked away from Ben, back at Rachael, and said, “He's a complete outsider. If we don't want you in this, then we certainly aren't about to make room for him.”

To Ben, that statement sounded ominously like a death sentence, and at last he moved with a sinuosity and lightning speed worthy of a striking snake. Taking a big chance that the second command to the voice-activated switch would be as simple as the first, he said, “Lights off!” The room instantly went dark as he simultaneously threw the flashlight at Vincent's head, but, Jesus, the guy was already turning to fire at him, and Rachael was screaming — Ben hoped she was diving for the floor — and the sudden darkness was cast into confusion by the whipping beam of the tumbling Eveready, which he hoped would be enough to give him the edge, an edge he badly needed because, just a fraction of a second after the lights went out and the flashlight left his hand, he was already pitching forward, onto the malachite desk in a sliding belly flop that ought to carry him across and into Vincent, committed to action, no turning back now, all of this like a film run at twice its normal speed, yet with an eerie objective time sense so slowed down that each second seemed like a minute, which was just the old program taking control of his brain, the fighting animal taking charge of the body. In the next single second a hell of a lot happened all at once: Rachael was still screaming shrilly, and Ben was sliding, and the flashlight was tumbling, and the muzzle of the Magnum flashed blue-white, and Ben sensed a slug passing over him so close it might have singed his hair, heard the whine of its passage even above the thunderous roar of the shot itself—skeeeeeeeen—felt the coldness of the polished malachite through his shirt, and the flashlight struck Vincent as the shot exploded and as Ben was crossing the desk, Vincent grunted from the blow, the flash rebounded and fell to the floor, its lance of light coming to rest on a six-foot piece of abstract bronze sculpture, and Ben was off the desk by then, colliding with his adversary, both of them going down hard. The gun fired again. The shot went into the ceiling. Ben was sprawled on top of Vincent in the darkness, but with a perfect intuitive sense of the relationship of their bodies, which made it possible for him to bring a knee up between the man's thighs, smashing it into the unprotected crotch, and Vincent screamed louder than Rachael, so Ben rammed his knee up again, showing no mercy, daring no mercy, chopped him in the throat, too, which cut off the scream, then hit him along the right temple, hit him again, hard, harder, and a third shot rang out, deafening, so Ben chopped him once more, harder still, then the gun fell out of Vincent's suddenly limp hand, and gaspingly Ben said, “Lights on!”

Instantly the room brightened.

Vincent was out cold, making a slight wet rattling noise as slow inhalations and exhalations passed through his injured throat.

The air stank of gunpowder and hot metal.

Ben rolled off the unconscious man and crawled to the Combat Magnum, taking possession of it with more than a little relief.

Rachael had ventured from behind the desk. Stooping, she picked up her thirty-two pistol, which Vincent had also dropped. The look she gave Ben was part shock, part astonishment, part disbelief.

He crawled back to Vincent and examined him. Thumbed up one eyelid and then the other, checking for the uneven dilation that might indicate a severe concussion or other brain injury. Gently inspected the man's right temple, where two edge-of-the-hand chops had landed. Felt his throat. Made sure his breathing, though hampered, was not too badly obstructed. Took his wrist, located his pulse, timed it.

He sighed and said, “He won't die, thank God. Sometimes it's hard to judge how much force is enough… or too much. But he won't die. He'll be out for a while, and when he comes around he'll need medical attention, but he'll be able to get to a doctor on his own.”

Speechless, Rachael stared at him.

He took a cushion from a chair and used it to prop up Vincent's head, which would help keep the trachea open if there was some bleeding in the throat.

He quickly searched Vincent but did not find the Wildcard file. “He must have come here with others. They opened the safe, took the contents, while he stayed behind to wait for us.”

She put a hand on his shoulder, and he raised his head to meet her eyes. She said, “Benny, for God's sake, you're just a real-estate salesman.”

“Yeah,” he said, as if he didn't understand the implied question, “and I'm a damn good one, too.”

“But… the way you handled him… the way you… so fast… violent… so sure of yourself…”

With satisfaction so intense it almost hurt, he watched her as she grappled with the realization that she was not the only one with secrets.

Showing her no more mercy than she'd thus far shown him, letting her stew in her curiosity, he said, “Come on. Let's get the hell out of here before someone else shows up. I'm good at these nasty little games, but I don't particularly enjoy them.”

8 DUMPSTER

When an old wino in soiled pants and a ragged Hawaiian shirt wandered into the alley, stacked some crates, and climbed up to search in the garbage dumpster for God knows what treasures, two rats had leaped from the bin, startling him. He had fallen off his makeshift ladder — just as he'd caught a glimpse of the dead woman sprawled in the garbage. She wore a cream-colored summer dress with a blue belt.

The wino's name was Percy. He couldn't remember his last name. “Not really sure I ever had one,” he said when Verdad and Hagerstrom questioned him in the alley a short while later. “For a fact, I ain't used a last name since I can remember. Guess maybe I did have one sometime, but my memory ain't what it used to be on account of the damn cheap wine, barf brew, which is the only rot I can pay for.”

“You think this slimeball killed her?” Hagerstrom asked Verdad, as if the alky couldn't hear them unless they spoke directly to him.

Studying Percy with extreme distaste, Verdad replied in the same tone of voice. “Not likely.”

“Yeah. And even if he saw anything important, he wouldn't know what it meant, and he won't remember it anyway.”

Lieutenant Verdad said nothing. As an immigrant born and raised in a far less fortunate and less just country than that to which he now willingly pledged his allegiance, he had little patience and no understanding for lost cases like Percy. Born with the priceless advantage of United States citizenship, how could a man turn from all the opportunities around him and choose degradation and squalor? Julio knew he ought to have more compassion for self-made outcasts like Percy. He knew this ruined man might have suffered, might have endured tragedy, been broken by fate or by cruel parents. A graduate of the police department's awareness programs, Julio was well versed in the psychology and sociology of the outcast-as-victim philosophy. But he would have had less trouble understanding the alien thought processes of a man from Mars than he had trying to get a handle on wasted men like this one. He just sighed wearily, tugged on the cuffs of his white silk shirt, and adjusted his pearl cuff links, first the right one, then the left.

Hagerstrom said, “You know, sometimes it seems like a law of nature that any potential witness to a homicide in this town has got to be drunk and about three weeks away from his last bath.”

“If the job was easy,” Verdad said, “we wouldn't like it so much, would we?”

“I would. Jesus, this guy stinks.”

As they talked about him, Percy did, in fact, seem oblivious. He picked at an unidentifiable piece of crud that had crusted to one of the sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt, and after a deep rumbling burp, he returned to the subject of his burnt-out cerebellum. “Cheap hootch fuzzies up your brain. I swear Christ, I think my brain's shrinkin' a little bit more every day, and the empty spaces is fillin' up with hairballs and old wet newspapers. I think a cat sneaks up on me and spits the hairballs in my ears when I'm asleep.” He sounded entirely serious, even a bit afraid of such a bold and invasive feline.

Although he wasn't able to remember his last name or much of anything else, Percy had enough brain tissue left — in there among the hairballs and old wet newspapers — to know that the proper thing to do upon finding a corpse was to call the police. And though he was not exactly a pillar of the community with much respect for the law or any sense of common decency, he had hurried immediately in search of the authorities. He thought that reporting the body in the dumpster might earn him a reward.

Now, after arriving with the technicians from the Scientific Investigation Division more than an hour ago, and after fruitlessly questioning Percy while the SID men strung their cables and switched on their lights, Lieutenant Verdad saw another rat explode in panic from the garbage as the coroner's men, having overseen the extensive photographing of the corpse in situ, began to haul the dead woman out of the dumpster. Pelt matted with filth, tail long and pink and moist, the disgusting rodent scurried along the wall of the building toward the mouth of the alley. Julio required every bit of his self-control to keep from drawing his gun and firing wildly at the creature. It dashed to a storm drain with a broken grating and vanished into the depths.

Julio hated rats. The mere sight of a rat robbed him of the self-image he had painstakingly constructed during more than nineteen years as an American citizen and police officer. When he glimpsed a rat, he was instantly stripped of all that he had accomplished and become in nearly two decades, was transformed into pathetic little Julio Verdad of the Tijuana slums, where he had been born in a one-room shack made of scrap lumber and rusting barrels and tar paper. If the right of tenancy had been predicated upon mere numbers, the rats would have owned that shack, for the seven members of the Verdad clan were far outnumbered by vermin.

Watching this rat scramble out of the portable floodlights and into shadows and down the alley drain, Julio felt as if his good suit and custom-made shirt and Bally loafers were sorcerously transformed into thirdhand jeans, a tattered shirt, and badly worn sandals. A shudder passed through him, and for a moment he was five years old again, standing in that stifling shack on a blistering August day in Tijuana, staring down in paralyzed horror at the two rats that were chewing busily at the throat of the four-month-old baby, Ernesto. Everyone else was outside, sitting in patches of shade along the dusty street, fanning themselves, the children playing at quiet games and sipping at water, the adults cooling off with the beer they'd purchased cheap from two young ladrones who had successfully broken into a brewery warehouse the night before. Little Julio tried to scream, tried to call for help, but no sound would escape him, as if words and cries could not rise because of the heavy, humid August air. The rats, aware of him, turned boldly upon him, hissing, and even when he lunged forward, swatting furiously at them, they backed off only with great reluctance and only after one of them had tested his mettle by biting the meatiest part of his left hand. He screamed and struck out in even greater fury, routing the rats at last, and he was still screaming when his mother and his oldest sister, Evalina, rushed in from the sun-scorched day to find him weeping blood from his hand as if from stigmata — and his baby brother dead.

Reese Hagerstrom — having been partners with Julio long enough to know about his dread of rats, but too considerate ever to mention that fear directly or even indirectly — put one of his enormous hands on Julio's slender shoulder and said, by way of distraction, “I think I'll give Percy five bucks and tell him to get lost. He had nothing to do with this, and we're not going to get anything more out of him, and I'm sick of the stink of him.”

“Go ahead,” Julio said. “I'm in for two-fifty of it.” While Reese dealt with the wino, Julio watched the dead woman being hauled out of the dumpster. He tried to distance himself from the victim. He tried to tell himself she didn't look real, looked more like a big rag doll, and maybe even was a doll, or a mannequin, just a mannequin. But it was a lie. She looked real enough. Hell, she looked too real. They deposited her on a tarp that had been spread on the pavement for that purpose.

In the glare of the portable lights, the photographer took a few more pictures, and Julio moved in for a closer look. The dead woman was young, in her early twenties, a black-haired and brown-eyed Latino. In spite of what the killer had done to her, and in spite of the garbage and the industrious rats, there was reason to believe that she had been at least attractive and perhaps beautiful. She had gone to her death in a summery cream-colored dress with blue piping on the collar and sleeves, a blue belt, and blue high-heeled shoes.

She was only wearing one shoe. No doubt the other was in the dumpster.

There was something unbearably sad about her gay dress and her one bare foot with its meticulously painted toenails.

At Julio's direction, two uniformed men donned rubber boots, put on scented surgical masks, and climbed into the dumpster to go through every piece of rubbish. They were searching for the other shoe, the murder weapon, and anything else that might pertain to the case.

They found the dead woman's purse. She had not been robbed, for her wallet contained forty-three dollars. According to her driver's license, she was Ernestina Hernandez, twenty-four, of Santa Ana.

Ernestina.

Julio shivered. The similarity between her name and that of his long-dead little brother, Ernesto, gave him a chill. Both the child and the woman had been left for the rats, and though Julio had not known Ernestina, he felt an instant, profound, and only partially explicable obligation to her the moment he learned her name.

I will find your killer, he promised her silently. You were so lovely, and you died before your time, and if there is any justice in the world, any hope of making sense out of life, then your murderer cannot go unpunished. I swear to you, even if I have to go to the ends of the earth, I will find your killer.

Two minutes later, they found a blood-spattered lab coat of the kind doctors wore. Four words were stitched on the breast pocket: santa ana city morgue.

“What the hell?” Reese Hagerstrom said. “You think someone from the morgue cut her throat?”

Frowning at the lab coat, Julio Verdad said nothing.

A lab man carefully folded the coat, trying not to shake loose any hairs or fibers that might be clinging to it. He put it into a plastic bag, which he sealed tightly.

Ten minutes later, the officers in the dumpster found a sharp scalpel with traces of blood on the blade. An expensive, finely crafted instrument of surgical quality. Similar to those used in hospital operating rooms. Or in a medical examiner's pathology lab.

The scalpel, too, was put in a plastic bag, then laid beside the lab coat, which lay beside the now-draped body.

By midnight, they had not found the dead woman's other blue shoe. But there was still about sixteen inches of garbage in the dumpster, and the missing item was almost certain to turn up in that last layer of refuse.

9 SUDDEN DEATH

Bulleting through the hot June night, from the Riverside Freeway to I-15 East, then east on I-10, past Beaumont and Banning, skirting the Morongo Indian Reservation, to Cabazon and beyond, Rachael had plenty of time to think. Mile by mile, the metropolitan sprawl of southern California fell behind; the lights of civilization grew sparser, dimmer. They headed deeper into the desert, where vast stretches of empty darkness opened on all sides, and where often the only things to be seen on the plains and hills were a few toothy rock formations and scattered Joshua trees limned by frost-pale moonlight that waxed and waned as it was screened by the thin and curling clouds that filigreed the night sky. The barren landscape said all that could be said about solitude, and it encouraged introspection, as did the lulling hum of the Mercedes's engine and the whisper of its spinning tires on the pavement.

Slumped in the passenger's seat, Benny was stubbornly silent for long periods, staring at the black ribbon of highway revealed in the headlights. A few times, they engaged in short conversations, though the topic was always so light and inconsequential that, under the circumstances, it seemed surreal. They discussed Chinese food for a while, subsided into a deep and mutual silence, then talked of Clint Eastwood movies, followed by another and longer silence.

She was aware that Benny was paying her back for her refusal to share her secrets with him. He surely knew that she was stunned by the ease with which he had disposed of Vincent Baresco in Eric's office and that she was dying to know where he had learned to handle himself so well. By turning cool on her, by letting the brooding silences draw out, he was telling her that she was going to have to give him some information in order to get some in return.

But she could not give. Not yet. She was afraid he had already been drawn too far into this deadly business, and she was angry with herself for letting him get involved. She was determined not to drag him deeper into the nightmare — unless his survival depended upon a complete understanding of what was happening and of what was at stake.

As she turned off Interstate 10 onto State Highway 111, now only eleven miles from Palm Springs, she wondered if she could have done more to dissuade him from coming with her to the desert. But upon leaving Geneplan's offices in Newport Beach, he had been quietly adamant, and attempting to change his mind had seemed as fruitless as standing on the shore of the Pacific and commanding an incoming tide to reverse itself immediately.

Rachael deeply regretted the awkwardness between them. In the five months since they had met, this was the first time they had been uneasy with each other, the first time that their relationship had been touched by even a hint of anger or had been in any way less than entirely harmonious.

Having departed Newport Beach at midnight, they arrived in Palm Springs and drove through the heart of town on Palm Canyon Drive at one-fifteen Tuesday morning. That was ninety-nine miles in only an hour and fifteen minutes, for an average speed of eighty miles an hour, which should have given Rachael a sense of speed. But she continued to feel that she was creeping snail-slow, falling farther and farther behind events, losing ground by the minute.

Summer, with its blazing desert heat, was a somewhat less busy tourist season in Palm Springs than other times of the year, and at one-fifteen in the morning the main street was virtually deserted. In the hot and windless June night, the palm trees stood as still as images painted on canvas, illuminated and slightly silvered by the streetlights. The many shops were dark. The sidewalks were empty. The traffic signals still cycled from green to yellow to red to green again, although hers was the only car passing through most of the intersections.

She almost felt as if she were driving through a post-Armageddon world, depopulated by disease. For a moment she was half convinced that if she switched on the radio, there would be no music — only the cold empty hiss of static all the way across the dial.

Since receiving the news of Eric's missing corpse, she had known that something terrible had come into the world, and hour by hour she had grown more bleak. Now even an empty street, which would have looked peaceful to anyone else, stirred ominous thoughts in her. She knew she was overreacting. No matter what happened in the next few days, this was not the end of the world.

On the other hand, she thought, it might be the end of me, the end of my world.

Driving from the commercial district into residential areas, from neighborhoods of modest means into wealthier streets, she encountered even fewer signs of life, until at last she pulled into a Futura Stone driveway and parked in front of a low, sleek, flat-roofed stucco house that was the epitome of clean-lined desert architecture. The lush landscaping was distinctly not of the desert — ficus trees, benjamina, impatiens, begonias, beds of marigolds and Gerber daisies — green and thick and flower-laden in the soft glow of a series of Malibu lights. Those were the only lights burning; all the front windows were dark.

She had told Benny that this was another of Eric's houses — though she had been closemouthed about the reason she had come. Now, as she switched off the headlights, he said, “Nice little vacation retreat.”

She said, “No. This is where he kept his mistress.”

Enough soft light fell from the Malibu fixtures, rebounded from the lawn and from the edge of the driveway, penetrated the windows of the car, and touched Benny's face to reveal his look of surprise. “How did you know?”

“A little over a year ago, just a week before I left him, she — Cindy Wasloff was her name — she called the house in Villa Park. Eric had told her never to phone there except in the direst emergency, and if she spoke with anyone but him, she was supposed to say she was the secretary of some business associate. But she was furious with him because, the night before, he'd beaten her pretty badly, and she was leaving him. First, however, she wanted to let me know he'd been keeping her.”

“Had you suspected?”

“That he had a mistress? No. But it didn't matter. By then I'd already decided to call it quits. I listened to her and commiserated, got the address of the house, because I thought maybe the day would come when I might be able to use the fact of Eric's adultery to pry myself loose from him if he wouldn't cooperate in the divorce. Even as ugly as it got, it never got quite that tawdry, thank God. And it would have been exceedingly tawdry indeed if I'd had to go public with it… because the girl was only sixteen.”

“What? The mistress?”

“Yes. Sixteen. A runaway. One of those lost kids, from the sound of her. You know the type. They start doing drugs in junior high and just seem to… burn away too many gray cells. No, that's not right, either. The drugs don't destroy brain cells so much as they… eat away at their souls, leave them empty and purposeless. They're pathetic.”

“Some are,” he said. “And some are scary. Bored and listless kids who've tried everything. They either become amoral sociopaths as dangerous as rattlesnakes — or they become easy prey. I gather you're telling me that Cindy Wasloff was easy prey and that Eric swept her in out of the gutter for some fun and games.”

“And apparently she wasn't the first.”

“He had a thing for teenage girls, huh?”

Rachael said, “What he had a thing about was getting old. It terrified him. He was only forty-one when I left him, still a young man, but every year when his birthday rolled around he was crazier about it than the year before, as if at any moment he'd blink and find himself in a nursing home, decrepit and senile. He had an irrational fear of growing old and dying, and the fear expressed itself in all sorts of ways. For one thing, year by year, newness in everything became increasingly important to him: new cars every year, as if a twelve-month-old Mercedes was ready for the scrap heap; a constant change of wardrobe, out with the old and in with the new…”

“And the modern art, modern architecture, all the ultramodern furniture.”

“Yes. And the latest electronic gadgetry. And I guess teenage girls were just another part of his obsession with staying young and… cheating death. I guess, in his twisted mind, being with young girls kept him young, too. When I learned about Cindy Wasloff and this house in Palm Springs, I realized that one of the main reasons he'd married me was because I was twelve years younger than him, twenty-three to his thirty-five. I was just one more means of slowing down the flow of time for him, and when I started to get into my late twenties, when he could see me getting a little older, then I no longer served that purpose quite as well for him, so he needed younger flesh like Cindy.”

She opened her door and got out of the car, and Benny got out on his side. He said, “So exactly what're we looking for here? Not just his current mistress; you wouldn't have rocketed out here like a race-car driver just to get a peek at his latest bimbo.”

Closing her door, withdrawing the thirty-two pistol from her purse, and heading toward the house, Rachael did not — could not — answer.

The night was warm and dry. The vault of the clear desert sky was spangled with an incredibility of stars. The air was still, and all was silent but for crickets singing in the shrubbery.

Too much shrubbery. She looked around nervously at all the looming dark forms and black spaces beyond the glow of the Malibu lights. Lots of hiding places. She shivered.

The door was ajar, which seemed an ominous sign. She rang the bell, waited, rang again, waited, rang and rang, but no one responded.

At her side, Benny said, “It's probably your house now. You inherited it with everything else, so I don't think you need an invitation to go in.”

The door, ajar as it was, provided more invitation than she would have liked. It looked as if it were the open door on a trap. If she went inside in search of the bait, the trap might be sprung, and the door might slam behind her.

Rachael took a step back, kicked out with one foot, knocking the door inward. It swung back hard against the wall of the foyer with a shuddering crash.

“So you don't expect to be welcomed with open arms,” Benny said.

The exterior light above the door shed pale beams a few feet into the foyer, though not as far as she had hoped. She could see that no one lurked in the first six or eight feet, but beyond lay darkness that might shelter an assailant.

Because he didn't know everything she knew and therefore didn't appreciate the true extent of the danger, because he expected nothing worse than another Vincent Baresco with another revolver, Benny was bolder than Rachael. He stepped past her into the house, found the wall switch in the foyer, and snapped on the lights.

Rachael went inside and moved past him. “Damn it, Benny, don't be so quick to step through a doorway. Let's be slow and careful.”

“Believe it or not, I can handle just about any teenage girl who wants to throw a punch at me.”

“It's not the mistress I'm worried about,” she said sharply.

“Then who?”

Tight-lipped, holding her pistol at the ready, she led the way through the house, turning on lights as they went.

The uncluttered ultramodern decor — more futuristic than in any of Eric's other habitats — bordered on stark-ness and sterility. A highly polished terrazzo floor that looked as cold as ice, no carpet anywhere. Levolor metal blinds instead of drapes. Hard-looking chairs. Sofas that, if moved to the depths of a forest, might have passed for giant fungi. Everything was in pale gray, white, black, and taupe, with no color except for scattered accent pieces all in shades of orange.

The kitchen had been wrecked. The white-lacquered breakfast table and two chairs were overturned. The other two chairs had been hammered to pieces against everything else in sight. The refrigerator was badly dented and scraped; the tempered glass in the oven door was shattered; the counters and cabinets were gouged and scratched, edges splintered. Dishes and drinking glasses had been pulled from the cupboards and thrown against the walls, and the floor was prickled and glinting with thousands of sharp shards. Food had been swept off the shelves of the refrigerator onto the floor: Pickles, milk, macaroni salad, mustard, chocolate pudding, maraschino cherries, a chunk of ham, and several unidentifiable substances were congealing in a disgusting pool. Beside the sink, above the cutting board, all six knives had been removed from their rack and, with tremendous force, had been driven into the wall; some of the blades were buried up to half their lengths in the dry wall, while two had been driven in to their hilts.

“You think they were looking for something?” Benny asked.

“Maybe.”

“No,” he said, “I don't think so. It's got the same look as the bedroom in the Villa Park house. Weird. Creepy. This was done in a rage. Out of fierce hatred, in a frenzy, a fury. Or by someone who takes pure, unadulterated pleasure in destruction.”

Rachael could not take her eyes off the knives embedded in the wall. A deep sick quivering filled her stomach. Her chest and throat tightened with fear.

The gun in her hand felt different from the way it had felt just a moment ago. Too light. Too small. Almost like a toy. If she had to use it, would it be effective? Against this adversary?

They continued through the silent house with considerably greater caution. Even Benny had been shaken by the psychopathic violence that had been unleashed here. He no longer taunted her with his boldness, but stayed close at her side, warier than he had been.

In the large master bedroom, there was more destruction, though it was not as extensive or as indicative of insane fury as the damage in the kitchen. Beside the king-size bed of black-lacquered wood and burnished stainless steel, a torn pillow leaked feathers. The bedsheets were strewn across the floor, and a chair was overturned. One of the two black ceramic lamps had been knocked off a nightstand and broken, and the shade had been crushed. The shade on the other lamp was cocked, and the paintings hung askew on the walls.

Benny stooped and carefully lifted a section of one of the sheets to have a closer look at it. Small reddish spots and a single reddish smear shone with almost preternatural brilliance on the white cotton.

“Blood,” he said.

Rachael felt a cold sweat suddenly break out on her scalp and along the back of her neck.

“Not much,” Benny said, standing again, his gaze traveling over the tangled sheets. “Not much, but definitely blood.”

Rachael saw a bloody handprint on the wall beside the open door that led into the master bedroom. It was a man's print, and large — as if a butcher, exhausted from his hideous labors, had leaned there for a moment to catch his breath.

The lights were on in the large bathroom, the only chamber in the house that had not been dark when they'd reached it. Through the open door, Rachael could see virtually everything either directly or in the mirrors covering one wall: gray tile with a burnt-yellow border, big sunken tub, shower stall, toilet, one edge of the counter that held the sinks, bright brass towel racks and brass-rimmed recessed ceiling lamps. The bathroom appeared deserted. However, when she crossed the threshold, she heard someone's quick, panicked breathing, and her own heartbeat, already trotting, raced.

Close behind her, Benny said, “What's wrong?”

She pointed to the opaque shower stall. The glass was so heavily frosted that nothing could be seen of the person on the other side, not even a tenebrous form. “Somebody' s in there.”

Benny leaned forward, listening.

Rachael had backed against the wall, the muzzle of the thirty-two aimed at the shower door.

“Better come out of there,” Benny said to the person in the stall.

No answer. Just quick, thin wheezing.

“Better come out right now,” Benny said.

“Come out, damn you!” Rachael said, her raised voice echoing harshly off the gray tile and the bright mirrors.

From the stall came an unexpectedly woeful mewling that was the very essence of terror. It sounded like a child.

Shocked, concerned, but still wary, Rachael edged toward the frosted glass.

Benny stepped past her, took hold of the brass handle, and pulled the door open. “Oh, my God.”

Rachael saw a nude girl huddled pathetically on the tile floor of the shadowy stall, her back pressed into the corner. She looked no older than fifteen or sixteen and must be the current mistress in residence, the latest — and last — of Eric's pitiable “conquests.” Her slender arms were crossed over her breasts more in fear and self-defense than in modesty. She was trembling uncontrollably, and her eyes were wide with terror, and her face was pale, sickly, waxen.

She was probably quite pretty, but it was difficult to tell for sure, not because of the gloominess of the enclosed shower stall but because she had been badly beaten. Her right eye was blackened and beginning to swell. Another ugly bruise was forming on her right cheek, from the corner of the eye all the way down to the jaw. Her upper lip had been split; blood still oozed from it, and blood covered her chin. There were bruises on her arms as well, and a big one on her left thigh.

Benny turned away, clearly as embarrassed for the girl as he was alarmed by her condition.

Lowering her pistol, stooping at the shower door, Rachael said, “Who did this to you, honey? Who did this?” She already knew what the answer must be, dreaded hearing it, but was morbidly compelled to ask the question.

The girl could not respond. Her bleeding lips moved, and she tried to form words, but all that came out was that thin grievous whining, broken into chords by an especially violent siege of the shivers. Even if she had spoken, she would most likely not have answered the question, for she was obviously in shock and to some degree disassociated from reality. She seemed only partially aware of Rachael and Benny, with the larger part of her attention focused on some private horror. She met Rachael's eyes but didn't really seem to see her.

Rachael reached into the stall with one hand. “Honey, it's all right. Everything's all right. No one's going to hurt you anymore. You can come out now. We won't let anyone hurt you anymore.”

The girl stared through Rachael, murmuring softly but urgently to herself, shaken by a wind of fear that blew through some grim inner landscape in which she seemed trapped.

Rachael handed her gun to Benny. She stepped into the big shower stall and knelt beside the girl, speaking softly and reassuringly to her, touching her gently on the face and arms, smoothing her tangled blond hair. At the first few touches, the girl flinched as if she'd been struck, though the contact briefly broke her trance. She looked at Rachael for a moment instead of through her, and she allowed herself to be coaxed to her feet and out of the shadowy stall, though by the time she crossed the sill of the shower into the bathroom, she was already retreating once more into her semicatatonic state, unable to answer questions or even to respond with a nod when spoken to, unable to meet Rachael's eyes.

“We've got to get her to a hospital,” Rachael said, wincing when she got a better look at the poor child's injuries in the brighter light of the bathroom. Two fingernails on the girl's right hand had been broken back almost to the cuticle and were bleeding; one finger appeared to be broken.

Rachael sat with her on the edge of the bed while Benny went through the closets and various dresser drawers, looking for clothes.

She listened for strange noises elsewhere in the house.

She heard none.

Still, she listened attentively.

In addition to panties, faded blue jeans, a blue-checkered blouse, peds, and a pair of New Balance running shoes, Benny found a trove of illegal drugs. The bottom drawer of one of the nightstands contained fifty or sixty hand-rolled joints, a plastic bag full of unidentified brightly colored capsules, and another plastic bag containing about two ounces of white powder. “Probably cocaine,” Benny said.

Eric had not used drugs; he had disdained them. He had always said that drugs were for the weak, for the losers who could not cope with life on its own terms. But obviously he had not been averse to supplying all sorts of illicit substances to the young girls he kept, ensuring their docility and compliance at the expense of further corrupting them. Rachael had never loathed him as much as she did at that moment.

She found it necessary to dress the naked girl as she would have had to dress a very small child, although the teenager's helpless daze — marked by spells of shivers and occasional whimpering — was caused by shock and terror rather than by the illegal chemicals that Benny had found in the nightstand.

As Rachael quickly dressed the girl, chivalrous Benny kept his eyes discreetly averted. Having found her purse while searching for her clothes, he now went through it, seeking identification. “Her name's Sarah Kiel, and she turned sixteen just two months ago. Looks like she's come west from… Coffeyville, Kansas.”

Another runaway, Rachael thought. Maybe fleeing an intolerable home life. Maybe just a rebellious type who chafed at discipline and entertained the illusion that life on her own, without restrictions, would be pure bliss. Off to L.A., the Big Orange, to take a shot at the movie business, dreaming of stardom. Or maybe just seeking some excitement, an escape from the boredom of the vast and slumbering Kansas plains.

Instead of the expected romance and glamour, Sarah Kiel had found what most girls like her found at the end of the California rainbow: a hard and homeless life on the streets — and eventually the solicitous attention of a pimp. Eric must have either bought her from a pimp or found her himself while on the prowl for the kind of fresh meat that would keep him feeling young. Ensconced in an expensive Palm Springs house, supplied with all the drugs she wanted, plaything of a very rich man, Sarah had surely begun to convince herself that she was, after all, destined for a fairy-tale life. The naive child could not have guessed the true extent of the danger into which she had stepped, could not have conceived of the horror that would one day pay a visit and leave her dazed and mute with terror.

“Help me get her out to the car,” Rachael said as she finished dressing Sarah Kiel.

Benny put an arm around the girl from one side, and Rachael held her from the other side, and although Sarah shuffled along under her own power, she would have collapsed several times if they had not provided support. Her knees kept buckling.

The night smelled of star jasmine stirred by a breeze that also rustled shrubbery, causing Rachael to glance nervously at the shadows.

They put Sarah in the car and fastened her seat belt for her, whereupon she slumped against the restraining straps and let her head fall forward. It was possible for a third person to ride in the 560 SL, although it was necessary for the extra passenger to sit sideways in the open storage space behind the two bucket seats and endure a bit of squeezing. Benny was too big to fit, so Rachael got behind the seats, and he took the wheel for the trip to the hospital.

As they pulled out of the driveway, a car turned the corner, headlights washing over them, and when they entered the street, the other car suddenly surged forward, fast, coming straight at them.

Rachael's heart stuttered, and she said, “Oh, hell, it's them!”

The oncoming car angled across the narrow street, intending to block it. Benny wasted no time asking questions, immediately changed directions, pulling hard on the wheel, putting the other car behind them. He tramped the accelerator; tires squealed; the Mercedes leaped forward with dependable quickness, racing past the low dark houses. Ahead, the street ended in a cross street, forcing them to turn either left or right, so Benny had to slow down, and Rachael lowered her head and peered through the rear window against which she was crammed, and she saw that the other car — a Cadillac of some kind, maybe a Seville — was following close, very close, closer.

Benny took the corner wide, at a frightening slant, and Rachael would have been thrown by the sudden force of the turn if she hadn't been wedged tightly in the storage space behind the seats. There was nowhere for her to be thrown to, and she didn't even have to hold on to anything, but she did hold on to the back of Sarah Kiel's seat because she felt as if the world were about to fall out from under her, and she thought, God, please, don't let the car roll over.

The Mercedes didn't roll, hugged the road beautifully, came out into a straight stretch of residential street, and accelerated. But behind them, the Cadillac almost went over on its side, and the driver overcompensated, which made the Caddy swing so dangerously wide that it side-swiped a Corvette parked at the curb. Sparks showered into the air, cascaded along the pavement. The Caddy lurched away from the impact and looked like it would veer across the street and into the cars along the other curb, but then it recovered. It had lost some ground, but it came after them again, its driver undaunted.

Benny whipped the little 560 SL into another turn, around another corner, holding it tighter this time, then stood on the accelerator for a block and a half, so it seemed as if they were in a rocket ship instead of an automobile. Just when Rachael felt herself pressed back with a force of maybe 4.5 Gs, just when it seemed they would break the chains of gravity and explode straight into orbit, Benny manipulated the brakes with all the style of a great concert pianist executing “Moonlight Sonata,” and as he came up on another stop sign with no intention of obeying it, he spun the wheel as hard as he dared, so from behind it must have looked as if the Mercedes had just popped off that street onto the street that intersected from the left.

He was as expert at evasive driving as he had proved to be at hand-to-hand combat, and Rachael wanted to say, Who the hell are you, anyway, not just a placid real-estate salesman with a love of trains and swing music, damned if you are, but she didn't say anything because she was afraid she would distract him, and if she distracted him at this speed, they would inevitably roll — or worse — and be killed for sure.

Ben knew that the 560 SL could easily win a speed contest with the Cadillac out on the open roads, but it was a different story on streets like these, which were narrow and occasionally bisected by speed bumps to prevent drag racing. Besides, there were traffic lights as they drew nearer the center of town, and even at this dead hour of the morning he had to slow for those main intersections, at least a little, or risk plowing broadside into a rare specimen of crosstown traffic. Fortunately, the Mercedes cornered about a thousand times better than the Cadillac, so he didn't have to slow down nearly as much as his pursuers, and every time he switched streets he gained a few yards that the Caddy could not entirely regain on the next stretch of straightaway. By the time he had zigzagged to within a block of Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag, the Caddy was more than a block and a half behind and losing ground, and he was finally confident that he would shake the bastards, whoever they were—

— and that was when he saw the police car.

It was parked at the front of a line of curbed cars, at the corner of Palm Canyon, a block away, and the cop must have seen him coming in the rearview mirror, coming like a bat out of hell, because the flashing red and blue beacons on the roof of the cruiser came on, bright and startling, ahead on the right.

“Hallelujah!” Ben said.

“No,” Rachael said from her awkward seat in the open storage space behind him, shouting though her mouth was nearly at his ear. “No, you can't go to the cops! We're dead if you go to the cops.”

Nevertheless, as he rocketed toward the cruiser, Ben started to brake because, damn it, she'd never told him why they couldn't rely on the police for protection, and he was not a man who believed in taking the law into his own hands, and surely the guys in the Cadillac would back off fast if the cops came into it.

But Rachael shouted, “No! Benny, for Christ's sake, trust me, why don't you? We're dead if you stop. They'll blow our brains out, sure as hell.”

Being accused of not trusting her — that hurt, stung. He trusted her, by God, trusted her implicitly because he loved her. He didn't understand her worth shit, not tonight he didn't, but he did trust her, and it was like a knife twisting in his heart to hear that note of disappointment and accusation in her voice. He took his foot off the brake and put it back on the accelerator, swept right past the black-and-white so fast that the light from its swiveling emergency beacons flashed through the Mercedes only once and then were behind. When he'd glanced over, he'd seen two uniformed officers looking astonished. He figured they'd wait for the Caddy and then give chase to both cars, which would be fine, just fine, because the guys in the Caddy couldn't catch up with him and blow his brains out if they had the police on their tail.

But to Ben's surprise and dismay, the cops pulled out right after him, siren screaming. Maybe they had been so shocked by the sight of the Mercedes coming at them like a jet that they hadn't noticed the Cadillac farther back. Or maybe they'd seen the Caddy but had been so startled by the Mercedes that they hadn't realized the second car was approaching at almost the same high speed. Whatever their reasoning, they shot away from the curb and fell in behind him as he hung a right onto Palm Canyon Drive.

Ben made that turn with the reckless aplomb of a stunt driver who knows that his roll bars and special stabilizers and heavy duty hydraulic shock absorbers and other sophisticated equipment remove most of the danger from such risky maneuvers — except he didn't have roll bars and special stabilizers. He realized he'd miscalculated and was about to turn Rachael and Sarah and himself into canned meat, three lumps of imitation Spam encased in expensive German steel, Jesus, and the car tilted onto two tires, he smelled smoking rubber, it seemed an hour they teetered on edge, but by the grace of God and the brilliance of the Benz designers they came down again onto all fours with a jolt and crash that, by virtue of another miracle, did not blow out any tires, though Rachael hit her head on the ceiling and let out her breath in a whoosh that he felt on the back of his neck.

He saw the old man in the yellow Banlon shirt and the cocker spaniel even before the car stopped bouncing on its springs. They had been crossing the street in the middle of the block when he had come around the corner like a fugitive from a demolition derby. He was bearing down on them at a frightening speed, and they were frozen in surprise and fear, both dog and man, heads up, eyes wide. The guy looked ninety, and the dog seemed decrepit, too, so it didn't make sense for them to be out on the street at nearly two o'clock in the morning. They ought to have been home in bed, occupied with dreams of fire hydrants and well-fitted false teeth, but here they were.

“Benny!” Rachael shouted.

“I see, I see!”

He had no hope of stopping in time, so he not only jumped on the brakes but turned across Palm Canyon, a combination of forces that sent the Mercedes into a full spin combined with a slide, so they went around a full hundred and eighty degrees and wound up against the far curb. By the time he peeled rubber, roared back across the street, and was headed north again, the old man and the cocker had finally tottered for the safety of the sidewalk — and the police cruiser was no more than ten yards behind him.

In the mirror, he could see that the Caddy had also turned the corner and was still giving chase, undeterred by the presence of the police. Crazily the Caddy pulled out around the black-and-white, trying to pass it.

“They're lunatics,” Ben said.

“Worse,” Rachael said. “Far worse.”

In the passenger seat, Sarah Kiel was making urgent noises, but she did not appear to be frightened by the current danger. Instead, it seemed as if the violence of the chase had stirred the sediment of memory, recalling for her the other — and worse — violence that she had endured earlier in the night.

Picking up speed as he headed north on Palm Canyon, Ben glanced again at the mirror and saw that the Cadillac had pulled alongside the police cruiser. They appeared to be drag racing back there, just a couple of carloads of guys out for some fun. It was… well, it was downright silly was what it was. Then suddenly it wasn't silly at all because the intentions of the men in the Caddy became horribly clear with the repeated winking of muzzle flashes and the tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire. They had opened up on the cops with a submachine gun, as if this weren't Palm Springs but Chicago in the Roaring Twenties.

“They shot the cops!” he said, as astonished as he had ever been in his life.

The black-and-white went out of control, jumped the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and rammed through the plate-glass window of an elegant boutique, but still a guy in the back seat of the Cadillac continued to lean out the window, spraying bullets back at the cruiser until it was out of range.

In the seat beside Ben, Sarah said, “Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,” and she twitched and spasmed as if someone were raining blows on her. She seemed to be reliving the beating she had taken, oblivious of the immediate danger.

“Benny, you're slowing down,” Rachael said urgently.

Overcome by shock, he had relaxed his foot on the accelerator.

The Cadillac was closing on them as hungrily as any shark had ever closed on any swimmer.

Ben tried to press the gas pedal through the floorboards, and the Mercedes reacted as if it were a cat that had just been kicked in the butt. They exploded up Palm Canyon Drive, which was relatively straight for a long way, so he could even put some distance between them and the Cadillac before he made any turns. And he did make turns, one after the other, off into the west side of town now, up into the hills, back down, working steadily south, through older residential streets where trees arched overhead to form a tunnel, then through newer neighborhoods where the trees were small and the shrubbery too sparse to conceal the reality of the desert on which the town had been built. With every corner he rounded, he widened the gap between them and the killers in the Cadillac.

Stunned, Ben said, “They wasted two cops just because the poor bastards got in the way.”

“They want us real bad,” Rachael said. “That's what I've tried to tell you. They want us so very bad.”

The Caddy was two blocks behind now, and within five or six more turns, Ben would lose them because they wouldn't have him in sight and wouldn't know which way he had gone.

Hearing a tremor in his voice that surprised him, a quavering note that he didn't like, he said, “But, damn it, they never really had much of a chance of catching us. Not with us in this little beauty and them in a lumbering Caddy. They had to see that. They had to. One chance in a hundred. At best. One chance in a hundred, but they still wasted the cops.”

He half wheeled and half slid around another turn, onto a new street.

“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” Sarah said softly, frantically, drawing down in the seat as far as the safety harness would allow, crossing her arms over her breasts as she had done in the shower stall when she had been naked.

Behind Ben, sounding as shaky as he did, Rachael said, “They probably figured the police had gotten our license number — and theirs, too — and were about to call them in for identification.”

The Cadillac headlights turned the corner far back, losing ground more rapidly now. Ben took another turn and sped along another dark and slumbering street, past older houses that had gotten a bit seedy and no longer measured up to the Chamber of Commerce's fantasy image of Palm Springs.

“But you've implied that the guys in the Caddy would get their hands on you even quicker if you went to the police.”

“Yes.”

“So why wouldn't they want the police to nab us?”

Rachael said, “It's true that in police custody I'd be even easier to nail. I'd have no chance at all. But killing me then will be a lot messier, more public. The people in that Cadillac… and their associates… would prefer to keep this private if they can, even if that means they'll need more time to get their hands on me.”

Before the Cadillac headlights could appear again, Ben executed yet another turn. In a minute he would finally slip away from their pursuers for good. He said, “What the hell do they want from you?”

“Two things. For one… a secret they think I have.”

“But you don't have it?”

“No.”

“What's the second thing?”

“Another secret that I do know. I share it with them. They already know it, and they want to stop me from telling anyone else.”

“What is it?”

“If I told you, they'd have as much reason to kill you as me.”

“I think they already want my butt,” Ben said. “I'm in too deep already. So tell me.”

“Keep your mind on your driving,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“Not now. You've got to concentrate on getting away from them.”

“Don't worry about that, and don't try to use it as an excuse to clam up on me, damn it. We're already out of the woods. One more turn, and we'll have lost them for good.”

The right front tire blew out.

10 NAILS

It was a long night for Julio and Reese.

By 12:32, the last of the garbage in the dumpster had been inspected, but Ernestina Hernandez's blue shoe had not been found.

Once the trash had been searched and the corpse had been moved to the morgue, most detectives would have decided to go home to get some shut-eye and start fresh the next day — but not Lieutenant Julio Verdad. He was aware the trail was freshest in the twenty-four hours after the discovery of the body. Furthermore, for at least a day following assignment to a new case, he had difficulty sleeping, for then he was especially troubled by a sense of the horror of murder.

Besides, this time, he had a special obligation to the victim. For reasons which might have seemed inadequate to others but which were compelling to him, he felt a deep commitment to Ernestina. Bringing her killer to justice was not just his job but a point of honor with Julio.

His partner, Reese Hagerstrom, accompanied him without once commenting on the lateness of the hour. For Julio and for no one else, Reese would work around the clock, deny himself not only sleep but days off and regular meals, and make any sacrifice required. Julio knew, if it ever became necessary for Reese to step into the path of a bullet and die for Julio, the big man would make that ultimate sacrifice as well, and without the slightest hesitation. It was something which they both understood in their hearts, in their bones, but of which they had never spoken.

At 12:41 in the morning, they took the news of Ernestina's brutal death to her parents, with whom she had lived, a block east of Main Street in a modest house flanked by twin magnolias. The family had to be awakened, and at first they were disbelieving, certain that Ernestina had come home and gone to bed by now. But, of course, her bed was empty.

Though Juan and Maria Hernandez had six children, they took this blow as hard as parents with one precious child would have taken it. Maria sat on the rose-colored sofa in the living room, too weak to stand. Her two youngest sons — both teenagers — sat beside her, red-eyed and too shaken to maintain the macho front behind which Latino boys of their age usually hid. Maria held a framed photograph of Ernestina, alternately weeping and tremulously speaking of good times shared with the beloved daughter. Another daughter, nineteen-year-old Laurita, sat alone in the dining room, unapproachable, inconsolable, clutching a rosary. Juan Hernandez paced agitatedly, jaws clenched, blinking furiously to repress his tears. As patriarch, it was his duty to provide an example of strength to his family, to be unshaken and unbroken by this visitation of muerta. But it was too much for him to bear, and twice he retreated to the kitchen where, behind the closed door, he made soft strangled sounds of grief.

Julio could do nothing to relieve their anguish, but he inspired trust and hope for justice, perhaps because his special commitment to Ernestina was clear and convincing. Perhaps because, in his soft-spoken way, he conveyed a hound-dog perseverance that lent conviction to promises of swift justice. Or perhaps his smoldering fury at the very existence of death, all death, was painfully evident in his face and eyes and voice. After all, that fury had burned in him for many years now, since the afternoon when he had discovered rats chewing out the throat of his baby brother, and by now the fire within him must have grown bright enough to show through for all to see.

From Mr. Hernandez, Julio and Reese learned that Ernestina had gone out for an evening on the town with her best girlfriend, Becky Klienstad, with whom she worked at a local Mexican restaurant, where both were waitresses. They had gone in Ernestina's car: a powder-blue, ten-year-old Ford Fairlane.

“If this has happened to my Ernestina,” Mr. Hernandez said, — "then what's happened to poor Becky? Something must have happened to her, too. Something very terrible.”

From the Hernandez kitchen, Julio telephoned the Klienstad family in Orange. Becky — actually Rebecca — was not yet home. Her parents had not been worried because she was, after all, a grown woman, and because some of the dance spots that she and Ernestina favored were open until two in the morning. But now they were very worried indeed.

1:20 a.m.

In the unmarked sedan in front of the Hernandez house, Julio sat behind the wheel and stared bleakly out at the magnolia-scented night.

Through the open windows came the susurration of leaves stirring in the vague June breeze. A lonely, cold sound.

Reese used the console-mounted computer terminal to generate an APB and pickup order on Ernestina's powder-blue Ford. He'd obtained the license number from her parents.

“See if there're any messages on hold for us,” Julio said.

At the moment he did not trust himself to operate the keyboard. He was full of anger and wanted to pound on something — anything — with both fists, and if the computer gave him any trouble or if he hit one wrong key by mistake, he might take out his frustration on the machine merely because it was a convenient target.

Reese accessed the police department's data banks at headquarters and requested on-file messages. Softly glowing green letters scrolled up on the video display. It was a report from the uniformed officers who'd gone to the morgue, at Julio's direction, to ascertain if the scalpel and bloodstained morgue coat found in the dumpster could be traced to a specific employee on the coroner's staff. Officials at the coroner's office were able to confirm that a scalpel, lab coat, set of hospital whites, surgical cap, and a pair of antistatic lab shoes were missing from the morgue's supplies closet. However, no specific employee could be linked with the theft of those items.

Looking up from the VDT, gazing at the night, Julio said, “This murder is somehow tied to the disappearance of Eric Leben's body.”

“Could be coincidence,” Reese said.

“You believe in coincidence?”

Reese sighed. “No.”

A moth fluttered against the windshield.

“Maybe whoever stole the body also killed Ernestina,” Julio said.

“But why?”

“That's what we must find out.”

Julio drove away from the Hernandez house.

He drove away from the fluttering moth and the whispering leaves.

He turned north and drove away from downtown Santa Ana.

However, although he followed Main Street, where closely spaced streetlamps blazed, he could not drive away from the deep darkness, not even temporarily, for the darkness was within him.

1:38 a.m.

They reached Eric Leben's Spanish-modern house quickly, for there was no traffic. Night in that wealthy neighborhood was respectfully still. Their footsteps clicked hollowly on the tile walkway, and when they rang the doorbell, it sounded as if it were echoing back to them from the bottom of a deep well.

Julio and Reese had no authority whatsoever in Villa Park, which was two towns removed from their own jurisdiction. However, in the vast urban sprawl of Orange County, which was essentially one great spread-out city divided into many communities, a lot of crimes were not conveniently restricted to a single jurisdiction, and a criminal could not be allowed to gain time or safety by simply crossing the artificial political boundary between one town and another. When it became necessary to pursue a lead into another jurisdiction, one was required to seek an escort from the local authorities or obtain their approval or even enlist them to make the inquiries themselves, and these requests were routinely honored.

But because time was wasted going through proper channels, Julio and Reese frequently skipped the protocol. They went where they needed to go, talked with whomever they needed to talk, and only informed local authorities when and if they found something pertinent to their case — or if a situation looked as if it might turn violent.

Few detectives operated that boldly. Failure to follow standard procedures might result in a reprimand. Repeated violations of the rules might be viewed as a dismal lack of respect for the command structure, resulting in disciplinary suspension. Too much of that, and even the finest cop could forget about further promotions — and might have to worry about hanging on to collect his pension.

The risks did not particularly concern Julio or Reese. They wanted promotions, of course. And they wanted their pensions. But more than career advancement and financial security, they wanted to solve cases and put murderers in prison. Being a cop was pointless if you weren't willing to put your life on the line for your ideals, and if you were willing to risk your life, then it made no sense to worry about small stuff like salary increases and retirement funds.

When no one responded to the bell, Julio tried the door, but it was locked. He didn't attempt to void the lock or force it. In the absence of a court order, what they needed to get them into the Leben house was probable cause to believe that criminal activity of some kind was under way on the premises, that innocent people might be harmed, and that there was nothing less than a public emergency.

When they circled to the back of the house, they found what they needed: a broken pane of glass in the French door that led from the patio into the kitchen. They would have been remiss if they had not assumed the worst: that an armed intruder had forced his way into the house to commit burglary or to harm whoever resided legally within.

Drawing their revolvers, they entered cautiously. Shards of broken glass crunched underfoot.

As they moved from room to room, they turned on lights and saw enough to justify intrusion. The bloody palmprint etched into the arm of the white sofa in the family room. The destruction in the master bedroom. And in the garage… Ernestina Hernandez's powder-blue Ford.

Inspecting the car, Reese found bloodstains on the back seat and floor mats. “Some of it's still a little sticky,” he told Julio.

Julio tried the trunk of the car and found it unlocked. Inside, there was more blood, a pair of broken eyeglasses — and one blue shoe.

The shoe was Ernestina's, and the sight of it caused Julio's chest to tighten.

As far as Julio knew, the Hernandez girl had not worn glasses. In photographs he had seen at the Hernandez home, however, Becky Klienstad, friend and fellow waitress, had worn a pair like these. Evidently, both women had been killed and stuffed into the Ford's trunk. Later, Ernestina's corpse had been heaved into the dumpster. But what happened to the other body?

“Call the locals,” Julio said. “It's time for protocol.”

1:52 a.m.

When Reese Hagerstrom returned from the sedan, he paused to put up the electric garage doors to air out the smell of blood that had risen from the open trunk of the Ford and reached into every corner of the long room. As the doors rolled up, he spotted a discarded set of hospital whites and a pair of antistatic shoes in one corner. “Julio? Come here and look at this.”

Julio had been staring intently into the bloody trunk of the car, unable to touch anything lest he ruin precious evidence, but hoping to spot some small clue by sheer dint of intense study. He joined Reese at the discarded clothes.

Reese said, “What the hell is going on?”

Julio did not reply.

Reese said, “The evening started out with one missing corpse. Now two are missing — Leben and the Klienstad girl. And we've found a third we wish we hadn't. If someone's collecting dead bodies, why wouldn't they keep Ernestina Hernandez, too?”

Puzzling over these bizarre discoveries and the baffling link between the snatching of Leben's corpse and the murder of Ernestina, Julio unconsciously straightened his necktie, tugged on his shirt sleeves, and adjusted his cuff links. Even in summer heat, he would not forsake a tie and long-sleeve shirt, the way some detectives did. Like a priest, a detective held a sacred office, labored in the service of the gods of Justice and Law, and to dress any less formally would have seemed, to him, as disrespectful as a priest celebrating the Mass in jeans and a T-shirt.

“Are the locals coming?” he asked Reese.

“Yes. And as soon as we've had a chance to explain the situation to them, we've got to go up to Placentia.”

Julio blinked. “Placentia? Why?”

“I checked messages when I got to the car. HQ had an important one for us. The Placentia police have found Becky Klienstad.”

“Where? Alive?”

“Dead. In Rachael Leben's house.”

Astonished, Julio repeated the question that Reese had asked only a few minutes ago: “What the hell is going on?”

1:58 a.m.

To get to Placentia, they drove from Villa Park through part of Orange, across a portion of Anaheim, over the Tustin Avenue bridge of the Santa Ana River, which was only a river of dust during this dry season. They passed oil wells where the big pumps, like enormous praying mantises, worked up and down, a shade lighter than the night around them, identifiable and yet somehow mysterious shapes that added one more ominous note to the darkness.

Placentia was usually one of the quietest communities in the county, neither rich nor poor, just comfortable and content, with no terrible drawbacks, with no great advantages over other nearby towns except, perhaps, for the enormous and beautiful date palms which lined some of its streets. Palms of remarkable lushness and stature lined the street on which Rachael Leben lived, and their dense overhanging fronds appeared to be afire in the flickering reflection of the red emergency beacons on the clustered police cars parked under them.

Julio and Reese were met at the front door by a tall uniformed Placentia officer named Orin Mulveck. He was pale. His eyes looked strange, as if he had just seen something he would never choose to remember but would also never be able to forget. “Neighbor called us because she saw a man leaving the house in a hurry, and she thought there was something suspicious about him. When we came to check the place but, we found the front door standing wide open, lights on.”

“Mrs. Leben wasn't here?”

“No.”

“Any indication where she is?”

“No.” Mulveck had taken off his cap and was compulsively combing his fingers through his hair. “Jesus,” he said more to himself than to Julio or Reese. Then: “No, Mrs. Leben is gone. But we found the dead woman in Mrs. Leben's bedroom.”

Entering the cozy house behind Mulveck, Julio said, “Rebecca Klienstad.”

“Yeah.”

Mulveck led Julio and Reese across a charming living room decorated in shades of peach and white with dark blue accents and brass lamps.

Julio said, “How'd you identify the deceased?”

“She was wearing one of those medical-alert medallions,” Mulveck said. “Had several allergies, including one to penicillin. You seen those medallions? Name, address, medical condition on it. Then, how we got onto you so fast — we asked our computer to check the Klienstad woman through Data Net, and it spit out that you were looking for her in Santa Ana in connection with the Hernandez killing.”

The Law Enforcement Data Net, through which the county's many police agencies shared information among their computers, was a new program, a natural outgrowth of the computerization of the sheriff's department and all local police. Hours, sometimes days, could be saved with the use of Data Net, and this was not the first time Julio found reason to be thankful that he was a cop in the Microchip Age.

“Was the woman killed here?” Julio asked as they circled around a burly lab technician who was dusting furniture for fingerprints.

“No,” Mulveck said. “Not enough blood.” He was still combing one hand through his hair as he walked. “Killed somewhere else and… and brought here.”

“Why?”

“You'll see why. But damned if you'll understand why.”

Puzzling over that cryptic statement, Julio trailed Mulveck down a hallway into the master bedroom. He gasped at the sight awaiting him and for a moment could not breathe.

Behind him, Reese said, “Holy shit.”

Both bedside lamps were burning, and though there were still shadows around the edges of the room, Rebecca Klienstad's corpse was in the brightest spot, mouth open, eyes wide with a vision of death. She had been stripped naked and nailed to the wall, directly over the big bed. One nail through each hand. One nail just below each elbow joint. One in each foot. And a large spike through the hollow of the throat. It was not precisely the classic pose of crucifixion, for the legs were immodestly spread, but it was close.

A police photographer was still snapping the corpse from every angle. With each flash of his strobe unit, the dead woman seemed to move on the wall; it was only an illusion, but she appeared to twitch as if straining at the nails that held her.

Julio had never seen anything as savage as the crucifixion of the dead woman, yet it had obviously been done not in a white-hot madness but with cold calculation. Clearly, the woman had already been dead when brought here, for the nail holes weren't bleeding. Her slender throat had been slashed, and that was evidently the mortal wound. The killer — or killers — had expended considerable time and energy finding the nails and the hammer (which now lay on the floor in one corner of the room), hoisting the corpse against the wall, holding it in place, and precisely driving the impaling spikes through the cool dead flesh. Apparently the head had drooped down, chin to chest, and apparently the killer had wanted the dead woman to be staring at the bedroom door (a grisly surprise for Rachael Leben), so he had looped a wire under the chin and had tied it tautly to a nail driven into the wall above her skull, to keep her facing out. Finally he had taped her eyes open — so she would be staring sightlessly at whomever discovered her.

“I understand,” Julio said.

“Yes,” Reese Hagerstrom said shakily.

Mulveck blinked in surprise. Pearls of sweat glistened on his pale forehead, perhaps not because of the June heat. “You've got to be joking. You understand this… madness? You see a reason for it?”

Julio said, “Ernestina and this girl were murdered primarily because the killer needed a car, and they had a car. But when he saw what the Klienstad woman looked like, he dumped the other one and brought the second body here to leave this message.”

Mulveck nervously combed one hand through his hair. “But if this psycho intended to kill Mrs. Leben, if she was his primary target, why not just come here and get her? Why just leave a… a message?”

“The killer must have had reason to suspect that she wouldn't be at home. Maybe he even called first,” Julio said.

He was remembering Rachael Leben's extreme nervousness when he had questioned her at the morgue earlier this evening. He had sensed that she was hiding something and that she was very much afraid. Now he knew that, even then, she had realized her life was in danger.

But who was she afraid of, and why couldn't she turn to the police for help? What was she hiding?

The police photographer's camera click-flashed.

Julio continued: “The killer knew he wouldn't be able to get his hands on her right away, but he wanted her to know she could expect him later. He — or they — wanted to scare her witless. And when he took a good look at this Klienstad woman he had killed, he knew what he must do.”

“Huh?” Mulveck said. “I don't follow.”

“Rebecca Klienstad was voluptuous,” Julio said, indicating the crucified woman. “So is Rachael Leben. Very similar body types.”

“And Mrs. Leben has hair much the same as the Klienstad girl's,” Reese said. “Coppery brown.”

“Titian,” Julio said. “And although this woman isn't nearly as lovely as Mrs. Leben, there's a vague resemblance, a similarity of facial structure.”

The photographer paused to put new film in his camera.

Officer Mulveck shook his head. “Let me get this straight. The way it was supposed to work — Mrs. Leben would eventually come home and when she walked into this room she would see this woman crucified and know, by the similarities, that it was her this psycho really wanted to nail to the wall.”

“Yes,” Julio said, “I think so.”

“Yes,” Reese agreed.

“Good God,” Mulveck said, “do you realize how black, how bitter, how deep this hatred must be? Whoever he is, what could Mrs. Leben possibly have done to make him hate her like that? What sort of enemies does she have?”

“Very dangerous enemies,” Julio said. “That's all I know. And… if we don't find her quickly, we won't find her alive.”

The photographer's camera flashed.

The corpse seemed to twitch.

Flash, twitch.

Flash, twitch.

11 GHOST STORY

When the right front tire blew, Benny hardly slowed. He wrestled with the wheel and drove another half block. The Mercedes thumped and shuddered and rocked along, crippled but cooperative.

No headlights appeared behind them. The pursuing Cadillac had not yet turned the corner two blocks back. But it would. Soon.

Benny kept looking desperately left and right.

Rachael wondered what sort of bolthole he was searching for.

Then he found it: a one-story stucco house with a for SALE sign in the front yard, set on a big half-acre lot, grass unmown, separated from its neighbors by an eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that was also finished in stucco and that afforded some privacy. There were lots of trees on the property as well, and overgrown shrubbery in need of a gardener's attention.

“Eureka,” Benny said.

He swung into the driveway, then pulled across one corner of the lawn and around the side of the house. In back, he parked on a concrete deck, under a redwood patio cover. He switched off the headlights, the engine.

Darkness fell over them.

The car's hot metal made soft pinging sounds as it cooled.

The house was unoccupied, so no one came out to see what was happening. And because the place was screened from the neighbors on both sides by the wall and trees, no alarm was raised from those sources, either.

Benny said, “Give me your gun.”

From her perch behind the seats, Rachael handed over the pistol.

Sarah Kiel was watching them, still trembling, still afraid, but no longer in a trance of terror. The violence of the chase seemed to have jolted her out of her preoccupation with her memories of other, earlier violence.

Benny opened his door and started to get out.

Rachael said, “Where are you going?”

“I want to make sure they go past and don't double back. Then I've got to find another car.”

“We can change the tire—”

“No. This heap's too easy to spot. We need something ordinary.”

“But where will you get another car?”

“Steal it,” he said. “You just sit tight, and I'll be back as soon as I can.”

He closed his door softly, sprinted back the way they had come, slipped around the corner of the house, and was gone.

Scuttling in a half crouch along the side of the house, Ben heard a chorus of distant sirens. Police cars and ambulances were probably still converging on Palm Canyon Drive, a mile or two away, where the bullet-riddled cops had ridden their cruiser through the windows of a boutique.

Ben reached the front of the house and saw the Cadillac coming along the street. He dove into a lush planting bed at the corner and cautiously peered between branches of the overgrown oleander bushes, which were heavily laden with pink flowers and poisonous berries.

The Caddy cruised slowly by, giving him a chance to ascertain that there were three men inside. He could see only one clearly — the guy in the front passenger's seat, who had a receding hairline, a mustache, blunt features, and a mean slash of a mouth.

They were looking for the red Mercedes, of course, and they were smart enough to know that Ben might have tried to slip into a shadowy niche and wait until they had gone past. He hoped to God that he had not left obvious tire tracks across the short stretch of unmown lawn that he'd traversed between the driveway and the side of the house. It was dense Bermuda grass, highly resilient, and it hadn't been watered as regularly as it should have been, so it was badly blotched with brown patches, which provided a natural camouflage to further conceal the marks of the Mercedes's passage. But the men in the Caddy might be trained hunters who could spot the most subtle signs of their quarry's trail.

Hunkering in the bushy oleander, still wearing his thoroughly inappropriate suit trousers, vest, white shirt, and tie with the knot askew, Ben felt ridiculous. Worse, he felt hopelessly inadequate to meet the challenge confronting him. He'd been a real-estate salesman too long. He was not up to this sort of thing anymore, not for an extended length of time. He was thirty-seven, and he'd last been a man of action when he'd been twenty-one, which seemed a date lost in the mists of the Paleolithic era. Although he had kept in shape over the years, he was rusty. To Rachael, he had looked formidable when he'd gone after the man named Vincent Baresco in Eric Leben's Newport Beach office, and his handling of the car had no doubt impressed her, but he knew his reflexes weren't what they had once been. And he knew these people, his nameless enemies, were deadly serious.

He was scared.

They had blown away those two cops as if swatting a couple of annoying flies. Jesus.

What secret did they share with Rachael? What could be so damn important that they would kill anyone, even cops, to keep a lid on it?

If he lived through the next hour, he would get the truth out of her one way or another. Damned if he would let her keep stalling.

The Caddy's engine sort of purred and sort of rumbled, and the car moved past at a crawl, and the guy with the mustache looked right at Ben for a moment, or seemed to, stared right between the oleander branches that Ben was holding slightly apart. Ben wanted to let the branches close up, but he was afraid the movement would be seen, slight as it was, so he just looked back into the other man's eyes, expecting the Caddy to stop and the doors to fly open, expecting a submachine gun to start crackling, shredding the oleander leaves with a thousand bullets. But the car kept moving past the house and on down the street. Watching its taillights dwindle, Ben let out his breath with a shudder.

He crept free of the shrubbery, went out to the street, and stood in the shadows by a tall jacaranda growing near the curb. He stared after the Cadillac until it had traveled three blocks, climbed a small hill, and disappeared over the crest.

In the distance, there were still sirens, though fewer. They had sounded angry before. Now they sounded mournful.

Holding the thirty-two pistol at his side, he hurried off into the night-cloaked neighborhood in search of a car to steal.

In the 560 SL, Rachael had moved up front to the driver's seat. It was more comfortable than the cramped storage space, and it was a better position from which to talk with Sarah Kiel. She switched on the little overhead light provided for map reading, confident it would not be seen past the property's thick screen of trees. The moon-pale glow illuminated a portion of the dashboard, the console, Rachael's face, and Sarah's stricken countenance.

The battered girl, having been shaken from her catatonic state, was at last capable of responding to questions. She was holding her curled right hand protectively against her breast, which somehow gave her the look of a small, injured bird. Her torn fingernails had stopped bleeding, but her broken finger was grotesquely swollen. With her left hand, she tenderly explored her blackened eye, bruised cheek, and split lip, frequently wincing and making small, thin sounds of pain. She said nothing, but when her frightened eyes met Rachael's, awareness glimmered in them.

Rachael said, “Honey, we'll get you to a hospital in just a few minutes. Okay?”

The girl nodded.

“Sarah, do you have any idea who I am?”

The girl shook her head.

“I'm Rachael Leben, Eric's wife.”

Fear seemed to darken the blue of Sarah's eyes.

“No, honey, it's all right. I'm on your side. Really. I was in the process of divorcing him. I knew about his young girls, but that has nothing to do with why I left him. The man was sick, honey. Twisted and arrogant and sick. I learned to despise and fear him. So you can speak freely with me. You've got a friend in me. You understand?”

Sarah nodded.

Pausing to look around at the darkness beyond the car, at the blank black windows and patio doors of the house on one side and the untended shrubbery and trees on the other, Rachael locked both doors with the master latch. It was getting warm inside the car. She knew she should open the windows, but she felt safer with them closed.

Returning her attention to the teenager, Rachael said, “Tell me what happened to you, honey. Tell me everything.”

The girl tried to speak, but her voice broke. Violent shivers coursed through her.

“Take it easy,” Rachael said. “You're safe now.” She hoped that was true. “You're safe. Who did this to you?”

In the frosty glow of the map light, Sarah's skin looked as pallid as carved bone. She cleared her throat and whispered, “Eric. Eric b-beat me.”

Rachael had known this would be the answer, yet it chilled her to the marrow and, for a moment, left her speechless. At last she said, “When? When did he do this to you?”

“He came… at half past midnight.”

“Dear God, not even an hour before we got there! He must've left just before we arrived.”

From the time she'd left the city morgue earlier this evening, she had hoped to catch up with Eric, and she should have been pleased to learn they were so close behind him. Instead, her heart broke into hard drumlike pounding and her chest tightened as she realized how closely they had passed by him in the warm desert night.

“He rang the bell, and I answered the door, and he just… he just… hit me.” Sarah carefully touched her blackened eye, which was now almost swollen shut. “Hit me and knocked me down and kicked me twice, kicked my legs…”

Rachael remembered the ugly bruises on Sarah's thighs.

“… grabbed me by the hair…”

Rachael took the girl's left hand, held it.

“… dragged me into the bedroom…”

“Go on,” Rachael said.

“… just tore my pajamas off, you know, and… and kept yanking on my hair and hitting me, hitting, punching me…”

“Has he ever beaten you before?”

“N-no. A few slaps. You know… a little roughhouse. That's all. But tonight… tonight he was wild… so full of hatred.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Not much. Called me names. Awful names, you know. And his speech — it was funny, slurred.”

“How did he look?” Rachael asked.

“Oh God…”

“Tell me.”

“A couple teeth busted out. Bruised up. He looked bad.”

“How bad?”

“Gray.”

“What about his head, Sarah?”

The girl gripped Rachael's hand very tightly. “His face… all gray… like, you know, like ashes.”

“What about his head?” Rachael repeated.

“He… he was wearing a knitted cap when he came in. He had it pulled way down, you know what I mean, like a toboggan cap. But when he was beating me… when I tried to fight back… the cap came off.”

Rachael waited.

The air in the car was stuffy and tainted by the acid stink of the girl's sweat.

“His head was… it was all banged up,” Sarah said, her voice thickening with terror, horror, and disgust.

“The side of his skull?” Rachael asked. “You saw that?”

“All broken, punched in… terrible, terrible.”

“His eyes. What about his eyes?”

Sarah tried to speak, choked. She lowered her head and closed her eyes for a moment, struggling to regain control of herself.

Seized by the irrational but quite understandable feeling that someone — or something—was stealthily creeping up on the Mercedes, Rachael surveyed the night again. It seemed to pulse against the car, seeking entrance at the windows.

When the brutalized girl raised her head again, Rachael said, “Please, honey, tell me about his eyes.”

“Strange. Hyper. Spaced out, you know? And… clouded…”

“Sort of muddy-looking?”

“Yeah.”

“His movements. Was there anything odd about the way he moved?”

“Sometimes… he seemed jerky… you know, a little spastic. But most of the time he was quick, too quick for me.”

“And you said his speech was slurred.”

“Yeah. Sometimes it didn't make any sense at all. And a couple times he stopped hitting me and just stood there, swaying back and forth, and he seemed… confused, you know, as if he couldn't figure where he was or who he was, as if he'd forgotten all about me.”

Rachael found that she was trembling as badly as Sarah — and that she was drawing as much strength from the contact with the girl's hand as the girl was drawing from her.

“His touch,” Rachael said. “His skin. What did he feel like?”

“You don't even have to ask, do you? 'Cause you already know what he felt like. Huh?” the girl said. “Don't you? Somehow… you already know.”

“But tell me anyway.”

“Cold. He felt too cold.”

“And moist?” Rachael asked.

“Yeah… but… not like sweat.”

“Greasy,” Rachael said.

The memory was so vivid that the girl gagged on it and nodded.

Ever so slightly greasy flesh, like the first stage — the very earliest stage — of putrefaction, Rachael thought, but she was too sick to her stomach and too sick at heart to speak that thought aloud.

Sarah said, “Tonight I watched the eleven o'clock news, and that's when I first heard he'd been killed, hit by a truck earlier in the day, yesterday morning, and I'm wondering how long I can stay in the house before someone comes to put me out, and I'm trying to figure what to do, where to go from here. But then little more than an hour after I see the story about him on the news, he shows up at the door, and at first I think the story must've been all wrong, but then…oh, Christ… then I knew it wasn't wrong. He… he really was killed. He was.”

“Yes.”

The girl tenderly licked her split lip. “But somehow…”

“Yes.”

“… he came back.”

“Yes,” Rachael said. “He came back. In fact, he's still coming back. He's not made it all the way back yet and probably won't ever make it.”

“But how—”

“Never mind how. You don't want to know.”

“And who—”

“You don't want to know who! Believe me, you don't want to know, can't afford to know. Honey, you've got to listen closely now, and I want you to take to heart what I'm saying to you. You can't tell anyone what you've seen. Not anyone. Understand? If you do… you'll be in terrible danger. There're people who'd kill you in a minute to keep you from talking about Eric's resurrection. There's more involved here than you can ever know, and they'll kill as many people as necessary to keep their secrets.”

A dark, ironic, and not entirely sane laugh escaped the girl. “Who could I tell that would believe me, anyway?”

“Exactly,” Rachael said.

“They'd think I was crazy. It's nuts, the whole thing, just plain impossible.”

Sarah's voice had a bleak edge, a haunted note, and it was clear that what she had seen tonight had changed her forever, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse. She would never be the same again. And for a long time, perhaps for the rest of her life, sleep would not be easily attained, for she would always fear what dreams might come.

Rachael said, “All right. Now, when we get you to a hospital, I'll pay all your bills. And I'm going to give you a check for ten thousand dollars as well, which I hope to God you won't throw away on drugs. And if you want me to, I'll call your parents out there in Kansas and ask them to come for you.”

“I… I think I'd like that.”

“Good. I think that's very good, honey. I'm sure they've been worried about you.”

“You know… Eric would've killed me. I'm sure that's what he wanted. To kill me. Maybe not me in particular. Just someone. He just felt like he had to kill someone, like it was a need in him, in his blood. And I was there. You know? Convenient.”

“How did you get away from him?”

“He… he sort of phased out for a couple of minutes. Like I told you, he seemed confused at times. And then at one point his eyes just sort of clouded up even worse, and he started making this funny little wheezing noise. He turned away from me and looked around, as if he was really mixed up… you know, bewildered. He seemed to get weak, too, because he leaned against the wall there by the bathroom door and hung his head down.”

Rachael remembered the bloody palmprint on the bedroom wall, beside the bathroom door.

“And when he was like that,” Sarah said, “when he was distracted, I was flat on the bathroom floor, hurt real bad, hardly able to move, and so the best I could do was crawl into the shower stall, and I was sure he'd come in after me when he got his senses back, you know, but he didn't. Like he forgot me. Came to his senses and either didn't remember I'd been there or couldn't figure out where I'd gone to. And then, after a while, I heard him farther back in the house, pounding things, breaking things.”

“He pretty much wrecked the kitchen,” Rachael said, and in a dark corner of her memory was the image of the knives driven deep into the kitchen wall.

Tears slid first from Sarah's good eye, then from the blackened and swollen one, and she said, “I can't figure…”

“What?” Rachael asked.

“Why he'd come after me.”

“He probably didn't come after you specifically,” Rachael said. “If there was a wall safe in the house, he would've wanted the money from it. But basically, I think he's just… looking for a place to go to ground for a while, until the process… runs its course. Then, when he blanked out for a moment and you hid from him, and when he came around again and didn't see you, he probably figured you'd gone for help, so he had to get out of there fast, go somewhere else.”

“The cabin, I'll bet.”

“What cabin?”

“You don't know about his cabin up at Lake Arrowhead?”

“No,” Rachael said.

“It's not on the lake, really. Farther up there on the mountain. He took me up to it once. He owns a couple of acres of woods and this neat cabin—”

Someone tapped on the window.

Rachael and Sarah cried out in surprise.

It was only Benny. He pulled open Rachael's door and said, “Come on. I've got us a new set of wheels. It's a gray Subaru — one hell of a lot less conspicuous than this buggy.”

Rachael hesitated, catching her breath, waiting for her drumming heartbeat to slow down. She felt as if she and Sarah were kids who'd been sitting at a camp fire, telling ghost stories, trying to spook each other and succeeding all too well. For an instant, crazily, she had been certain that the tapping at the window was the hard, bony click-click-click of a skeletal finger.

12 SHARP

From the moment Julio met Anson Sharp, he disliked the man. Minute by minute, his dislike intensified.

Sharp came into Rachael Leben's house in Placentia in more of a swagger than a walk, flashing his Defense Security Agency credentials as if ordinary policemen were expected to fall to their knees and venerate a federal agent of such high position. He looked at Becky Klienstad crucified on the wall, shook his head, and said, “Too bad. She was a nice-looking piece, wasn't she?” With an authoritarian briskness that seemed calculated to offend, he told them that the murders of the Hernandez and Klienstad women were now part of an extremely sensitive federal case, removed from the jurisdiction of local police agencies, for reasons that he could not — or would not — divulge. He asked questions and demanded answers, but he would give no answers of his own. He was a big man, even bigger than Reese, with chest and shoulders and arms that looked as if they had been hewn from immense timbers, and his neck was almost as thick as his head. Unlike Reese, he enjoyed using his size to intimidate others and had a habit of standing too close, intentionally violating your space, looming over you when he talked to you, looking down with a vague, barely perceptible, yet nevertheless infuriating smirk. He had a handsome face and seemed vain about his looks, and he had thick blond hair expensively razor-cut, and his jewel-bright green eyes said, I'm better than you, smarter than you, more clever than you, and I always will be.

Sharp told Orin Mulveck and the other Placentia police officers that they were to vacate the premises and immediately desist in their investigation. “All of the evidence you've collected, photographs you've taken, and paperwork you've generated will be turned over to my own team at once. You will leave one patrol car and two officers at the curb and assign them to assist us in any way we see fit.”

Clearly, Orin Mulveck was no happier with Sharp than Julio and Reese were. Mulveck and his people had been reduced to the role of the federal agent's glorified messenger boys, and none of them liked it, though they would have been considerably less offended if Sharp had handled them with more tact — hell, with any tact at all.

“I'll have to check your orders with my chief,” Mulveck said.

“By all means,” Sharp said. “Meanwhile, please get all your people out of this house. And you are all under orders not to speak of anything you've seen here. Is that understood?”

“I'll check with my chief,” Mulveck said. His face was red and the arteries were pounding in his temples when he stalked out.

Two men in dark suits had come with Sharp, neither as large as he, neither as imposing, but both of them cool and smug. They stood just inside the bedroom, one on each side of the door, like temple guards, watching Julio and Reese with unconcealed suspicion.

Julio had never encountered Defense Security Agency men before. They were far different from the FBI agents that he had sometimes worked with, less like policemen than FBI men were. They wore elitism as if it were a pungent cologne.

To Julio and Reese, Sharp said, “I know who you are, and I know a little bit about your reputations — two hound dogs. You bite into a case and you just never let go. Usually that's admirable. This time, however, you've got to unclench your teeth and let go. I can't make it clear enough. Understand me?”

“It's basically our case,” Julio said tightly. “It started in our jurisdiction, and we caught the first call.”

Sharp frowned. “I'm telling you it's over and you're out. As far as your department's concerned, there is no case for you to work on here. The files on Hernandez, Klienstad, and Leben have all been pulled from your records, as if they never existed, and from now on we handle everything. I've got my own forensics team driving in from L.A. right now. We don't need or want anything you can provide. Comprende, amigo? Listen, Lieutenant Verdad, you're gone. Check with your superiors if you don't believe me.”

“I don't like it,” Julio said.

“You don't have to like it,” Sharp said.

Julio drove only two blocks from Rachael Leben's house before he had to pull over to the curb and stop. He threw the car into park with a violent swipe at the gearshift and said, “Damn! Sharp's so sold on himself he probably thinks someone ought to bottle his piss and sell it as perfume.”

During the ten years Reese had worked with Julio, he. had never seen his partner this angry. Furious. His eyes looked hard and hot. A tic in his right cheek made half his face twitch. The muscles in his jaws clenched and unclenched, and the cords in his neck were taut. He looked like he wanted to break something in half. Reese was struck by the weird thought that if Julio had been a cartoon character, steam would have been pouring from his ears.

Reese said, “He's an asshole, sure, but he's an asshole with a lot of authority and connections.”

“Acts like a damn storm trooper.”

“I suppose he's got his job to do.”

“Yeah, but it's our job he's doing.”

“Let it go,” Reese said.

“I can't.”

“Let it go.”

Julio shook his head. “No. This is a special case. I feel a special obligation to that Hernandez girl. Don't ask me to explain it. You'd think I was getting sentimental in my old age. Anyway, if it was just an ordinary case, just the usual homicide, I'd let it go in a minute, I would, I really would, but this one is special.”

Reese sighed.

To Julio, nearly every case was special. He was a small man, especially for a detective, but he was committed, damned if he wasn't, and one way or another he found an excuse for persevering in a case when any other cop would have given up, when common sense said there was no point in continuing, and when the law of diminishing returns made it perfectly clear that the time had come to move on to something else. Sometimes he said, “Reese, I feel a special commitment to this victim 'cause he was so young, never had a chance to know life, and it isn't fair, it eats at me.” And sometimes he said, “Reese, this case is personal and special to me because the victim was so old, so old and defenseless, and if we don't go an extra mile to protect our elderly citizens, then we're a very sick society; this eats at me, Reese.” Sometimes the case was special to Julio because the victim was pretty, and it seemed such a tragedy for any beauty to be lost to the world that it just ate at him. But he could be equally eaten because the victim was ugly, therefore already disadvantaged in life, which made the additional curse of death too unfair to be borne. This time, Reese suspected that Julio had formed a special attachment to Ernestina because her name was similar to that of his long-dead little brother. It didn't take much to elicit a fierce commitment from Julio Verdad. Almost any little thing would do. The problem was that Julio had such a deep reservoir of compassion and empathy that he was always in danger of drowning in it.

Sitting rigidly behind the steering wheel, lightly but repeatedly thumping one fist against his thigh, Julio said, “Obviously, the snatching of Eric Leben's corpse and the murders of these two women are connected. But how? Did the people who stole his body kill Ernestina and Becky? And why? And why nail her to the wall in Mrs. Leben's bedroom? That's so grotesque!”

Reese said, “Let it go.”

“And where's Mrs. Leben? What's she know about this? Something. When I questioned her, I sensed she was holding something back.”

“Let it go.”

“And why would this be a national security matter requiring Anson Sharp and his damn Defense Security Agency?”

“Let it go,” Reese said, sounding like a broken record, aware that it was useless to attempt to divert Julio, but making the effort anyway. It was their usual litany; he would have felt incomplete if he had not upheld his end of it.

Less angry now than thoughtful, Julio said, “It must have something to do with work Leben's company is doing for the government. A defense contract of some kind.”

“You're going to keep poking around, aren't you?”

“I told you, Reese, I feel a special connection with that poor Hernandez girl.”

“Don't worry; they'll find her killer.”

“Sharp? We're supposed to rely on him? He's a jackass. You see the way he dresses?” Julio, of course, was always impeccably dressed. “The sleeves on his suit jacket were about an inch too short, and it needed to be let out along the back seam. And he doesn't polish his shoes often enough; they looked like he'd just been hiking in them. How can he find Ernestina's killer if he can't even keep his shoes properly polished?”

“I have a feeling of my own about this one, Julio. I think they'll have our scalps if we don't just let it go.”

“I can't walk away,” Julio said adamantly. “I'm still in. I'm in for the duration. You can opt out if you want.”

“I'll stay.”

“I'm putting no pressure on you.”

“I'm in,” Reese said.

“You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.”

“I said I was in, and I'm in.”

Five years ago, in an act of unparalleled bravery, Julio Verdad had saved the life of Esther Susanne Hagerstrom, Reese's daughter and only child, who had then been just four years old and achingly small and very helpless. In the world according to Reese Hagerstrom, the seasons changed and the sun rose and the sun set and the sea rose and the sea fell all for one reason: to please Esther Susanne. She was the center, the middle, the ends, and the circumference of his life, and he had almost lost her, but Julio had saved her, had killed one man and nearly killed two others in order to rescue her, so now Reese would have walked away from a million-dollar inheritance sooner than he would have walked away from his partner.

“I can handle everything on my own,” Julio said. “Really.”

“Didn't you hear me say I was in?”

“We're liable to screw ourselves into disciplinary suspensions.”

“I'm in.”

“Could be kissing good-bye to any more promotions.”

“I'm in.”

“You're in, then?”

“I'm in.”

“You're sure?”

“I'm sure.”

Julio put the car in gear, pulled away from the curb, and headed out of Placentia. “All right, we're both a little whacked out, need some rest. I'll drop you off at your place, let you get a few hours in the sack, and pick you up at ten in the morning.”

“And where will you be going while I'm sleeping?”

“Might try to get a few winks myself,” Julio said.

Reese and his sister, Agnes, lived with Esther Susanne on East Adams Avenue in the town of Orange, in a pleasant house that Reese had rather substantially remodeled himself during his days off. Julio had an apartment in an attractive Spanish-style complex just a block off Fourth Street, way out at the east end of Santa Ana.

Both of them would be going home to cold and lonely beds. Julio's wife had died of cancer seven years ago. Reese's wife, Esther's mother, had been shot and killed during the same incident in which he had almost lost his little girl, so he had been a widower five years, only two less than Julio.

On the 57 Freeway, shooting south toward Orange and Santa Ana, Reese said, “And if you can't sleep?”

“I'll go into the office, nose around, try to see if anyone knows anything about this Sharp and why he's so damned hot to run the show. Maybe ask around here and there about Dr. Eric Leben, too.”

“What're we going to do exactly when you pick me up at ten in the morning?”

“I don't know yet,” Julio said. “But I'll have figured out something by then.”

13 REVELATIONS

They took Sarah Kiel to the hospital in the stolen gray Subaru. Rachael arranged to pay the hospital bills, left a ten-thousand-dollar check with Sarah, called the girl's parents in Kansas, then left the hospital with Ben and went looking for a suitable place to hole up for the rest of the night.

By 3:35 Tuesday morning, grainy-eyed and exhausted, they found a large motel on Palm Canyon Drive with an all-night desk clerk. Their room had orange and white drapes that almost made Ben's eyes bleed, and Rachael said the bedspread pattern looked like yak puke, but the shower and air-conditioning worked, and the two queen-size beds had firm mattresses, and the unit was at the back of the complex, away from the street, where they could expect quiet even after the town came alive in the morning, so it wasn't exactly hell on earth.

Leaving Rachael alone for ten minutes, Ben drove the stolen Subaru out the motel's rear exit, left it in a supermarket parking lot several blocks away, and returned on foot. Both going and coming, he avoided passing the windows of the motel office and therefore did not stir the curiosity of the night clerk. Tomorrow, with the need for wheels less urgent, they could take time to rent a car.

In his absence, Rachael had visited the ice-maker and the soda-vending machine. A plastic bucket brimming with ice cubes stood on the small table by the window, plus cans of Diet Coke and regular Coke and A&W Root Beer and Orange Crush.

She said, “I thought you might be thirsty.”

He was suddenly aware that they were smack in the middle of the desert and that they had been moving in a sweat for hours. Standing, he drank an Orange Crush in two swallows, finished a root beer nearly as fast, then sat down and popped the tab on a Diet Coke. “Even with the hump, how do camels do it?”

As if dropping under an immense weight, she sat down on the other side of the table, opened a Coke, and said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Aren't you going to ask?”

He yawned, not out of perversity, and not because he wanted to irritate her, but because at that moment the prospect of sleep was more appealing than finally learning the truth of her circumstances. He said, “Ask what?”

“The same questions you've been asking all night.”

“You made it clear you wouldn't give answers.”

“Well, now I will. Now there's no keeping you out of it.”

She looked so sad that Ben felt a cold premonition of death in his bones and wondered if he had, indeed, been foolish to involve himself even to help the woman he loved. She was looking at him as if he were already dead — as if they were both dead.

“So if you're ready to tell me,” he said, “then I don't need to ask questions.”

“You're going to have to keep an open mind. What I'm about to tell you might seem unbelievable… damn strange.”

He sipped the Diet Coke and said, “You mean about Eric dying and coming back from the dead?”

She jerked in surprise and gaped at him. She tried to speak but couldn't get any words out.

He had never in his life elicited such a rewarding reaction from anyone else, and he took enormous pleasure in it.

At last she said, “But… but, how… when… what…”

He said, “How do I know what I know? When did I figure it out? What clued me in?”

She nodded.

He said, “Hell, if someone had stolen Eric's body, they'd surely have come with a car of their own to haul it away. They wouldn't have had to kill a woman and steal her car. And there were those discarded hospital whites in the garage in Villa Park. Besides, you were scared witless from the moment I showed up at your door last evening, and you aren't easily spooked. You're a very competent and self-sufficient woman, not the type to get the willies. In fact, I've never seen you scared of anything except maybe… Eric.”

“He really was killed by that truck, you know. It isn't just that they misdiagnosed his condition.”

The desire for sleep retreated a bit, and Ben said, “His business — and genius — was genetic engineering. And the man was obsessed with staying young. So I figure he found a way to edit out the genes linked to aging and death. Or maybe he edited in an artificially constructed gene for swift healing, tissue stasis… immortality.”

“You endlessly amaze me,” she said.

“I'm quite a guy.”

Her own weariness gave way to nervous energy. She could not keep still. She got up and paced.

He remained seated, sipping his Diet Coke. He had been badly rattled all night; now it was her turn.

Her bleak voice was tinted by dread, resignation. “When Geneplan patented its first highly profitable artificial microorganisms, Eric could've taken the company public, could've sold thirty percent of his stock and made a hundred million overnight.”

“A hundred? Jesus!”

“His two partners and three of the research associates, who also had pieces of the company, half wanted him to do just that because they'd have made a killing, too. Everyone else but Vincent Baresco was leaning toward going for the gold. Eric refused.”

“Baresco,” Ben said. “The guy who pulled the Magnum on us, the guy I trashed in Eric's office tonight — is he a partner?”

“It's Dr. Vincent Baresco. He's on Eric's handpicked research staff — one of the few who know about the Wildcard Project. In fact, only the six of them knew everything. Six plus me. Eric loved to brag to me. Anyway, Baresco sided with Eric, didn't want Geneplan to go public, and he convinced the others. If it remained a privately held company, they didn't have to please stockholders. They could spend money on unlikely projects without defending their decisions.”

“Such as a search for immortality or its equivalent.”

“They didn't expect to achieve full immortality — but longevity, regeneration. It took a lot of funds, money that stockholders would've wanted to see paid out in dividends. Eric and the others were getting rich, anyway, from the modest percentage of corporate profits they distributed to themselves, so they didn't desperately need the capital they'd get by going public.”

“Regeneration,” Ben said thoughtfully.

At the window, Rachael stopped pacing, cautiously drew back the drape, and peered out at the night-cloaked motel parking lot.

She said, “God knows, I'm no expert in recombinant DNA. But… well, they hoped to develop a benign virus that'd function as a 'carrier' to convey new genetic material into the body's cells and precisely place the new bits on the chains of chromosomes. Think of the virus as a sort of living scalpel that does genetic surgery. Because it's microscopic, it can perform minute operations no real scalpel ever could. It can be designed to seek out — and attach itself to — a certain portion of a chromosomal chain, either destroying the gene already there or inserting a new one.”

“And they did develop it?”

“Yes. Then they needed to positively identify genes associated with aging and edit them out—and develop artificial genetic material for the virus to carry into the cells. Those new genes would be designed to halt the aging process and tremendously boost the natural immune system by cuing the body to produce vastly larger quantities of interferon and other healing substances. Follow me?”

“Mostly.”

“They even believed they could give the human body the ability to regenerate ruined tissue, bone, and vital organs.”

She still stared out at the night, and she appeared to have gone pale — not at something she had seen but at the consideration of what she was slowly revealing to him.

Finally she continued: “Their patents were bringing in a river of money, a flood. So they spent God knows how many tens of millions, farming out pieces of the research puzzle to geneticists not in the company, keeping the work fragmented so no one was likely to realize the true intent of their efforts. It was like a privately financed equivalent of the Manhattan Project — and maybe even more secret than the development of the atomic bomb.”

“Secret… because if they succeeded, they wanted to keep the blessing of an extended life span for themselves?”

“Partly, yes.” Letting the drape fall in place, she turned from the window. “And by holding the secret, by dispensing the blessing only to whomever they chose — just imagine the power they'd wield. They could essentially create a long-lived elite master race that owed its existence to them. And the threat of withholding the gift would be a bludgeon that could make virtually anyone cooperate with them. I used to listen to Eric talk about it, and it sounded like nonsense, pipe dreams, even though I knew he was a genius in his field.”

“Those men in the Cadillac who pursued us and shot the cops—”

“From Geneplan,” she said, still full of nervous energy, pacing again. “I recognized the car. It belongs to Rupert Knowls. Knowls supplied the initial venture capital that got Eric started. After Eric, he's the chief partner.”

“A rich man… yet he's willing to risk his reputation and his freedom by gunning down two cops?”

“To protect this secret, yeah, I guess he is. He's not exactly a scrupulous man to begin with. And confronted with this opportunity, I suppose he'll stretch his scruples even further than usual.”

“Okay. So they developed the technique to prolong life and promote incredibly rapid healing. Then what?”

Her lovely face had been pale. Now it darkened as if a shadow had fallen across it, though there was no shadow. “Then… they began experiments on lab animals. Primarily white mice.”

Ben sat up straighter in his chair and put the can of Diet Coke aside, because from Rachael's demeanor he sensed that she was reaching the crux of the story.

She paused for a moment to check the dead bolt on the room door, which opened onto a covered breezeway that flanked the parking lot. The lock was securely engaged, but after a moment's hesitation she took one of the straight-backed chairs from the table, tipped it onto two legs, and braced it under the doorknob for extra protection.

He was sure she was being overly cautious, treading the edge of paranoia. On the other hand, he didn't object.

She returned to the edge of the bed. “They injected the mice, changed the mice, working with mouse genes instead of human genes, of course, but applying the same theories and techniques they intended to use to promote human longevity. And the mice, a short-lived variety, survived longer… twice as long as usual and still kicking. Then three times as long… four times… and still young. Some mice were subjected to injuries of various kinds — everything from contusions and abrasions to punctures, broken bones, serious burns — and they healed at a remarkable rate. They recovered and flourished after their kidneys were virtually destroyed. Lungs eaten half away by acid fumes were regenerated. They actually regained their vision after being blinded. And then…”

Her voice trailed away, and she glanced at the fortified door, then at the window, lowered her head, closed her eyes.

Ben waited.

Eyes still closed, she said, “Following standard procedure, they killed some mice and put them aside for dissection and for thorough tissue tests. Some were killed with injections of air — embolisms. Killed others with lethal injections of formaldehyde. And there was no question they were dead. Very dead. But those that weren't yet dissected… they came back. Within a few hours. Lying there in the lab trays… they just… started twitching, squirming. Bleary-eyed, weak at first… but they came back. Soon they were on their feet, scurrying about their cages, eating — fully alive. Which no one had anticipated, not at all. Oh, sure, before the mice were killed, they'd had tremendously enhanced immune systems, truly astonishing capacity to heal, and life spans that had been dramatically increased, but…” Rachael raised her head, opened her eyes, looked at Ben. “But once the line of death is crossed… who'd imagine it could be recrossed?”

Ben's hands started shaking, and a wintry shiver followed the track of his spine, and he realized that the true meaning and power of these events had only now begun to sink in.

“Yes,” Rachael said, as if she knew what thoughts and emotions were racing through his mind and heart.

He was overcome by a strange mixture of terror, awe, and wild joy: terror at the idea of anything, mouse or man, returning from the land of the dead; awe at the thought that humankind's genius had perhaps shattered nature's dreadful chains of mortality; joy at the prospect of humanity freed forever from the loss of loved ones, freed forever from the great fears of sickness and death.

And as if reading his mind, Rachael said, “Maybe one day… maybe even one day soon, the threat of the grave will pass away. But not yet. Not quite yet. Because the Wildcard Project's breakthrough is not entirely successful. The mice that came back were… strange.”

“Strange?”

Instead of elaborating on that freighted word, she said, “At first the researchers thought the mice's odd behavior resulted from some sort of brain damage — maybe not to cerebral tissues but to the fundamental chemistry of the brain — that couldn't be repaired even by the mice's enhanced healing abilities. But that wasn't the case. They could still run difficult mazes and repeat other complex tricks they'd been taught before they'd died—”

“So somehow the memories, knowledge, probably even personality survives the brief period of lifelessness between death and rebirth.”

She nodded. “Which would indicate that some small current still exists in the brain for a time after death, enough to keep memory intact until… resurrection. Like a computer during a power failure, barely holding on to material in its short-term memory by using the meager flow of current from a standby battery.”

Ben wasn't sleepy anymore. “Okay, so the mice could run mazes, but there was something strange about them. What? How strange?”

“Sometimes they became confused — more frequently at first than after they'd been back with the living awhile — and they repeatedly rammed themselves against their cages or ran in circles chasing their tails. That kind of abnormal behavior slowly passed. But another, more frightening behavior emerged… and endured.”

Outside a car pulled into the motel parking lot and stopped.

Rachael glanced worriedly at the barricaded door.

In the still desert air, a car door opened, closed.

Ben sat up straighter in his chair, tense.

Footsteps echoed softly through the empty night. They were heading away from Rachael's and Ben's room. In another part of the motel, the door to another room opened and closed.

With visible relief Rachael let her shoulders sag. “Mice are natural-born cowards, of course. They never fight their enemies. They're not equipped to. They survive by running, dodging, hiding. They don't even fight among themselves for supremacy or territory. They're meek, timid. But the mice who came back weren't meek at all. They fought one another, and they attacked mice that had not been resurrected — and they even tried to nip at the researchers handling them, though a mouse has no hope of hurting a man and is ordinarily acutely aware of that. They flew into rages, clawing at the floors of their cages, pawing at the air as if fighting imaginary enemies, sometimes even clawing at themselves. Occasionally these fits lasted less than a minute, but more often went on until the mouse collapsed in exhaustion.”

For a moment, neither spoke.

The silence in the motel room was sepulchral, profound.

At last Ben said, “In spite of this strangeness in the mice, Eric and his researchers must've been electrified. Dear God, they'd hoped to extend the life span — and instead they defeated death altogether! So they were eager to move on to development of similar methods of genetic alteration for human beings.”

“Yes.”

“In spite of the mice's unexplained tendency to frenzies, rages, random violence.”

“Yes.”

“Figuring that problem might never arise in a human subject… or could be dealt with somewhere along the way.”

“Yes.”

Ben said, “So… slowly the work progressed, but too slowly for Eric. Youth-oriented, youth-obsessed, and inordinately afraid of dying, he decided not to wait for a safe and proven process.”

“Yes.”

“That's what you meant in Eric's office tonight, when you asked Baresco if he knew Eric had broken the cardinal rule. To a genetics researcher or other specialist in biological sciences, the cardinal rule would be — what? — that he should never experiment with human beings until all encountered problems and unanswered questions are dealt with at the test-animal level or below.”

“Exactly,” she said. She had folded her hands in her lap to keep them from shaking, but her fingers kept picking at one another. “And Vincent didn't know Eric had broken the cardinal rule, I knew, but it must've come as a nasty shock to them when they heard Eric's body was missing. The moment they heard, they knew he'd done the craziest, most reckless, most unforgivable thing he possibly could've done.”

“And now what?” Ben asked. “They want to help him?”

“No. They want to kill him. Again.”

“Why?”

“Because he won't come back all the way, won't ever be exactly like he was. This stuff wasn't perfected yet.”

“He'll be like the lab animals?”

“Probably. Strangely violent, dangerous.”

Ben thought of the mindless destruction in the Villa Park house, the blood in the trunk of the car.

Rachael said, “Remember — he was a ruthless man all his life and troubled by barely suppressed violent urges even before this. The mice started out meek, but Eric didn't, so what might he be like now? Look what he did to Sarah Kiel.”

Ben remembered not only the beaten girl but the wrecked kitchen in the Palm Springs house, the knives driven into the wall.

“And if Eric murders someone in one of these rages,” Rachael said, “the police are more likely to learn he's alive, and Wildcard will be blown wide open. So his partners want to kill him in some very final manner that'll rule out another resurrection. I wouldn't be surprised if they dismembered the corpse or burned it to ashes and then disposed of the remains in several locations.”

Good God, Ben thought, is this reality or Chiller Theater?

He said, “They want to kill you because you know about Wildcard?”

“Yes, but that's not the only reason they'd like to get their hands on me. They've got two others at least. For one thing, they probably think I know where Eric will go to ground.”

“But you don't?”

“I had some ideas. And Sarah Kiel gave me another one. But I don't know for sure.”

“You said there's a third reason they'd want you?”

She nodded. “I'm first in line to inherit Geneplan, and they don't trust me to continue pumping enough money into Wildcard. By removing me, they stand a much better chance of retaining control of the corporation and of keeping Wildcard secret. If I could've gotten to Eric's safe ahead of them and could've put my hands on his project diary, I would've had solid proof that Wildcard exists, and then they wouldn't have dared touch me. Without proof, I'm vulnerable.”

Ben rose and began to move restlessly around the room, thinking furiously.

Somewhere in the night, not far beyond the motel walls, a cat cried either in anger or in passion. It went on a long time, rising and falling, an eerie ululation.

Finally Ben said, “Rachael, why are you pursuing Eric? Why this desperate rush to reach him before the others? What'll you do if you find him?”

“Kill him,” she said without hesitation, and the bleakness in her green eyes was now complemented by a Rachael-like determination and iron resolve. “Kill him for good. Because if I don't kill him, he's going to hide out until he's in better condition, until he's a bit more in control of himself, and then he's going to come kill me. He died furious with me, consumed by such hatred for me that he dashed blindly out into traffic, and I'm sure that same hatred was seething in him the moment awareness returned to him in the county morgue. In his clouded and twisted mind, I'm very likely his primary obsession, and I don't think he'll rest until I'm dead. Or until he's dead, really dead this time.”

He knew she was right. He was deeply afraid for her.

His preference for the past was as strong in him now as it had ever been, and he longed for simpler times. How mad had the modern world become? Criminals owned the city streets at night. The whole planet could be utterly destroyed in an hour with the pressing of a few buttons. And now… now dead men could be reanimated. Ben wished for a time machine that could carry him back to a better age: say the early 1920s, when a sense of wonder was still alive and when faith in the human potential was unsullied and unsurpassed.

Yet… he remembered the joy that had surged in him when Rachael had first said that death had been beaten, before she had explained that those who came back from beyond were frighteningly changed. He had been thrilled. Hardly the response of a genuine stick-in-the-mud reactionary. He might peer back at the past and long for it with full-blown sentimentalism, but in his heart he was, like others of his age, undeniably attracted to science and its potential for creating a brighter future. Maybe he was not such a misfit in the modern world as he liked to pretend. Maybe this experience was teaching him something about himself that he would have preferred not to learn.

He said, “Could you really pull the trigger on Eric?”

“Yes.”

“I'm not sure you could. I suspect you'd freeze up when you were really confronted with the moral implications of murder.”

“This wouldn't be murder. He's no longer a human being. He's already dead. The living dead. The walking dead. He's not a man anymore. He's different. Changed. Just as those mice were changed. He's only a thing now, not a man, a dangerous thing, and I wouldn't have any qualms about blowing his head off. If the authorities ever found out, I don't think they'd even try to prosecute me. And I see no moral questions that would put me on trial in my own mind.”

“You've obviously thought hard about this,” he said. “But why not hide out, keep a low profile, let Eric's partners find him and kill him for you?”

She shook her head. “I can't bet everything on their success. They might fail. They might not get to him before he finds me. This is my life we're talking about, and by God I'm not trusting in anyone but me to protect it.”

“And me,” he said.

“And you, yes. And you, Benny.”

He came to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, beside her. “So we're chasing a dead man.”

“Yes.”

“But we've got to get some rest now.”

“I'm beat,” she agreed.

“Then where will we go tomorrow?”

“Sarah told me about a cabin Eric has in the mountains near Lake Arrowhead. It sounded secluded. Just what he needs now, for the next few days, while the initial healing's going on.”

Ben sighed. “Yeah, I think we might find him in a place like that.”

“You don't have to come with me.”

“I will.”

“But you don't have to.”

“I know. But I will.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

Though she was weary, sweaty, and rumpled, with lank hair and bloodshot eyes, she was beautiful.

He had never felt closer to her. Facing death together always forged a special bond between people, drew them even closer regardless of how very close they might have been before. He knew, for he had been to war in the Green Hell.

Tenderly she said, “Let's get some rest, Benny.”

“Right,” he said.

But before he could lie down and turn off the lights, he had to break out the magazine of the Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum that he had taken off Vincent Baresco several hours ago and count the remaining cartridges. Three. Half the magazine's load had been expended in Eric's office, when Baresco had fired wildly in the darkness as Ben attacked him. Three left. Not much. Not nearly enough to make Ben feel secure, even though Rachael had her own thirty-two pistol. How many bullets were required to stop a walking dead man? Ben put the Combat Magnum on the nightstand, where he could reach out and lay his hand on it in an instant if he needed it during what remained of the night.

In the morning, he would buy a box of ammunition. Two boxes.

14 LIKE A NIGHT BIRD

Leaving two men behind at Rachael Leben's house in Placentia — where the crucified corpse of Rebecca Klienstad had finally been taken down from the bedroom wall — and leaving other men at the Leben house in Villa Park and still others at the Geneplan offices, Anson Sharp of the Defense Security Agency choppered through the desert darkness with two more agents, flying low and fast, to Eric Leben's stylish yet squalid love nest in Palm Springs. The pilot put the helicopter down in a bank parking lot less than a block off Palm Canyon Drive, where a nondescript government car was waiting. The chuffling rotors of the aircraft sliced up the hot dry desert air and flung slabs of it at Sharp's back as he dashed to the sedan.

Five minutes later, they arrived at the house where Dr. Leben had kept his string of teenage girls. Sharp wasn't surprised to find the front door ajar. He rang the bell repeatedly, but no one answered. Drawing his service revolver, a Smith & Wesson Chief's Special, he led the way inside, in search of Sarah Kiel who, according to the most recent report on Leben, was the current piece of fluff in residence.

The Defense Security Agency knew about Leben's lechery because it knew everything about people engaged in top-secret contract work with the Pentagon. That was something civilians like Leben just could never seem to understand: Once they accepted the Pentagon's money and undertook highly sensitive research work, they had absolutely no privacy. Sharp knew all about Leben's fascination with modern art, modern design, and modern architecture. He knew about Eric Leben's marital problems in detail. He knew what foods Leben preferred, what music he liked, what brand of underwear he wore; so of course he also knew every little thing about the teenage girls because the potential for blackmail that they presented was related to national security.

When Sharp stepped into the kitchen and saw the destruction, especially the knives driven into the wall, he figured he would not find Sarah Kiel alive. She would be nailed up in another room, or maybe bolted to the ceiling, or maybe hacked to pieces and hung on wire to form a bloody mobile, maybe even worse. You couldn't guess what might happen next in this case. Anything could happen.

Weird.

Gosser and Peake, the two young agents with Sharp, were startled and made uneasy by the mess in the kitchen and by the psychopathic frenzy it implied. Their security clearance and need to know were as high as Sharp's, so they were aware that they were hunting for a walking dead man. They knew Eric Leben had risen from a morgue slab and escaped in stolen hospital whites, and they knew a half-alive and deranged Eric Leben had killed the Hernandez and Klienstad women to obtain their car, so Gosser and Peake held their service revolvers as tightly and cautiously as Sharp held his.

Of course, the DSA was fully aware of the nature of the work Geneplan was doing for the government: biological warfare research, the creation of deadly man-made viruses. But the agency also knew the details of other projects under way within the company, including the Wildcard Project, although Leben and his associates had labored under the delusion that the secret of Wildcard was theirs alone. They were unaware of the federal agents and stoolies among them. And they did not realize how quickly government computers had ascertained their intentions merely by surveying the research they farmed out to other companies and extrapolating the purpose of it all.

These civilian types just could not understand that when you bargained with Uncle Sam and eagerly took his money, you couldn't sell only a small piece of your soul. You had to sell it all.

Anson Sharp usually enjoyed bringing that bit of nasty news to people like Eric Leben. They thought they were such big fish, but they forgot that even big fish are eaten by bigger fish, and there was no bigger fish in the sea than the whale called Washington. Sharp loved to watch that realization sink in. He relished seeing the self-important hotshots break into a sweat and quiver. They usually tried to bribe him or reason with him, and sometimes they begged, but of course he could not let them off the hook. Even if he could have let them off, he would not have done it, because he liked nothing more than seeing them squirm before him.

Dr. Eric Leben and his six cronies had been permitted to proceed unhampered with their revolutionary research into longevity. But if they had solved all the problems and achieved a useful breakthrough, the government would have moved in on them and would have absorbed the project by one means or another, through the swift declaration of a national defense emergency.

Now Eric Leben had screwed up everything. He administered the faulty treatment to himself and then accidentally put it to the test by walking in front of a damn garbage truck. No one could have anticipated such a turn of events because the guy had seemed too smart to risk his own genetic integrity.

Looking at the broken china and the trampled food that littered the floor, Gosser wrinkled his choirboy face and said, “The guy's a real berserker.”

“Looks like the work of an animal,” Peake said, frowning.

Sharp led them out of the kitchen, through the rest of the house, finally to the master bedroom and bath, where more destruction had been wrought and where there was also some blood, including a bloody palmprint on the wall. It was probably Leben's print: proof that the dead man, in some strange fashion, lived.

No cadaver could be found in the house, neither Sarah Kiel's nor anybody else's, and Sharp was disappointed. The nude and crucified woman in Placentia had been unexpected and kinky, a welcome change from the corpses he usually saw. Victims of guns, knives, plastique, and the garroting wire were old news to Sharp; he had seen them in such plenitude over the years that he no longer got a kick out of them. But he had sure gotten a kick out of that bimbo nailed to the wall, and he was curious to see what Leben's deranged and rotting mind might come up with next.

Sharp checked the hidden safe in the floor of the bedroom closet and found that it had been emptied.

Leaving Gosser behind to house-sit in case Leben returned, Sharp took Peake along on a search of the garage, expecting to find Sarah Kiel's body, which they did not. Then he sent Peake into the backyard with a flashlight to examine the lawn and flower beds for signs of a freshly dug grave, though it seemed unlikely that Leben, in his current condition, would have the desire or the foresight to bury his victims and cover his tracks.

“If you don't find anything,” Sharp told Peake, “then start checking the hospitals. In spite of the blood, maybe the Kiel girl wasn't killed. Maybe she managed to run away from him and get medical attention.”

“If I find her at some hospital?”

“I'll need to know at once,” Sharp said, for he would have to prevent Sarah Kiel from talking about Eric Leben's return. He would try to use reason, intimidation, and outright threats to ensure her silence. If that didn't work, she would be quietly removed.

Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway also had to be found soon and silenced.

As Peake set out on his assigned tasks — and while Gosser waited alertly inside the house — Sharp climbed into the unmarked sedan at the curb and had the driver return him to the bank parking lot off Palm Canyon Drive, where the helicopter was still waiting for him.

Airborne again, heading for the Geneplan labs in Riverside, Anson Sharp stared out at the night landscape as it rushed past below the chopper, his eyes narrowed as if he were a night bird seeking prey.

15 LOVING

Ben's dreams were dark and full of thunder, blasted by strange lightning that illuminated nothing in a landscape without form, inhabited by an unseen but fearful creature that stalked him through the shadows, where all was vast and cold and lonely. It was — and yet was not — the Green Hell where he had spent more than three years of his youth, a familiar yet unfamiliar place, the same as it had been, yet changed as landscapes can be only in dreams.

Shortly after dawn, he came awake with bird-thin cries, full of dread, shuddering, and Rachael was with him. She had moved from the other bed and had drawn him to her, comforting him. Her warm tender touch dispelled the cold and lonely dream. The rhythmic thumping of her heart seemed like the steady throbbing of a bright lighthouse beacon along a fogbound coast, each pulse a reassurance.

He believed she had intended to offer nothing more than the comfort that a good friend could provide, though perhaps unconsciously she brought the greater gift of love and sought it in return. In the half-awake state following sleep, when his vision seemed filtered by a semitransparent cloth, when an invisible thinness of warm silk seemed to interpose itself between his hands and everything he touched, and while sounds were still dream-muffled, his perceptions were not sharp enough to determine how and when her offered comfort became offered — and accepted — love. He only knew that it happened and that, when he drew her unclothed body to his, he felt a rightness that he had never felt before in his thirty-seven years.

He was at last within her, and she was filled with him. It was fresh and wondrous, yet they did not have to search for the rhythms and patterns that pleased them, because they knew what was perfect for them as lovers of a decade might know.

Although the softly rumbling air conditioner kept the room cool, Ben had an almost psychic awareness of desert heat pressing at the windows. The cool chamber was a bubble suspended outside the reality of the harsh land, just as their special moment of tender coupling was a bubble drifting outside the normal flow of seconds and minutes.

Only one opaque window of frosted glass — high in the kitchenette wall — was not covered with a drape, and upon it the rising sun built a slowly growing fire. Outside, palm fronds, fanning lazily in a breeze, filtered the beams of the sun; feathery tropical shadows and frost-pale light fell on their nude bodies, rippling as they moved.

Ben saw her face clearly even in that inconstant light. Her eyes were shut, mouth open. She drew deep breaths at first, then breathed more quickly. Every line of her face was exquisitely sensuous — but also infinitely precious. His perception of her preciousness mattered more to him than the shatteringly sensuous vision she presented, for it was an emotional rather than physical response, a result of their months together and of his great affection for her. Because she was so special to him, their coupling was not merely an act of sex but an immeasurably more gratifying act of love.

Sensing his examination, she opened her eyes and looked into his, and he was electrified by that new degree of contact.

The palm-patterned morning light grew rapidly brighter, changing hue as well, from frost-pale to lemon-yellow to gold. It imparted those colors to Rachael's face, slender throat, full breasts. As the richness of the light increased, so did the pace of their lovemaking, till both were gasping, till she cried out and cried out again, at which moment the breeze outside became a sudden energetic wind that whipped the palm fronds, casting abruptly frantic shadows through the milky window, upon the bed. At precisely the moment when the wind-sculpted shadows leaped and shuddered, Ben thrust deep and shuddered too, emptying copious measures of himself into Rachael, and just when the last rush of his seed had streamed from him, the spill of wind was also depleted, flowing away to other corners of the world.

In time he withdrew from her, and they lay on their sides, facing each other, heads close, their breath mingling. Still, neither spoke nor needed to, and gradually they drifted toward sleep again.

He had never before felt as fulfilled and contented as this. Even in the good days of his youth, before the Green Hell, before Vietnam, he had never felt half this fine.

She slept before Ben did, and for a long pleasant moment he watched as a bubble of saliva slowly formed between her parted lips, and popped. His eyes grew heavy, and the last thing he saw before he closed them was the vague — almost invisible — scar along her jawline, where she had been cut when Eric had thrown a glass at her.

Drifting down into a restful darkness, Ben almost felt sorry for Eric Leben, because the scientist had never realized love was the closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only — and best — answer to death was loving. Loving.

16 IN THE ZOMBIE ZONE

For part of the night he lay fully clothed on the bed in the cabin above Lake Arrowhead, in a condition deeper than sleep, deeper than coma, his body temperature steadily declining, his heart beating only, twenty times a minute, blood barely circulating, drawing breath shallow-ly and only intermittently. Occasionally his respiration and heartbeat stopped entirely for periods as long as ten or fifteen minutes, during which the only life within him was at a cellular level, though even that was not life as much as stasis, a strange twilight existence that no other man on earth had ever known. During those periods of suspended animation, with cells only slowly renewing themselves and performing their functions at a greatly reduced pace, the body was gathering energy for the next period of wakefulness and accelerated healing.

He was healing, and at an astonishing rate. Hour by hour, almost visibly, his multitude of punctures and lacerations were scabbing over, closing up. Beneath the ugly bluish blackness of the bruises that he had suffered from the brutal impact with the garbage truck, there was already a visible yellow hue arising as the blood from crushed capillaries was leeched from the tissues. When he was awake, he could feel fragments of his broken skull pressing insistently into his brain, even though medical wisdom held that tissue of the brain was without nerve endings and therefore insensate; it was not a pain as much as a pressure, like a Novocaine-numbed tooth registering the grinding bit of a dentist's drill. And he could sense, without understanding how, that his genetically improved body was methodically dealing with that head injury as surely as it was closing up its other wounds. For a week he would need much rest, but during that time the periods of stasis would grow shorter, less frequent, less frightening. That was what he wanted to believe. In two or three weeks, his physical condition would be no worse than that of a man leaving the hospital after major surgery. In a month he might be fully recovered, although he'd always have a slight — or even pronounced — depression along the right side of his skull.

But mental recovery was not keeping pace with the rapid physical regeneration of tissues. Even when awake, heartbeat and respiration close to normal, he was seldom fully alert. And during those brief periods when he possessed approximately the same intellectual capacity he had known before his death, he was acutely and dismally aware that for the most part he was functioning in a robotic state, with frequent lapses into a confused and, at times, virtually animalistic condition.

He had strange thoughts.

Sometimes he believed himself to be a young man again, recently graduated from college, but sometimes he recognized that he was actually past forty. Sometimes he did not know exactly where he was, especially when he was out on the road, driving, with no familiar reference points to his own past life; overcome by confusion, feeling lost and sensing that he would forever be lost, he had to pull over to the edge of the highway until the panic passed. He knew that he had a great goal, an important mission, though he was never quite able to define his purpose or destination. Sometimes he thought he was dead and making his way through the levels of hell on a Dantean journey. Sometimes he thought he had killed people, although he could not remember who, and then he did briefly remember and shrank from the memory, not only shrank from it but convinced himself that it was not a memory at all but a fantasy, for of course he was incapable of cold-blooded murder. Of course. Yet at other times he thought about how exciting and satisfying it would be to kill someone, anyone, everyone, because in his heart he knew they were after him, all of them, out to get him, the rotten bastards, as they had always been out to get him, though they were even more determined now than ever. Sometimes he thought urgently, Remember the mice, the mice, the deranged mice bashing themselves to pieces against the walls of their cages, and more than once he even said it aloud, “Remember the mice, the mice,” but he had no idea what those words meant: what mice, where, when?

He saw strange things, too.

Sometimes he saw people who could not possibly be there: his long-dead mother, a hated uncle who had abused him when he had been a little boy, a neighborhood bully who had terrorized him in grade school. Now and then, as if suffering from the delirium tremens of a chronic alcoholic, he saw things crawling out of the walls, bugs and snakes and more frightening creatures that defied definition.

Several times, he was certain that he saw a path of perfectly black flagstones leading down into a terrible darkness in the earth. Always compelled to follow those stones, he repeatedly discovered the path was illusory, a figment of his morbid and fevered imagination.

Of all the apparitions and illusions that flickered past his eyes and through his damaged mind, the most unusual and the most disturbing were the shadowfires. They leaped up unexpectedly and made a crackling sound that he not only heard but felt in his bones. He would be moving right along, walking with reasonable sure-footedness, passing among the living with some conviction, functioning better than he dared believe he could — when suddenly a fire would spring up in the shadowed corners of a room or in the shadows clustered beneath a tree, in any deep pocket of gloom, flames the shade of wet blood with hot silvery edges, startling him. And when he looked close, he could see that nothing was burning, that the flames had erupted out of thin air and were fed by nothing whatsoever, as if the shadows themselves were burning and made excellent fuel in spite of their lack of substance. When the fires faded and were extinguished, no signs of them remained — no ashes, charred fragments, or smoke stains.

Though he had never been afraid of fire before he died, had never entertained the pyrophobic idea that he was destined to die in flames, he was thoroughly terrified of these hungry phantom fires. When he peered into the flickering brightness, he felt that just beyond lay a mystery he must solve, though the solution would bring him unimaginable anguish.

In his few moments of relative lucidity, when his intellectual capacity was nearly what it once had been, he told himself that the illusions of flames merely resulted from misfiring synapses in his injured brain, electrical pulses shorting through the damaged tissues. And he told himself that the illusions frightened him because, above all else, he was an intellectual, a man whose life had been a life of the mind, so he had every right to be frightened by signs of brain deterioration. The tissues would heal, the shadowfires fade forever, and he would be all right. That was also what he told himself. But in his less lucid moments, when the world turned tenebrous and eerie, when he was gripped by confusion and animal fear, he looked upon the shadowfires with unalloyed horror and was sometimes reduced to paralysis by something he thought he glimpsed within — or beyond — the dancing flames.

Now, as dawn insistently pressed upon the resistant darkness of the mountains, Eric Leben ascended from stasis, groaned softly for a while, then louder, and finally woke. He sat up on the edge of the bed. His mouth was stale; he tasted ashes. His head was filled with pain. He touched his broken pate. It was no worse; his skull was not coming apart.

The meager glow of morning entered by two windows, and a small lamp was on — not sufficient illumination to dispel all the shadows in the bedroom, but enough to hurt his extremely sensitive eyes. Watery and hot, his eyes had been less able to adapt to brightness since he had risen from the cold steel gurney in the morgue, as if darkness were his natural habitat now, as if he did not belong in a world subject either to sun or to man-made light.

For a couple of minutes he concentrated on his breathing, for his rate of respiration was irregular, now too slow and deep, now too fast and shallow. Taking a stethoscope from the nightstand, he listened to his heart as well. It was beating fast enough to assure that he would not soon slip back into a state of suspended animation, though it was unsettlingly arrhythmic.

In addition to the stethoscope, he had brought other instruments with which to monitor his progress. A sphygmomanometer for measuring his blood pressure. An ophthalmoscope which, in conjunction with a mirror, he could use to study the condition of his retinas and the pupil response. He had a notebook, too, in which he had intended to record his observations of himself, for he was aware — sometimes only dimly aware but always aware — that he was the first man to die and come back from beyond, that he was making history, and that such a journal would be invaluable once he had fully recovered.

Remember the mice, the mice…

He shook his head irritably, as if that sudden baffling thought were a bothersome gnat buzzing around his face. Remember the mice, the mice: He had not the slightest idea what it meant, yet it was an annoyingly repetitive and peculiarly urgent thought that had assailed him frequently last night. He vaguely suspected that he did, in fact, know the meaning of the mice and that he was suppressing the knowledge because it frightened him. However, when he tried to focus on the subject and force an understanding, he had no success but became increasingly frustrated, agitated, and confused.

Returning the stethoscope to the nightstand, he did not pick up the sphygmomanometer because he did not have the patience or the dexterity required to roll up his shirt sleeve, bind the pressure cuff around his arm, operate the bulb-type pump, and simultaneously hold the gauge so he could read it. He had tried last night, and his clumsiness had finally driven him into a rage. He did not pick up the ophthalmoscope, either, for to examine his own eyes he would have to go into the bathroom and use the mirror. He could not bear to see himself as he now appeared: gray-faced, muddy-eyed, with a slackness in his facial muscles that made him look… half dead.

The pages of his small notebook were mostly blank, and now he did not attempt to add further observations to his recovery journal. For one thing, he had found that he was not capable of the intense and prolonged concentration required to write either intelligibly or legibly. Besides, the sight of his sloppily scrawled handwriting, which previously had been precise and neat, was yet another thing that had the power to excite a vicious rage in him.

Remember the mice, the mice bashing themselves against the walls of their cages, chasing their tails, the mice, the mice…

Putting both hands to his head as if to physically suppress that unwanted and mysterious thought, Eric Leben lurched out of bed, onto his feet. He needed to piss, and he was hungry. Those were two good signs, two indications that he was alive, at least more alive than dead, and he took heart from those simple biological needs.

He started toward the bathroom but stopped suddenly when fire leaped up in a corner of the room. Not real flames but shadowfire. Blood-red tongues with silver edges. Crackling hungrily, consuming the shadows from which they erupted yet in no way reducing that darkness. Squinting his light-stung eyes, Eric found that, as before, he was compelled to peer into the flames, and within them he thought he saw strange forms writhing and… and beckoning to him..

Though he was unaccountably terrified of these shadowfires, a part of him, perverse beyond his understanding, longed to go within the flames, pass through them as one might pass through a door, and learn what lay beyond.

No!

As he felt that longing grow into an acute need, he desperately turned away from the fire and stood swaying in fear and bewilderment, two feelings that, in his current fragile state, quickly metamorphosed into anger, the anger into rage. Everything seemed to lead to rage, as if it were the ultimate and inevitable distillate of all other emotions.

A brass-and-pewter floor lamp with a frosted crystal shade stood beside an easy chair, within his reach. He seized it with both hands, lifted it high above his head, and threw it across the room. The shade shattered against the wall, and gleaming shards of frosted crystal fell like cracking ice. The metal base and pole hit the edge of the white-lacquered dresser and rebounded with a clang, clattered to the floor.

The thrill of destruction that shivered through him was of a dark intensity akin to a sadistic sexual urge, and its power was nearly as great as orgasm. Before his death, he had been an obsessive achiever, a builder of empires, a compulsive acquirer of wealth, but following his death he had become an engine of destruction, as fully compelled to smash property as he had once been compelled to acquire it.

The cabin was decorated in ultramodern with accents of art deco — like the ruined floor lamp — not a style particularly well suited to a five-room mountain cabin but one which satisfied Eric's need for a sense of newness and modernity in all things. In a frenzy, he began to reduce the trendy decor to piles of bright rubble. He picked up the armchair as if it weighed only a pound or two and heaved it at the three-panel mirror on the wall behind the bed. The tripartite mirror exploded, and the armchair fell onto the bed in a rain of silvered glass. Breathing hard, Eric seized the damaged floor lamp, held it by the pole, swung it at a piece of bronze sculpture that stood on the dresser, using the heavy base of the lamp as a huge hammer—bang! — knocking the sculpture to the floor, swung the lamp-hammer twice at the dresser mirror—bang, bang! — smashing, smashing, swung it at a painting hanging on the wall near the door to the bathroom, brought the picture down, hammered the artwork where it lay on the floor. He felt good, so good, never better, alive. As he gave himself entirely and joyfully to his berserker rage, he snarled with animal ferocity or shrieked wordlessly, though he was able/to form one special word with unmistakable clarity, “Rachael,” spoke it with unadulterated hatred, spittle spraying, “Rachael, Rachael.” He pounded the makeshift hammer into a white-lacquered occasional table that had stood beside the armchair, pounded and pounded until the table was reduced to splinters—"Rachael, Rachael" — struck the smaller lamp on the nightstand and knocked it to the floor. Bang! Arteries pounding furiously in his neck and temples, blood singing in his ears, he hammered the nightstand itself until he had broken the handles off the drawers, hammered the wall, “Rachael,” hammered until the pole lamp was too bent to be of any further use, angrily tossed it aside, grabbed the drapes and ripped them from their rods, tore another painting from the wall and put his foot through the canvas, “Rachael, Rachael, Rachael.” He staggered wildly now and flailed at the air with his big arms and turned in circles, a crazed bull, and he abruptly found it hard to breathe, felt the insane strength drain out of him, felt the mad destructive urge flowing away, away, and he dropped to the floor, onto his knees, stretched flat out on his chest, head turned to one side, face in the deep-pile carpet, gasping. His confused thoughts were even muddier than the strange and clouded eyes that he could not bear to look at in a mirror, but though he no longer possessed demonic energy, he had the strength to mutter that special name again and again while he lay on the floor: “Rachael… Rachael… Rachael…”