The Lonely Dead

Nina said nothing. Monroe stared at her. The man in the corner looked at her too. Finally it had begun to piss her off.

She turned to him and asked: 'Who are you, exactly?'

The man gazed back at her as if she was the vacation roster for a company he didn't work for.

When she looked back, Monroe's eyes were cold. 'You think I'm an idiot, Nina? Is that what it is?'

'No, Charles, of course not,' she said. 'This is old ground. I don't know anything more about Sarah Becker's return than you do.' He kept silent, forcing her to continue. 'I was in Montana visiting John, as I said at the time and several times since.'

'Right,' he said, blankly affable, and Nina began to feel even more disconcerted. Something about his abrupt switch in tone made her understand there was more going on than she'd realized, and that she was about to find out what it was.

It wasn't Monroe who spoke next. It was Corner Man. His voice was dry and unaccented, somewhat nasal.

'This would be John Zandt, correct?'

'Yes.' Nina kept her eyes on Monroe, bleakly realizing that her boss might be more subtle than she'd thought. He'd just fed her to this guy. He didn't appear discomfited by her gaze.

'The former Los Angeles homicide detective now connected to a murder in Portland. Whose daughter was abducted in May 2000, and never found. Who left the police force and disappeared, before re-emerging three months ago as, I understand, your lover.'

'A situation which is no longer the case. And in what sense would this be any of your business?'

The pause she left before this question had been supposed to make her sound strong. Even she heard it as evasive. It didn't matter much because she had evidently become inaudible. Neither of the men said anything.

She looked at Monroe, fighting to keep her voice calm. 'Is that what this is about? A slap on the wrist three years overdue? I kept John informed on the Delivery Boy case, which I shouldn't have done. You know this already. You know that I felt he deserved to know what we knew because his daughter was missing — and because he'd previously helped us nail a man who was killing black kids when we were getting nowhere at all and the media were kicking us all over town. You explained how my actions breached Bureau protocol and your own ideas of compartmentalization and you've never treated me quite the same since. I screwed up. I got the message. I thought we were done with it. Let's move on.'

Monroe glanced out of the window.

'We're not here to move on, Ms Baynam,' the Corner Man said. 'We're here to go back.'

'What the fuck are you talking about?'

'Nina

'Screw you, Charles. I'm tired of this. I don't know who the hell this guy is or why he thinks he's got the right to talk to me this way.'

Monroe pulled a briefcase onto the table, from which he slipped a standard-issue laptop. He opened it and angled the screen towards Nina. Neither he nor Corner Man made any attempt to move to a position where they could see, and Nina understood that they had already viewed whatever she was about to see.

The screen came on automatically, showing a black window in the centre. Monroe hit a key combination and the window changed from black to show rapidly moving colours. It took a moment to make out that it was a view from a video camera, shot across a road.

The street was empty for a second, revealing the backs of a row of houses on the other side. The view then pulled sharply forward to focus on one in particular. A two-storey house, wooden, painted a sandy colour with white trim, none of it very recently. It was caught in three-quarter view, revealing windows on the back and one side, all with drapes drawn, and a door in the back.

Nothing happened for a few moments. Cars passed, one from right to left, two in the other direction. There was no sound, but Nina couldn't tell whether this was because the file lacked it or if the laptop's volume was turned down.

The camera zoomed forward. It took a second to see what the cameraman had noticed. It was the house's back door. It had opened a few inches, revealing darkness inside. It closed again, for a second, and then opened enough for a man to come out. He was a little over medium height, with broad shoulders. He closed the door and walked along the back of the house. He was moving in such a way that a casual observer would have seen nothing of his face, and probably not even noticed his presence at all.

The person operating the camera had evidently not been such an observer, however, and pulled in hard. Nina bit her lip.

The man was John Zandt.

He walked out onto the road and the camera followed him to a car Nina recognized, a car he no longer owned but which had spent a few afternoons parked outside her house. He opened the driver's side door and just before he climbed in the camera caught a full-on view of his face over the top of the car. It was pale, his eyes hooded. He looked like many men she had seen photographed, walking with their hands cuffed together in front. He didn't look much like the man she had briefly thought she loved.

The video slowly pulled out to its widest view yet, one that showed half the street, and then stopped abruptly.

Her face carefully neutral, Nina sat back in her chair. 'Where did this come from?'

'It was emailed to us,' Monroe said. 'It arrived in the early hours of this morning.'

'What a weird coincidence,' she said. 'Coming right after the body in Portland, too.'

The two men were watching her carefully. Screw you, she thought. You want this, you're going to have to do it yourselves. 'So what's your point?'

'Our point,' said the man in the corner, 'is that this video shows your boyfriend visiting the house of a man who was questioned in regard to the Delivery Boy abductions — an investigation you were intimately involved with. Stephen DeLong was interviewed, presented a tight alibi, and was eliminated from the investigation.'

'Circumstantial evidence from this scene enables it to be dated to around the time of the case,' Monroe said.

'I'll just bet it does,' Nina said. 'Just like that big pullback at the end means any idiot could work out exactly where it was shot.'

Monroe blinked. Corner Man ignored her. 'About a week later, neighbours reported an offensive odour coming from the house we've just seen. DeLong was found in his bedroom, dead from a single gunshot wound. There was evidence of sustained physical violence to his person. The house featured the paraphernalia of small-scale narcotic distribution, which led the scene officers to assume the death was the result of a deal gone bad. DeLong was written up and forgotten. Nobody cared, and nobody put his death together with the ongoing investigation.'

'Why should they?'

'No reason, then. But as you've seen, there's a compelling reason to do so now. We really only need your input on one matter, Ms Baynam,' the man said. 'We'd like to talk to John Zandt.'

He leaned forward. 'Where is he?'

— «» — «» — «»—

Fifteen minutes later Nina walked out of the building. Her back was straight and her strides were of equal length. She didn't turn to look up towards Room 623's window, though she strongly suspected Monroe would be standing watching her go. If she saw him there was a danger she would march back into the building, run straight up the stairs and attempt to do him harm. She was strong. She might even manage it. It would feel good, but she might as well take her career and throw that out the window while she was there. This might effectively have happened already, but it wasn't going to be her who wrote it in stone.

Instead she got in her car and drove out of the lot. She took her time making the right turn and drove slowly for a while, not heading anywhere in particular. Within ten minutes she was both furious and a little frightened to see she was being tailed.

She pulled over at the next public phone box she saw. She walked over to it, feeling like an actress, and made two calls. When the first was answered she asked a favour, waited while someone explained why he couldn't do it, and then provided a brief but compelling reason why he could.

As she waited for the second call to be connected she watched the road and saw the nondescript sedan pull over twenty yards further along. The guy was either a beginner or he'd been told to make it obvious. Either pissed her off.

After about ten rings, the call was picked up.

'Things are badly fucked up,' she said to an answering service. 'Stay away and watch your back.'

She put the phone down and walked back to her car. As she passed the grey sedan she leaned across and flipped the driver the bird. He stared back impassively, but didn't follow. As she drove home she was dismayed to find that her eyes kept filling, until she realized it was fury that was causing it, as much as hurt. Fury was good. Anger led somewhere.

'You're going to rue the day, Charles,' she muttered, and felt a little better, but not for long. As an agent now suspended from duty, with an ex-boyfriend under investigation for two murders, and a boss who no longer trusted anything she said, it wasn't clear how she could make anyone rue anything at all.

— «» — «» — «»—

'We're getting out of here,' Ward said.

He was stuffing pieces of computer equipment into the bag he'd come with. He had stood and watched while Nina screamed down the phone at Zandt's answering service for a second and third time, before finally taking the phone from her hand.

'It doesn't matter who the guy in the suit is,' he said. 'It's clear what his job is. He's part of the squeeze on John, and he's powerful enough to be able to walk into FBI field office and have the boss there do what he says. You sure he wasn't Bureau brass?'

'He just didn't come over like it.'

'Whatever. He's in security somewhere, and he's either one of the Straw Men or doing what they tell him. That means we're not safe in this house or this city.'

'But where are we going to go?'

'Somewhere else. Do you speak any Russian?'

'Ward, we've got to find John. He's in far more danger than us. They're trying to nail him for something he didn't do.'

'Maybe. Maybe not.'

'What do you mean?'

'What I mean is we only know where he's been through what he's told us. He tells you he's in Florida, he tells me he's there too. He's got a previously established reason. Neither of us are going to run a trace on him, subpoena his cell company and demand to know exactly where the call is coming from.'

'But why would he have killed this Ferillo person?'

'Are you saying it's impossible? He killed the man he thought took his daughter. And back then he was still a cop.'

'I'm just saying he would have to have a very, very good reason.'

'Maybe he did. We're not going to know until he takes one of our calls. In the meantime is there any way you can get hold of his cell records? If we can do a point-of-origin trace we can confirm a wrong-state alibi for him.'

'I'm on it, Ward. I made a call on the way back here.'

'Fine. In the meantime, get your stuff together.'

'Ward, I'm not leaving my…'

He stopped packing, came and put a hand on each of her shoulders. He looked her in the eyes and she realized this was the closest they had ever stood. She realized also that this was a man who had spent three months on the road not for the fun of it, but because he'd known a moment like this would come.

'Yes, Nina, you are,' he said. 'We knew we only had so long before they came for us in earnest. This is it. It's begun.'

— «» — «» — «»—

Two hours later they were on 99 passing Bakersfield heading north. Ward was driving fast and not saying anything. Nina's cell rang and she ripped a nail snatching it out of her bag. She swore when she looked at the screen.

Ward glanced at her. 'Is it John?'

'No. I don't recognize the number. It could be the call I'm waiting for. Or…'

'If it's Monroe, don't tell him anything, and cut it off fast.'

She hit connect. She listened to the voice of Doug Olbrich, who had done what she had asked. She asked him three questions she had already formulated in her head. When she'd heard the answers she severed the connection and sat with her head in her hands.

Ward gave her precisely twenty seconds. 'So?'

She didn't move her head. 'That was a guy I know in LAPD. He's heading the task force on the hard-disk killer.'

'And?'

'I asked him to chase some records fast. He has someone who's very good at it.' Suddenly, and with no warning, she punched the dashboard with all her strength. 'I've screwed up, Ward.'

'Why?'

'Olbrich got hold of John's T-Mobile account. He tracked some points of origin. He noted that three days ago John made a call to a number which I recognize as your cell.'

'Yes. Big deal. We arranged to meet in San Francisco. That's when he told me he was in Florida.'

She nodded, said nothing. Looked at her hands in her lap. The cuticle under her torn nail was bleeding.

'Tell me, Nina.'

'John lied,' she said. 'He hasn't been to Florida in six weeks. He was in Portland the day Ferillo died.'

3: The Falling of Rain

The meaning of life is that it ends. Franz Kafka

19

She was found in some bushes. People are. They are found in woods, too, and in hot and cluttered bedrooms; they are found in back alleys and parking lots and the back row of movie theatres; they are found in swimming pools and in cars. You can be found dead almost anywhere, but bushes are often the worst. The bodies' condition and location leave little room for the comforting idea that they might just be asleep, drunk, passed out, unconscious in one way or another — but still capable of being led back to join the party of the living. Dead in the bushes is very dead indeed.

These particular bushes were around the back of the parking lot associated with Cutting Loose, a hair salon on the main drag through Snoqualmie. The body was discovered, as is often the case, by a man out walking his dog early in the day. Having kept it together for long enough to make a call on his cell phone, wait close to the spot — but far enough away to avoid attracting the curious — and finally point the way for the two cops from the sheriff's department, this man was now sitting on the other side of the street, back against a fence, head between his knees. His dog stood close by, confused by the smell of vomit, but loyal and game. When they got back to the house, the dog knew, he'd be confined to barracks for the long day while the human went out and did whatever it was he did when he wasn't there to hang out with the dog. The dog was therefore in no hurry to go home. If the price of a little extra freedom was sitting on rainwet asphalt near some regurgitation, that was fine by him. He licked his owner's hand, to show moral support. The hand flapped at him, feebly.

One of the policemen was now on the radio, putting out the word. The other stood a couple of yards away from the body, his hands on his hips. He had not seen a great many dead bodies, and there is something horribly transfixing about them. He was frankly glad that other policemen would soon arrive and take this situation off his hands, that it would not be his responsibility to spend the next several days, weeks or all eternity trying to work out what process had created this livid, could-not-be-deader thing out of someone living, how this woman had made the journey from some other place to here. He did not want to have to think overly much about the mind of a man — assuming it was a man, because it almost always was — who would think it right or even merely expedient to dump someone a few yards away from the side of the road like so much trash. Worse, perhaps, because people at least bothered to put their garbage in bags. This had been abandoned like it was less than that, as if it didn't even merit the temporary, above-ground burial people afforded to empty cans and cereal boxes.

He heard his colleague signing off, and decided he'd seen enough. As he was turning away, however, he noticed something glinting at the dead thing's head end. Against his better judgement, but feeling a little like a bona fide detective, he took a step closer to the body and bent down a little to get a closer look.

They had already informally decided that it would take neither long nor a genius to work out the cause of death. The woman was dressed in a smart suit, or the remains of one. Her body below the neck did not look like something you'd want to touch, but that was death's casual work, after the fact. It was above the neck that something had happened while she was still alive. There was something skewed about her head, and it was covered with brown, dried blood and other, blacker, material to such a degree that it was hard to make out the features. It was in the middle of this, just above the brow, that the weak morning sun was catching something.

'Careful, man,' his partner said. 'You screw up the scene and they'll pull your asshole out and wear it like a ring.'

'I know, I know,' he said.

Still he leaned in a little closer. This was as far as he was going to go, for sure. He tilted his head slightly, to reduce the glint. The smell was odd. The sight was bad. It was unpleasant all over.

In the mess that had been her forehead, something looked out of place.

He held his breath and moved forward another few inches. From here you couldn't avoid seeing the ants and other insects going about their duties, hurriedly, as if they knew someone was going to come and take this treasure away from them. You could also see that there was something stuck in the woman's forehead. The protruding edge was the width of a playing card, though it was much thicker — a quarter-inch, maybe slightly more. The glint came off the parts of this thing which weren't covered in dried blood. It seemed to be mainly made out of chrome, or some other kind of shiny metal. The lower edge of it looked to be black plastic.

Suddenly some of the remaining glare disappeared, as his partner leaned in to have a look and blocked out the sun. As a result the policeman could just make out something that looked like a very narrow label running along the end of the object.

'Fuck is that?' he said.

— «» — «» — «»—

By a little after nine it had been established that the thing sticking out of the woman's forehead was a hard disk, a small one, the kind found in laptop computers. It wasn't long before this information reached the FBI field office in Everett, and then quickly down to Los Angeles. From there, everything went batshit.

Charles Monroe tried every number he had, but Nina Baynam wasn't answering. He kept trying anyway, at regular intervals. Something had gone wrong with Monroe's life in a way he didn't quite understand, and it was getting more and more wrong by the minute. He had looked away, lost concentration for just one second, and turned back to find his ducks were no longer in a row.

His ducks had always been in a row before. Not now. It was even beginning to look as if some of them were missing.

20

Henrickson switched the engine off and turned to Tom with a grin. It was, Tom estimated, approximately the man's fifteenth of the morning, and it was as yet only ten o'clock.

'You ready for this?'

Tom gripped the backpack on his lap. 'I guess so.'

Forty-eight hours had now passed since he came back to Sheffer. The previous morning he'd woken from a night's non-sleep to find he felt too ill to consider a walk in the woods that day. Whatever adrenaline had hauled him back to Sheffer had burned out, leaving him exhausted, in many kinds of pain, and deeply nauseous. He also realized he had to do some proper thinking.

Henrickson had been cool about the delay, and told him to rest up. This Tom had done, initially, sitting in the chair in his room wrapped up in all the bedding he could find; getting stuff straight in his head, working out things he could do. In the early afternoon he had gone for a long drive, coming back after dark. By then he'd felt well enough to go for another drink with the journalist. This morning he'd felt better, if not exactly on top form. Calmer, perhaps. More compartmentalized.

Pulling in to the lot at the head of the Howard's Point trail provoked a far stronger reaction than he anticipated. If returning to his nest down in the gully had made him feel like a spirit coming home, stepping out of Henrickson's Lexus made him feel like his own grandfather. The journalist had parked on the opposite side of the lot to where Tom had come to rest — and fallen, for the first time — but that somehow made the layering effect even more unsettling. When the clunk of his car door closing echoed tightly off the trees, the view seemed to have a shivery fragility, as if it had been quickly painted over some other scene. Some emotional charge had changed. Of course the last time he'd been here he'd been drunk, whereas now he was merely slightly hungover, and feeling a bit sick, and there was a lot more snow than before.

'Jim, you know it's going to be very hard to find the place.'

'Of course.' The reporter had ditched his suit and was wearing an old pair of jeans and a tough-looking jacket. His boots spoke of proper walking experience. He looked hale and fit and altogether more prepared than Tom felt. 'You were out of it, and it was nearly dark. Not the end of the world if you don't find the same exact spot. Just… it would be good if you could.'

'Can't you just tell me what we're looking for?'

Grin number sixteen. 'Don't you like a surprise?'

'Not so much.'

'Trust me. It'll be great for the book. 'Kozelek leads the way back to the spot that changes history and biology and what the hell else as we know it. His fearless scribe points out the final proof. They share a manly hug.' It's a buddy thing. Hug's optional, of course.'

Tom nodded, wishing not for the first time that he hadn't mentioned the idea of writing a book. Henrickson had claimed not to be trying to get him drunk, again, and he believed him: yet by the end of the second evening Tom had spilled pretty much everything there was to know about himself. Pretty much.

'I just don't want to get lost again.'

'We won't. I've done hiking. I have a compass and I know how to use it. And if you didn't have a serious sense of direction, you'd be dead now.'

'I guess so.'

Tom swivelled his ankle gently. It still hurt, but the new boots seemed to help. He shrugged the backpack on. This time it held bottled water and a flask of sweet coffee and a couple of flapjacks. There was probably still glass at the bottom, too, but that was okay. He brought it along because it was from before. The glass was from before too. He had an idea that he might try to dump the bag in the forest somewhere, to try to leave behind everything it represented.

He walked over into the top corner, hesitated a moment, and then stepped over the thick log that formed a boundary to the parking area.

Henrickson waited until the man had made it a few yards up the trail, and then turned to look back across the lot. For just a moment he'd felt something in the back of his neck, almost as if he was being watched. He panned his eyes slowly around, but couldn't see anyone. Strange. He was usually right about that kind of thing.

He looked back to see Kozelek had stopped. Now that he was started, the man's enthusiasm for the trip was growing fast, as he had known it would.

'It's this way.'

Henrickson stepped over the log and followed him into the forest.

— «» — «» — «»—

Though there was a bank of cloud over to the west, the sun was strong and bright. It cast attractive shadows in the undisturbed snow. The two men walked for a while, climbing slowly, without saying much. By this time the road was a good distance behind them, and there was no noise but for the sound of their breath and feet.

'You seem pretty confident, my friend. You remember coming up this way?'

'Not remember. Just… I recognize the shape. Sounds stupid, maybe, and I'm really not much of an outdoors person, but…'

He stopped, and indicated the layout of the trees and hillside around them. 'Which other way are you going to go?'

Henrickson nodded. 'Know what you're saying, Tom. Some people, they got no sense of direction at all. Like some kid's wind-up toy. Let them go, and they walk in a straight line until they hit a wall. Others, they feel. They just know where they are. Works with time, too, matter of fact. What time do you think it is? Take a second. Think about it. Actually, don't: feel it instead. What time does it feel like?'

Tom considered. It didn't feel like any time at all, but it was probably about a half-hour since they'd started out.

'Half past ten.'

The man shook his head. 'Closer to eleven. About five to, I'd say.' He stretched his wrist out of his jacket and looked at his watch. A grin, and then he held it out to Tom. 'How about that. Four minutes to.'

'You could have checked earlier.'

'Could have, but didn't.'

Tom stopped walking. They were coming to a ridge, and he was momentarily unsure of which way to go. Henrickson took a few steps back and looked the other way. Tom realized the man was giving him a chance to work things out, to feel the way, and felt an absurd rush of gratitude. It had been a while since someone had trusted him, had been willing to think of him as someone who knew things. William and Lucy had grown old enough to see him as someone with faults, rather than qualities. Sarah knew him all too well. He was a given. The curse of the middle-aged man was knowing — or believing — that he'd told all he had to tell. Soon as you suspected that, you started wanting something, anything, to prove it wasn't so: and that's where the mistakes started, when the bad things happened.

'It's this direction,' he said, turning right.

'Feel the force, Luke.'

The next twenty minutes were hard going, and it was a while before either had spare breath to talk. Then the ground started heading down the other side of the ridge, with a much higher climb ahead. None of it looked familiar to him, but it seemed to be the way to go.

Tom glanced across at the reporter, who was walking alongside and matching him with easy strides. 'You've been looking for Bigfoot a long time, haven't you?'

'Surely have.'

'How come nobody believes in it?'

'Oh they do,' he said. 'Just, it's one of those things that's hard to make work, if you believe what we're supposed to believe. Nobody wants to look stupid, which is another way They work. You're prepared to look a little dumb once in a while, the world opens like an oyster.'

'So what is it?'

'What do you think?'

Tom shrugged. 'Some big ape, I guess. Something that lived here before humans arrived, then shrank back into the forests. There's plenty of space out here. Right?'

'Half right,' Henrickson said. 'Personally I believe they're the last surviving examples of Neanderthal man.'

Tom stopped, stared at him. 'What?'

Henrickson kept walking. 'Not a new theory, actually. Only problem is getting the detail to work. You know what archaeologists are like — or maybe you don't. Blah there's no evidence; blah the fossil record; blah my professor says it ain't so. Way I see it is this. You've got Neanderthal man, one of the best-adapted species the world has ever known. These guys had spears four hundred thousand years ago. They spread out over half the world, including into Europe — when that's no place you want to live. The ice age is still frosty, there's animals with very big teeth, and there is nothing, repeat, nothing, to make life easy for them. Yet they survive for hundreds of thousands of years. They have burial rituals. They have dentistry, which must have been horrible without Front Page to ease the wait. They make ornaments and jewellery and they have trade ties which spread the stuff over Europe. Cro-Magnon man eventually turns up — that's us — and for a while the two species sort of co-exist. Then the Neanderthals die out, bang, leaving about enough bones to fill a handbag. And apparently that's all she wrote.'

'So what did happen? According to you?'

'They never died out. There were never that many of them. They just got good at hiding.'

'Hiding? Where?'

'Two kinds of places. First is deep forests and mountains, out in northeastern Europe, Finland, the Himalayas — but also here in the good old US of A. The prehistorians claim there's no way Neanderthals could have got to North America. Theory is that man got here via a high northern land bridge, and that it wouldn't have been possible earlier than say fifteen thousand BC. I think that's underestimating the Neanderthals. No reason they couldn't have had little boats. They could have hugged the coast from Russia, managed to get across the big icy water down to the Northern Territories, then kept coming down the coast until they found somewhere habitable. Then, when we finally arrive in force, they head up into the forests. What better place? You've got thousands of square miles of wilderness that people still don't trouble much even now. Throughout Native American culture in this region there's some nice little hints. The Chinooks have tales about the 'ghost people' who lived in their own places, and who the tribe had a working relationship with. Then you got the 'animal people' of the Okanogans: the tribe lived right in these mountains and they believed there once were 'animals' that had culture before the 'people' — by which they meant humans — had got themselves together at all.'

'And the second place? The other place they hid?'

'Right under our noses. What's the most common type of legend all over Europe?'

'I don't know.' Tom also wasn't sure he was going the right way any more. They were past the bottom of the divide, and starting to head up again. The increasing harshness of the terrain was familiar, but nothing else, and the ground was getting steeper in most directions, so that didn't count for much. For the time being, he just kept going, and Henrickson kept on talking, with the smooth flow of someone who'd been over something many times in his head. And, if Tom was honest, with the confidence of someone who wasn't quite as bright as he thought.

'Fairies. Ogres. Elves. Trolls. All of which, according to me, are also examples of surviving Neanderthal man. Creatures that lived here before we did, and had their own strange customs. Who were common at first but then got more and more rare — until hardly anyone saw them any more. But we remember them. Language works in strange ways. You must have heard stuff like, in legends, 'There were giants here in those days'? I think 'giant' didn't mean 'big in body'. It meant that incomers found a previously existing population that was powerful and accomplished, like the Okanogans' animal people: a species that was culturally big.'

'But they died out.'

'Not completely. What else do we hear a lot about, all over the world? Ghosts. Shadowy presences. And what else? Aliens. The greys. Who, incidentally, seem to land their ships in forests quite often, which is a weird approach to aviation, don't you think? Greys, fairies, spooks are all ways of explaining strange stuff that we see every now and then. Ways of explaining away a whole species They claim died out, but which just faded into the background — and creeps around us, keeping out of our way.'

'But none of those things look remotely like Neanderthal man,' Tom said.

'No, for two reasons. First is tales swelling in the telling. Over hundreds, thousands of years, the legends take on their own weight, their own rules and trappings. Fairies look like this or that, elves got their cool green clothes, ghosts always got some sad story behind them. Second is that Neanderthal man has a way of clouding our minds.'

'What?'

'They reckon the species' throat and mouth maybe wasn't up to fully articulated speech. Yet they managed to do all this stuff, so obviously they could communicate, and in a way that mere body language and a system of hoots and grunts ain't going to pull off. My theory is that they communicated at least partly through telepathy. They still do, and even we do, now and then. Telepathy is just empathy turned up a whole lot. When they're confronted by something they think is dangerous, like us, they throw shapes into our heads. We see pictures in our own minds. They reflect our imaginations right back at us.'

'This is all nonsense,' Tom said, distractedly. 'I'm sorry, but I don't buy a word of it.'

'Think about our current endeavour. If I'm right, and we're looking for a Neanderthal, why does everyone who's seen Bigfoot say it's eight feet tall? They make us think they're tall, because tall is scary. And why do so many people — like you, Tom — report a vile smell? Why should they or any other creature go around smelling bad? No reason. They just make us think they do. It's another protection mechanism, one of the simplest in the book. They hide by putting smoke in our minds. That's why they're so hard to find. Nearer to civilization, we think we've seen a ghost. In a forest you don't expect to see something like that — except on a lonely road, where you've got your 'hitchhiker who isn't in the back seat after all' formulation — which is why you get Bigfoot instead. You see something closer to their true shape, because part of us has always known they're still out here.'

Tom stopped, and turned to look at the journalist. The man wasn't grinning, for once. He was deadly serious. Though Tom was pleased to have someone on his side, he'd have much preferred it if the man just thought there was a hitherto unknown primate on the loose, rather than a rationale involving elves and mind control.

But for the time being, that was a secondary concern. He had news of his own.

'I'm completely lost,' he said.

— «» — «» — «»—

An hour later things were no better. Henrickson had been patient, often walking a little distance away to let Tom try to get his bearings, encouraging him to walk ahead and saying he'd catch him up if Tom shouted to say he was back on track. Tom wasn't on track, however. The further he walked the less he felt he knew where he was. In the end he came to a halt.

Henrickson called from behind. 'We getting warmer, good buddy?'

'No,' Tom said. 'I don't know where the hell we are.'

'Not a problem,' Henrickson said, when he came up level. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a trail map. He unfolded it, consulted the compass attached on a string to his coat, and then made a small circle on the map. 'We're round about here.'

Tom looked. 'Here' was an area of white space with some tightly grouped topographical lines — the last half-hour had been an up-and-down struggle. 'Middle of nowhere.'

'Not quite. This here is a stream,' the man said, indicating a wavering line. 'You reckon we're close enough that this could be your gully?'

'I really don't know. I guess we could look.'

'Let's do that.'

About twenty minutes later they began to hear a steady trickling sound. They came around a large rock formation to find a rocky stream, about five feet across, coursing hectically between shallow, mossy banks.

Tom shook his head. 'This isn't it. And my ankle is beginning to ache.'

Henrickson looked upstream. 'Could be steeper that way.'

'Maybe.' Tom felt foolish, though he'd known this was going to be hard to impossible, and had warned the reporter. 'I just don't know.'

Henrickson was looking as fit and hale as when they started, but hadn't produced a grin in quite a while. 'Know what you're thinking, my friend,' he said, however. 'And it's not a problem. Like you'll have gathered, I really want to find this critter. And hey — what else am I going to do? Go back to the city and sit in traffic? Rather be out here walking. Let's follow this one a little while. We know we're looking for something like it, and the map doesn't show any others real close. But first, I'm about ready for a java boost.'

Tom started to shrug the bag off his back, but Henrickson held up a hand. 'No need. I'll get it.'

He undid the fastenings, and Tom heard the other man's hand rustling inside the top of the bag. 'Careful,' Tom said. 'There's glass in there.'

'Okay. But, um, why?'

'There's a couple of broken bottles from when I came out here the first time. I didn't clear it out properly. It should be down the bottom, but

He sensed the other man wasn't listening, and that his hands were no longer in his backpack. 'Are you okay?'

There was no reply. Tom turned to see Henrickson was holding something that wasn't the coffee flask, and looking at it.

'What's that?'

'You tell me. It was in your bag.'

Tom looked more closely, and saw a tiny bundle of bedraggled-looking plant matter. 'I have no idea.'

'Probably nothing. Must have just fallen in your bag, I guess.'

He looked up at Tom, and this time his grin split the man's face in two. 'Let's get going, what do you say? Upwards and onwards.' As they walked on, sipping hot, sweet coffee, Tom noticed that the other man seemed to have an extra swing in his stride.

Another forty minutes took them several hundred feet higher. They followed the stream through rises and falls, around outcrops. The banks didn't seem to be getting any higher. This time it was the reporter who stopped.

'Not liking the look of this,' he said. He pulled out his map again. 'We must be over here by now,' he pointed at another patch of white space, 'which is further east than I'd like to be.'

'What's that black line?'

'A road. It's possible that you just missed it when you were trying to find your way back, but … look at the topography lines. It's downhill to there, which you'd likely have been attracted to. Which case you wouldn't have taken two days to get home. So… what? You okay?'

Tom was standing with his mouth slightly open. He slowly shut it again. He spoke reluctantly. 'Yes. It's just…'

'I'm sensing inner turmoil here. Bad for the guts.'

'The woman. Patrice. The one who had the boots.'

'What about her?'

'She was there. She saw my pack and, according to her, left the footprints. Connolly said she lived up in a subdivision around here somewhere. Which means…' He stopped.

'She'll know where the place was, and maybe be able to just walk right to it. That what you're saying, Tom?'

Tom nodded.

'You really didn't think of this earlier? Or perhaps you just didn't want someone else coming in on the story.'

'Honestly, it just didn't occur to me. I was very sick when she was in the station.'

'Shoot.' Henrickson stood with his hands on his hips and looked the other way for a moment. Then he shook his head. 'Okay, my friend. Should have put it together myself. And, yes, I can get that it would have been cooler to get there ourselves. But we're not getting there, are we?'

'Jim, I'm sorry.'

'That's okay. But I think what we're going to do now is walk back to the car, and go get us some reinforcements. This woman can take us there, it's going to save us a whole lot of time, and time is of the essence.'

Henrickson took out the map once more, and consulted his compass. 'We'll cut straight over there,' he said. 'Sense of direction is all very well. But let's go back the quick route, shall we?'

He strode off back the way they'd come, and Tom followed.

— «» — «» — «»—

It took them a little over an hour to get back to the trail head, aided by a route that was more direct and largely downhill. By the time he stepped back over the log boundary of the lot, Tom knew something had changed. He was no longer leading, he was following. That wasn't the way things should be. If necessary, he'd have to do something to change it.

Henrickson backed out onto the road and went a couple of miles back towards Sheffer. He stopped at a roadside latte hut and asked a few questions while getting the flask refilled. When he got back in the car, he winked.

'Think we found what we're looking for,' he said. 'Few miles round up the other side. Development called Cascade Falls. Never took off. But there's one inhabitant for sure. The stoner back there thinks the woman's name is Anders.'

'That's it,' Tom said. 'Patrice Anders. She's the one.'

'Hallelujah. We're back in business, my friend.'

It took nearly half an hour to take the road back over the highway, go north, then turn off into the mountains. The road soon began to narrow. Put in by the developer, it did nothing more than provide a way to get up to the land they'd been trying to sell. Soon there were thick trees on either side.

'Surely is the road less travelled,' Henrickson said, cheerfully.

Tom wondered what would make someone come and live in a place like this. Every now and then you saw a sign nailed to one of the trees nearest to the road. You could buy a piece of this, and come and live here. And then do what?

Eventually Henrickson pulled over and killed the engine. Just ahead on the left-hand side of the road was a gate. The name Anders was visible on a flat piece of wood nailed to it.

They got out, unlatched the gate, and walked down a track which wandered through the trees. After two hundred yards they saw a building up ahead. By the time they reached it, Tom was wondering if they were in the right place after all. The place looked small and cold and empty despite the light on over the door.

'Not much of a house,' he said. It looked like more of a cabin with a porch, just a square log building with a car port on one side. The entrance to the house was under there, looking back up the track: a door with the number '2' burned in at waist height. There were four small glass panels in the upper half, the view of the interior obscured by a thick curtain.

Henrickson knocked. 'Compact, that's for damned sure.'

When, after a few moments, there was no answer, he knocked again. Tom meanwhile drifted up a little rise in front of the house. There was another small cabin twenty yards away in the trees, but it was dark and a little overgrown. When he walked a little further he could make out the faint glint of a small icy pond, also presumably on the property. The far side was a line of trees, apart from…

He walked a little further and thought he could see another cabin around the other side. He thought about calling out to Henrickson, but then, for some reason, didn't. Instead he walked back.

Henrickson was knocking for the fourth time. 'No one's home,' he said. 'She's probably back in Sheffer enjoying the bright lights and big-city ambiance. Which is kind of a pain. However…' He looked at his watch. 'Time is moving on. You say she said the place where you were was a good walk out from her property. Maybe we're not going to make it there and back today anyhow.'

He stood back from the door and walked over to one of two small windows on the next side. This too was curtained, but with thinner material. Tom looked through it with him, but you couldn't make out much of the inside.

'We're done for the day,' Henrickson decided. 'We'll head ourselves to town and kick back. See if we can get hold of this woman's phone number, so we can do things properly tomorrow. For now, I'm as hungry as a bear. No offence.'

They peered back through the window a final time, and then set off back up the track towards the gate.

It wasn't until they were back in the car, and the noise of its departure had drifted down through the trees, that the curtain at the front door moved.

21

When she was sure the men had gone, Patrice unlocked the door and stepped outside. She stood a while, listening carefully, but heard only what she always heard on her property: nothing at all. She didn't count the fall wind, or birds in spring, or busy summer insects. They weren't noises.

Tracks in the snow showed the men had walked down the drive and then right around the cabin. She realized that it also suggested that one of them had…

She followed the shuffling marks which led up over the small ridge and down towards the lake. They stopped after a few yards. Patrice saw that, unless the man had been very unobservant, he should have been able to spot the other small building on the far side. Yet she had not heard him call out, or mention it to the other man. That didn't necessarily mean anything. He could simply have been cold or bored or hungry. Wouldn't have mattered anyway. There was nothing in that cabin except tools and damp and the memory of an unexpected bout of love-making that had swept her and Bill along with it one winter night when they were supposed to be patching up the roof.

She walked down to the quarter-acre pond that marked the start of the wilderness section of her property. She sat on the bench that hugged the big tree a few yards back from its edge, and looked out across the icy water.

'They're coming,' she said, quietly. 'What do I do?'

He didn't answer. He never did. He didn't even know what she was talking about. But she always asked, just in case. Men like to feel involved.

— «» — «» — «»—

In the months after Bill's death, Patrice had found herself in a strange new world in which everything seemed to have been broken and put back together not quite right. She learned that a fridge looks cold if stocked only with what you need, unleavened by the unexpected that caught your partner's eye. She remembered that pieces of paper didn't actually come with doodles, that envelopes, bills and till receipts didn't spontaneously develop sketches of trees or cats or boats. They looked odd without them. One of the hardest things she learned was that there no longer existed homes for some kinds of information. She could pass the time of day with the mail man, and she could chat in line at the market: but she couldn't tell Ned his nose was weird, or turn to someone and sing the tune of some silly advertisement that made her smile. That's the kind of thing makes people think the poor old bitch is going batty, such a sad story, something should be done. An event happened and then was gone, like a drop of rain falling onto hot asphalt. Nobody watching but her, a VCR that didn't work.

You got through a day and wondered what your reward was. It soon became evident the prize was you got to withstand tomorrow too. You got through it, hour by long hour, but at the end you looked up without much expectation. You had begun to understand the score. Sure enough: today's prize was the same. Outwardly calm, but with a scream building like the sound of a long-forgotten steam engine in the back corner of a basement, you got through that tomorrow too, and a flat hardpan of further tomorrows after that. You got through enough of them to realize you'd been had, that they aren't tomorrows after all but the wretched stretch of an endless today. What can you do? Rebellion gets you nowhere. If you're giving up smoking, and it all suddenly gets too much and you decide that the chance to not smoke tomorrow is not sufficient reward for having successfully not smoked today, then you can stomp furiously to the store and buy a pack and tear them open and make yourself feel happy and disappointed and defiant and guilty. No such triumphant failure exists with death. You can't say, 'Screw this. Bring my husband back'. People realize this, dimly. They don't put the world to the test because they understand that to finally articulate this demand, and have it denied, would drive them completely insane. They obliquely acquire the harsh intelligence that there's no way out, that they can't give up giving up, and go find the emergency packet of their loved one; can't retrieve him or her from where they've been hidden all along, on top of a cupboard in the kitchen or behind the bath upstairs; can't dust them off and run their fingers through their hair and kiss them gently on the lips to wake them and the world back to normality, as if the whole episode had been some bad dream or stupid idea.

After a lifetime of unconsciously doing and thinking the right thing, of being born on the liberal side of every debate, Patrice found herself prey to thoughts of the utmost political incorrectness. She looked at people clogging the lanes of the market, people who were old and cranky and a pain to be around. Six months before she would have asked herself what had made them so unhappy, and if there was anything she could do to help. Now she just thought how unfair it was they were still alive. When she saw an appeal on television for a children's hospital she asked herself why people went so misty-eyed over kids when they'd done so little for the world, when someone like Bill had so much longer to become a part of other people's lives. Hers, for example.

And when someone tried to put an AIDS pin on her in the street over in Snohomish one afternoon, she snapped at them and pushed the boy aside. The boy — who was doe-eyed and good-looking — turned to his co-worker, a strikingly pretty teenage girl fairly dripping with compassion, and made a remark.

Patrice fixed him with a look. 'Getting laid the caring way?'

The boy flushed. By the time she got to the car Patrice was vermilion with self-dislike, but a voice inside was still jabbering. It just wasn't fair. Someone kills themselves skiing — after choosing to slide down a mountain on slippery sticks, in other words — and it's a tragedy. If someone gets lung cancer then it's 'Well it's your own fault, you me-murdering smoker shit.' Even his widow is implicated — she could have stopped him, surely? Did she just not care enough? — and the loss is compromised by shame. We search for fault because it lets God off the hook, and without Him we don't know where to turn.

Patrice knew all about fault. It was Patrice who had killed her husband, after all.

Five years before they came north, Bill buckled under the Zeitgeist and gave up smoking. He found it hard, tough as hell in fact, but he stuck with it. Five months later they found themselves on the deck of the bar in Verona. They'd had a lovely day. A good meal was in prospect. As they sat with the balcony to themselves and the sun going down, everything was pretty perfect. They chatted, and they smiled, and they looked out over the inlet. Everything was fine, but it wasn't right, and Patrice watched Bill and knew he was dully accepting that some of his most pleasurable moments were now minor ordeals — the ordeal of missed pleasure, which is what we have in the West instead of pain.

And so she reached into her bag and pulled out something she'd bought at the market up in Cannon Beach that morning. It hadn't been a foregone conclusion, but now she'd watched his face she didn't know what else to do. She put the pack of cigarettes on the table.

He looked at the pack, and smiled wistfully, as if shown a photograph of a good friend who'd died eight months before.

He leaned forward, and kissed her.

He didn't have one that evening. But the next night, he did.

The pack lasted a whole month. There was no way of telling whether the cigarette which sparked off the cancer came from it, or the others which followed. But being human, you assume it came from the one she gave him, or at least could have done. We paint those lines, make those connections, open our hearts up to blame; we believe it rains because we are bad. In the remaining years he was never more than an occasional smoker, and he was certainly a lot happier. Maybe the cigarettes had nothing to do with it. Plenty of my-body-is-a-temple merchants get whacked with the tumour stick too. That's the thing with death: you just don't know. You never know what you should or shouldn't do or have done until it's too late — and actually, you don't know then either. It's all a great big game of truth or consequences, only there's no truth, only consequences. Truth is a fiction we backfill to make some circumstance seem less awful, more explicable, or someone's fault — even if it has to be our own.

She didn't think about that pack of cigarettes often, but when she did it wasn't long before another thought came to mind; came to ask her whether she'd bought that pack for Bill after all, or whether it had been more to do with her not wanting her precious Verona time to be spoilt by the knowledge that he wasn't as happy as he could be. The only thing that made those moments possible to bear was the certain knowledge that Bill wouldn't have minded even if the latter had been true. He had loved her that much. Then he'd died.

For a time, after a few months, it felt as if things were easing a bit. It soon became clear, however, that this was merely the calm before the storm. She started to slip, badly. Days began to get harder, longer.

Then, one long December night in 2002 as she approached her first Christmas without him, something burst in her head. She owned a CD of his favourite tracks, chosen by him to be played at his funeral back down in Portland. Songs she'd loved with him, classical pieces she'd never heard but which he evidently held dear in that part which was separate; that part that pre-dated them and had now gone on without her. She hadn't listened to the CD since the funeral. That night she put it on for the second time, listened right the way through. She found a huge bottle of scotch Bill had left behind, and drank it all. She had never done anything remotely like it in her entire life.

Midnight found her staggering in the trees outside, hair whipped by a cold gale, barefoot and nearly insensible. She had talked and she had screamed and snarled and she had cried. Her throat was torn and dry. She had left the door to the house open, and it was thwacking in the wind, way behind her. She didn't feel foolish. She felt like tearing out the eyes of everyone in the world. She felt like finding someone, anyone, and bashing their brains out with a rock. She was caught up in a whirling cloud of horror, and that night she knew she had cut through to the centre of everything. The centre, the truth, was this:

Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.

To kill herself would be to give in. Death's gang is bigger and tougher than anyone else's. Always has been, and always will be. Death's the man, there's no question, but she wasn't going to be on his side. So who else? It was impossible to take God seriously any more. She was sick of making excuses for the senile old shit, helping him out of his endless scrapes, patching and mending his appalling record of capriciousness. God was gone for her, but Death wasn't getting her for a sunbeam either.

Faced with this, she made a decision as she stood howling on the edge of a cold, cold lake, still swigging from the bottle of her dead husband's drink. She wasn't, in what she understood to be the popular parlance, going to be anyone's bitch no more. She would owe no allegiance to anyone or anything. No person, no god, no idea, no truth, no promise. Nothing was worth it, nothing could be trusted. There had been Bill. Now there was nothing.

But then two weeks later she had found something, something in the forest; or it had found her; and she changed her mind.

— «» — «» — «»—

The sky was dark now, and the lake looked like a sheet of black marble. It was cold. It was time to go back inside. She sat a little longer, however, because she loved this view and she feared things were about to change. She feared that though the men had gone, they would come back, and that she might be forced to defend the only thing she really cared about.

So be it.

22

We had holed up in the Morisa, a hunk of faded grandeur near the centre of Fresno. The hotel looked like it had been built to withstand sustained bombing. We liked that about it. We arrived in town late the previous night and decided not to drive any further. Until we had a plan, and somewhere in particular to go, we could be heading in one of many wrong directions. We went to the desk separately and booked rooms on different floors and went upstairs and went to sleep. Early next day we walked out into the downtown. We walked and we walked but couldn't work out where to go or what to do. There's something very alienating about stores when you have no interest in shopping. Who are these people? What are they buying, and why? They seem no less weird and irrelevant than the boarded-up fronts or the graffiti-strewn alleyways between abandoned warehouses. Weirdly, I thought I saw some letters I recognized on a door down one of these, but closer inspection showed the second letter was a 'B', not an 'R'. I think. I'm not sure. I was feeling pretty paranoid.

Late morning had found us back in my hotel room. The room was not large and had not been decorated recently. I sat in the chair. She sat on the bed. We drank the coffee when it arrived.

Nina was regretting leaving LA. She wanted to go back. I wouldn't let her. I understood that it felt like running away — it was running away. She had a job, too, even if she'd currently been asked not to do it. For her to be in this position because of a relationship to a man (and a relationship that was finished, moreover) was the kind of thing that would piss any woman off. Nina wasn't just any woman, either. She had ire in depth. She was so furious at Zandt having lied to her that she wouldn't turn her phone back on. I tried calling him, a few times, but never got anything more than the same old robotic voice telling me the phone was off. He could be anywhere in the country, doing God knows what — or in serious trouble. For all we knew, he could be dead.

It wasn't that either of us thought it was impossible that Zandt had killed Ferillo. We both knew that, during the initial search for his daughter, when he had still been on the force, he had privately cornered and killed the man he was convinced was responsible. The problem was that a further abduction had taken place after this event. We now had a name for that person — Stephen DeLong — and already knew he had been only one of several people abducting to order for the Straw Men, my brother being chief amongst them. The sudden arrival of a video file nailing John for DeLong's murder — and which had evidently been held in reserve for a long time — proved they were after him, and willing to do a great deal to send bigtime trouble his way. The question was whether the death of Ferillo was an example of this, or part of the cause.

Nina had made two calls from the room's landline. These had established that Ferillo had a restaurant called the Dining Room on Stark Street in Portland. Four years previously he had been arrested as part of a racketeering investigation down in LA, and had been close to going away for a long time. He'd walked, and got himself from there into the position of owning a vaunted eatery patronized by the great and the good of northeast Oregon. From minor mob to wealthy restaurateur was a mighty bound, but said nothing about why Zandt might have decided to explode into his life — or why someone might choose to make it look that way.

After the calls we sat in silence for a while. The coffee got slowly colder, but we kept drinking it anyway, until my stomach felt bitter and curdled. I had the window open wide and was staring out over battered buildings as an angry sky dropped persistent rain. It felt absurd not to be doing something, but I couldn't think what it might be. We had no way of finding John, and no way of getting closer to the Ferillo investigation.

Then suddenly a very dim light went off in my head. It flickered, sputtered out for a second, then came back a little stronger.

'Call Monroe,' I said, slowly.

'No way.'

'See it from his point of view. He's not an idiot. He knows something major happened to you at the end of last year. You get shot, and Sarah Becker is back with her parents. But you tell him nothing, and now someone you're intimately tied to is going around doing very bad things.'

'Or looks like they are.'

'Whatever. Even if Monroe didn't have someone pushing him from behind, you'd be standing at the end of a long plank right now.'

'What are you not saying?'

'What do you mean?'

She looked at me squarely. 'What I mean is that there's something in your voice that I don't understand.'

'Tell me again about what happened when you went to The Knights motel. The day Jessica's body was found.'

'Ward

'Just tell me.'

'I got a call from Charles. On my cell. He said someone had just taken out a cop in a patrol car and then disappeared.'

'And then what?'

'Nothing. He told me where it was and said he wanted me down there.'

'For a cop-killing.'

She hesitated. 'Yes.'

'Which is nothing to do with the FBI, and of no interest to him. Unless…'

She was silent for a full twenty seconds while she thought it through. 'Oh Christ.'

'Yeah. Maybe.'

She blinked, rapidly. 'So why on earth would we talk to him?'

'Because we don't have anyone else. And because then you get to ask him this question and see what he says, and if he has no good answer, then… either we're in worse trouble than we thought, or we have something to work with.'

She'd evidently made the decision before I spoke. She got off the bed and pulled her phone from her bag, turning it on. Within a couple of seconds it chirped several times.

'Messages,' she said. She listened. Then pulled the phone from her ear and stood with a strange expression on her face.

'John?'

She shook her head. 'Monroe. Four times. No message, just 'call me.'

'So call him. Not his office number. Call his cell.'

'But if he does a point-of-origin he'll know where we are.'

'He'll know where we were. Come on, do it.'

She dialled. Listened to it ring, with her eyes on me.

Then: 'Charles, it's Nina.'

From six feet away I could hear the immediate torrent of speech. Nina listened for a moment.

'What are you… Oh Jesus. Charles, I'll call you back.'

She cut the connection. Seemed for a moment actually speechless.

'What? Nina — what?'

'They've found another woman with a hard disk.'

— «» — «» — «»—

At half past five it was getting dark and we were sitting in the car fifty yards back from a place called the Daley Bread. We were there because it was a place I'd noticed on the way in the night before, big and anonymous, and we'd chosen it because it was on a big street, four turns off 99 and the open road north or south. Easy to find, easy to drive quickly away from. We were there early because we wanted to see if anyone was going to be put into position, whether calls might have been made to the local cops or field office, or… anyone else. Whether Monroe could be trusted even a little, in other words.

In half an hour we saw no one except a handful of bedraggled citizens shuffling past with tattered blankets around their shoulders, interspersed with small knots of the young and well-heeled. The two appeared utterly unrelated, and it was hard to understand how they inhabited parts of the same space, as if they were two separate species that just happened to look a little like each other. We watched each group approach and then walk away. Some peered into the car and doubtless wondered why a couple of people might be sitting there on a cold, dark evening. We stared back. We were about as paranoid as we could be. When no one was around we just watched the street in both directions.

At quarter past six, fifteen minutes ahead of the appointed meeting, I opened my door and got out.

'Be careful,' she said.

'I'll be fine. He doesn't know what I look like.'

'No. But other people do.'

I walked up the road at a moderate pace, trying to place myself somewhere between the derelicts and the young and cool. I waited a beat on the opposite side of the road to the diner, saw no one who looked like law enforcement outside, and very few people within.

As I walked across the road I realized that anyone with half a brain would have held the location of the meeting back until Monroe was actually in town, to make it harder for him to mobilize local agents, if he had a mind. More than ever before I wished Bobby was around. Or my mother. Without either, I knew there was some part of my back which was always going to feel uncovered.

I asked a question, quietly and without moving my lips.

'Is this a stupid idea?' There was no reply.

Inside the restaurant it was warmer and a little stuffy. A tired-looking girl in a uniform came straight over with a menu in her hand. 'I'm Britnee,' she said, unnecessarily. She had a badge the size of a plate. 'Will you be dining alone tonight?'

I said I would, and that I had my eye on one of the booths that ran either side of the central partition of the room. As there were only two other couples present in the entire place, she had no real choice but to sit me where I'd asked.

I ordered a chilli without looking at the menu. When she went off to wake up the cook, I got myself into the position Nina and I had agreed upon. I sat close up against the right-hand side of the booth, with my back to the low wall which separated it from its twin on the other side. Neither table could be seen from the other side, but I should be able to hear.

I pulled out a free magazine that I'd picked up in the foyer of the hotel, got my head down, and started reading.

Five minutes later I heard the door of the restaurant open. A quick glance showed Nina entering. Britnee tried to send her to one of the window tables, presumably because of their fabulous view of the cold, wet street outside, but Nina insisted. I lost sight of her as the waitress led her around the other side, but a minute later heard the settling sound of someone sitting on old Naugahyde, the other side of the partition wall.

We sat in silence for a while. I heard another waitress shuffle over to Nina and ask if she wanted a drink, and I heard Nina's reply. Soundwise, it was going to work fine.

I kept running my eyes over advertisements for local stores I had no interest in, and for deeply historic, family-run restaurants which looked identical to what you'd find in any town in the country. It felt strange knowing that Nina was the other side of the divide, doing the same thing. Every now and then I watched the street outside for a while. Nothing happened.

Then finally I heard Nina's voice, quietly.

'He's here,' she said.

I glanced quickly at the door again and saw an athletically built man in his late forties. He was wearing a suit and a long buff overcoat. He came into the restaurant walking quickly, and was past Britnee before she could even suggest a nice seat out on the terrace. He'd evidently clocked Nina's position from the outside.

'Hello Charles,' I overheard, a moment later.

There was the sound of someone sitting down. 'Why couldn't we meet at your hotel?'

'How do you know I'm at a hotel?'

'Where else are you going to be?'

There was a long pause, and then Nina said: 'Charles — are you okay?'

'No,' he said. 'And neither are you. The video's been checked. It's John, and it's not faked. His thumbprint on the bottle opener in Portland isn't fake either, and there's now an eyewitness who saw a man leaving the building half carrying a woman. This man told the witness the girl was drunk and he was taking her home. The photo fit looks so like Zandt it's untrue, and the girl confirms the likeness. I also talked to Olbrich and I know what he found out for you. John was in Portland that night.'

'Thanks, Doug.'

'He's a policeman, not your personal fucking information service. Zandt killed Ferillo, Nina. Accept it. He also hit the girl hard enough to give her concussion. I don't know what the hell is going on in his head but protecting him is going to do you no good at all.'

'Going after him is not going to help you either. You're committed.'

'What do you mean?'

At that moment two things happened. The first was that the waitress arrived with my chilli and took about as long setting it down, and made about as much noise, as you would have believed possible. She also wanted to ask me a lot of questions. Where I was staying, how much I was enjoying being right here in historic Fresno, if I was sure I didn't want a side of onion rings, she could go back and rustle them right up? I answered these as quickly and monosyllabically as I could.

The second was that Nina dried.

I didn't have to see her to know she was staring down at the table, unable to take the next step. So I made a decision. It was a mistake. I stood up, left my food, and walked around the partition.

I pulled a chair over to the end of the booth where Nina and Monroe sat opposite each other with untouched sodas.

Monroe stared at me. 'Can I help you?'

'I hope so,' I said. 'I'm a friend of Nina's. I'm going to ask you the question she doesn't want to ask.'

'Nina, do you know this guy?'

'Yes.'

'Your name is Charles Monroe. My name is Ward Hopkins. I'm one of only two people who can back up what Nina's eventually going to tell you. Probably the only one you're going to listen to, as you're unlikely to take John Zandt's word for much.'

'I've no intention of listening to you either, whoever the hell you may be. Nina…'

'You will listen,' I said. 'After you've explained to us how you knew there was a body to be found in The Knights.'

He wasn't expecting that. He tried to stare me down, but it's a funny thing: since my parents died, it's a lot harder to scare me. It was never that easy, and now it's pretty hard. It's like a part of me, right deep down, doesn't really give a shit any more.

Nina was watching him carefully. 'Are you going to answer him?'

He didn't say anything, and I saw the change in Nina's face, and realized she suddenly believed what I'd suggested.

'You bastard,' she said.

'Nina… I don't know what this guy's told you, but…'

'Really?' I said. 'Here it is in black and white. If a cop gets killed, it's LAPD's problem and job and business. It's not an FBI matter unless the cops choose to make it so, which they won't. The Feds are the big brother they never wanted: this isn't the X-Files, where you get called on parking offences or for spelling mistakes or just anything at all that looks juicy and like someone in a suit might help. Robbery Homicide has a special section dedicated to high-profile killings: they have entire divisions who'll drop everything to go after someone who killed one of their own. So what were you doing there? And so fast? How come you were on the scene before anyone went into the motel room? Before anyone knew there was something to be found?'

Monroe shook his head. 'This is ridiculous. Nina, this guy's crazy and we're in enough…'

'Charles, look at me and shut up.'

I didn't even recognize Nina's voice. It was a sound somewhere between a hiss and a ragged growl, like some large non-domesticated cat, long caged, finally tired of being screwed around.

Monroe looked at her. I did too.

'Charles, where are my hands?'

He stared at her. 'Under the table.'

'What do you think I'm holding?'

'Oh, Christ, Nina

'That's right. And I will shoot you right here and now unless you start saying things I can believe.'

'People know where I am.'

'No they don't,' she said. 'No way you're going to compromise your precious reputation by advertising you're coming upstate to talk to me, not with this crap about John floating around. Unless you've brought other people with you, of course, which so far it doesn't look like you have.'

'Of course I haven't,' Monroe said, momentarily looking so angry it was hard not to believe him. 'For God's sake — we've worked together for a long time. We owe each other.'

'Right. That's what I thought. Until I was suspended yesterday. By you.'

'I had no choice. You know that. Zandt has compromised you too much.'

'Compromised? Talk to me about being compromised, Charles. Start by answering Ward's question. My hands are still right where they were and I still mean exactly what I said.'

Monroe went quiet, staring down at his table mat. It held over-saturated pictures of high-fat food, and I knew it wouldn't be able to hold his attention for long.

'Things are going wrong,' he said, in the end. His voice was quiet. 'And not just for you.' He looked up. 'But it's your fault. It's whatever personal mission you're on. Why wouldn't you just tell me what happened last year?'

'To protect you,' she said. 'There was nothing you could do to help, and we didn't know who we could trust. If anyone.'

'Sorry, that just sounds like paranoia.'

'It isn't,' we said, simultaneously.

Monroe looked at me properly for the first time. 'Who did you piss off? Who the hell were you dealing with?'

Nina looked at me. I nodded.

'They're called the Straw Men,' she said. 'We don't know how many there are, or even who they are. They used to own a big chunk of land up in Montana, which is the place that got blown up.'

'You did that?'

'They did. It was wired,' I said. 'It was a field of evidence. Bodies. Many bodies. These people kill for fun. They had a chain of victim supply using people like Stephen DeLong. The man you once called the Delivery Boy was another one of their procurers — the most important of them, a serial killer in his own right, and some part of the overall organization. He's also my brother. He calls himself the Upright Man. He was key to one of their other sidelines. You remember the explosion at the school in Evanston last year?'

'Yes. They got two kids for it.'

'It wasn't them. It was him. Also other events and shootings in Florida, England, Europe, going back twenty years. Maybe longer. The group already existed back in the mid-sixties. They do these things and set up other people to take the falls.'

Monroe looked bewildered. 'Nina — do you believe this?'

'Belief is irrelevant. This is all true. There is a group of people who live in the cracks of this country, and who have done so for a long time. They are powerful, and they kill. That's who we pissed off. And now, for the last time: tell me about Jessica.'

He only hesitated for a moment. His decision was made.

'I got a call,' he said, quietly.

Even though she'd known it was coming, I think she still nearly shot him. I think Monroe thought that too.

Then there was silence for a long time.

— «» — «» — «»—

Monroe eventually opened his mouth to speak again. His voice clicked. He took a sip of soda, then changed it to a gulp.

'I got the call the evening before,' he said. 'To my cell — the personal one. Not many people have the number. I assumed it was you, in fact. I was at the theatre with Nancy. It was the intermission, we were in the bar, it was very noisy. A man's voice said something, but I couldn't really hear him properly and by the time I was outside he'd rung off. I had no reason to… Then next morning I was on the way to work and I got a second call. Again it was a man, and he asked what the hell was wrong with me, was I not interested? I said I didn't know what he was talking about. He told me a cop had just been shot, and I should go to The Knights motel right away. It…'

'It would be good for you,' Nina said, as if Monroe had just admitted he wanted to feed crack to babies while beating off.

'Yes,' he said. 'That's exactly what he said.'

'The same number that called you the night before?'

'Yes. For all I knew it could have been someone in the department.'

'Without declaring their identity? Yeah, right.'

'If it was going to be good for me it would also be good for the bureau.'

'Talk to the hand, Charles. I don't believe you and I don't care. You went there because you were tipped off there was something worth your while, something good for your career, and you pulled me into something you knew was tainted. You told no one that you had prior knowledge. You manoeuvred Olbrich into assembling a task force and you worked it for a couple of days until it started looking like it wasn't going anywhere. When we were in the McCains' house and I asked if we were sure the cop-killer also murdered Jessica, you already knew the two could be different.'

'The fact they could be didn't mean they were.'

'Oh, come on. You even tried to push me away from the idea. Then the morning after John suddenly made the Most Wanted List for the Ferillo killing, you get another email. Untraceable again, I assume?'

'It doesn't matter how it came, Nina. It's real. And get off your horse, for God's sake. You knew. You knew that Zandt had killed DeLong and you withheld the evidence.'

'I didn't know at the time. He only told me late last year.'

'Whatever. The minute you heard you were an accessory after the fact, so don't…'

I interrupted. 'Who was that man with you when you showed Nina the film?'

'I don't know,' he said, bitterly. 'He arrived that morning and already knew all about it. About everything. He had NSA security clearance but yesterday I tried to trace him and they claim he doesn't exist. I pushed it and shouted at some people and…'

'And now things are getting shaky for you too,' Nina said.

'Only indirectly.' He breathed out heavily. 'The Gary Johnson file is being re-opened.'

'What?'

'Some attorney in Louisiana is suddenly claiming he has evidence we tampered with the forensic reports. Specifically, that you did, and I looked the other way. Someone wants you discredited, and as the senior agent on that case I'm going to share the ride. Satisfied?'

'You compromised yourself, Charles. Don't blame me.'

'And don't you claim any moral high ground either. You withheld knowledge of a homicide, lied about what happened last year — and do you really think I don't know you took Jessica's disk out of evidence for forty-eight hours? Either is enough to ruin you and both were your choice and your fault.'

'Now there's been another killing with a disk,' I said. 'Did you get a warning of that too?'

'No. And look — who the hell are you, anyhow?'

'Ward's parents were killed by the Straw Men,' Nina said. 'He helped us save Sarah Becker's life and he's the only person in the world that I trust right now. I think that's enough. Tell me about the new killing.'

'Nina

'You got pulled into this through Jessica. If this is another murder by the same man, then we have some small chance of solving them, which is the only outcome that stands a hope in hell of making your life right again.'

'And yours.'

'Mine's flushed already. That pisses me off. I want to find the people who've done it. Ward and I have business with them.'

'Her name was Katelyn Wallace,' Monroe said. 'She worked the night shift at the Fairview in Seattle. Someone came and snatched her out of a hotel full of guests and with a night janitor right there on duty with her. She was found forty miles east in some bushes in a small town called Snoqualmie. We have half a registration number for a car seen passing through late that night, but it's a rental and it's a vacation area. Katelyn's body was more messed up than Jessica's. The belief — and yes, it's a profilers' opinion, but the photos bear it out — is the killer is getting more out of control. He hadn't bothered to dress her for comfort and this time the disk wasn't just resting in the mouth. It had been shoved into a hole he'd made in her head. It had the same piece of music on it as Jessica's.'

'Was there a note?'

'No. Three long-distance landscape pictures, low quality. A webcam. Of Pittsburgh, believe it or not. So the bureau there is now on alert, but who knows what it means, if anything.'

'What do you know about the woman?' I asked.

'She was from San Francisco. Forty-two now, moved to Seattle twelve years ago. No partner, but plenty of friends and a cat, and nobody who can think of anyone who might have done it. So far as we can tell, she's a random victim.'

'I don't think so,' I said. 'Why travel halfway up the country to pick someone random, and then stamp yourself all over it with the same MO? There has to be a connection between them. Nina told you about the missing photograph in Jessica's apartment?'

'Yes. We tracked down all three of the men in the videos. Two were regulars at this bar called Jimmy's, the other was someone she met at a party in Venice Beach. None look good for it, though one did confirm she had a picture of her parents beside her bed; he seemed to get a kick out of the fact. But now this Webdaddy slimeball, Robert Klennert, thinks he might have a recollection of someone trying to trace Jessica's location via an email to his main portal site, about two months ago. It happens all the time, apparently, all his girls get it. He just bounces them back. He didn't remember there was one for Jessica in particular until he started going through his files. It may not mean anything.'

'Or it could be the killer trying to find a way in. That's a long lead time, isn't it? Is there any sign that anything was taken from Katelyn Wallace's place?'

'How are we going to know? We don't have the lucky chance of a slew of images this time. Katelyn wasn't a web whore. She was a stable woman who worked hard.'

'They die too. But… We've been assuming that the killer took the picture as a random souvenir. Something personal, a way of getting his fingers into the life of a woman he was intending to kill. What if it was more than that?'

Nina was looking at me. 'What are you thinking?'

'They're trying to get the killer caught,' I said, talking slowly, trying not to get in the way of my thoughts. 'That's why they tipped Charles off. Obviously. But why? Who would the Straw Men want to get caught?'

I looked up, and that's when I saw him.

If I'd done what I was supposed to do, and stayed on the other side of the partition and kept watch while Nina did the talking, I would have seen him sooner. As it was I only got a quick impression of a slim man with short hair and glasses, standing right outside the restaurant. Looking in, straight at us.

'Shit…' was as far as I got — before there was a smashing sound, two claps, and the slapping thud of a bullet smacking into the padded wall behind us.

I threw myself out of the booth and went for my gun. I was fast but Nina was quicker because hers was already in her hand.

We were both firing before Monroe had the faintest idea what was happening. With my other hand I grabbed a chair and awkwardly threw it at the window, trying to give them enough time to get out from the booth.

The chair went wide but Nina was fast. The man kept firing through the hole in the glass. Measured shots, one after the other.

I scrabbled to try to get under his sight line, pulling Nina's arm and dragging her down behind a table. There was screaming around us. Britnee was lying on the ground, glass cuts over her face.

I saw the man running past the window, little more than a shadow, but he wasn't running away. He was heading around the front, to come into the restaurant.

'Oh Christ,' Nina said, and I turned to see that Monroe was slumped over the table. She started to head back to him but I grabbed her arm and yanked her down again.

'Leave him.' I heard the front door of the restaurant pulled open, screams of fresh intensity.

'Ward, he's been hit.'

'I know.'

Then the man came around and into our aisle. I think part of me had been expecting that it would be my brother, but it wasn't. He was younger, fit-looking but bulky in the chest. He was wearing combats and a dark coat. He stood at the end, apparently unafraid of what we might try to do, and took aim on Nina.

I shot him. I got him plumb in the chest.

He was thrown backwards, crashing into a table.

He stayed down for maybe five seconds, enough for me to start to straighten up, before suddenly standing again.

There was no blood coming out of him, and I realized he was wearing a vest. I backed away, trying to get behind something before he fired again. Nina fired past me, but missed. The man shot twice more and both came close. I fired again, aiming higher, but missed. Hitting a moving man's head is very hard. Just aiming for it isn't easy. You've got to really want someone dead. By now, I did.

The sound of a shot came from another angle and I thought Oh Christ, there's another one of them — but then I saw it was Monroe. His overcoat was covered in blood and he was wedged in the booth but had wrenched his upper body around and was emptying his gun at the man.

I took the opportunity, grabbed Nina again and pulled her around the back of the partition wall. My waitress was cowering there, breathlessly trying to scream but instead making a sound like a mouse being hit with a hammer.

On the back wall I saw a pair of half-height doors.

More shots suddenly, like the sound of slow hand clapping.

'Ward, we've got to get Charles…'

'It's too late.' I yanked her back towards the swing doors into the small kitchen. She fought at first but then followed me as I shoved past two terrified-looking men in whites and straight out the open back door. I slipped on the top of a short flight of stairs but grabbed the rail and made it down.

We ran down the side of the restaurant. The sound of shooting had stopped. I glanced in and saw the man standing over the booth where Monroe now lay face down on the table.

The man turned and saw us. Then he was running towards the door. Running fast.

'Get the car,' I shouted. Nina kept on running.

I turned and pointed my gun up the street, walking backwards as fast as I could. He'd fired his first shot before I even realized he was out on the street.

I shot and got him again, in the stomach, throwing him backwards once more. I turned and sprinted back to the car just as the lights flashed on and I heard the motor start.

Then it felt as if someone punched me on the shoulder. I was off balance and it threw me around and I fell and crashed onto the pavement. I pulled myself up, still unsure what had happened but feeling off-kilter and hot, and fired backwards.

The car jerked forward and the door flew open and I threw myself inside. My legs were still hanging out as Nina stood on the pedal and reversed down the street at forty miles an hour. When I was inside and had the door shut she whipped the car around in a tight turn and hammered off up the street.

'Where am I going?' She glanced across at me and the sudden widening of her eyes told me what I already suspected.

I put my hand up to my left shoulder. It was wet and warm.

'Just anywhere,' I said, as the pain suddenly cut in like a knife.

23

They stepped out of Henry's Diner into a drizzle that was light but insistent. Tom shivered massively as the cold hit him. He'd managed to eat only half his food, hunched with Henrickson over a table in the back corner. Tom saw a few locals glance his way. You could see they were thinking 'There's Bigfoot Boy' — or maybe 'Bullshit Boy' — and that hadn't helped his appetite much. Henrickson had been unusually quiet during the meal, and it had been a while since the last grin. It could be he was tired too, though he didn't seem it. His movements remained sharp and precise, and he ate quickly and methodically, making easy work of a chicken-fried steak. He'd asked for this to be done rare, which was a first for Tom — a first for the waitress, too, judging by the way she'd looked at him. When not eating, the man had looked out of the window as if wishing the darkness were over.

'Okay,' he said, as Tom tried to burrow deep in his coat against the wind. He looked away up the street. 'I guess I'll be heading back to the motel.'

Tom was surprised. He'd been assuming they'd be heading to the bar. It wasn't that he wanted a drink. He was exhausted from the day's walking, and the warm, stuffy diner had made him feel drowsy and dog-tired. Bed sounded good. But if he was alone in that room, he'd have to think about calling Sarah, and he still didn't have any proof.

'Buy you a beer?' The question made him feel gauche.

'Sure,' Henrickson said, slowly. 'Why not?'

There was something in his tone that made Tom wonder whether he was accepting for some reason of his own, one that had nothing to do with either a desire for a drink or Tom's company. But when they were sat at the counter of Big Frank's — which was otherwise stone-cold empty — the man clinked his glass against Tom's.

'Apologize if I seem kind of elsewhere,' he said. 'Just can't help feeling the time moving on. This is important to me.'

'I know,' Tom said. 'Tomorrow we'll find it. I promise.'

'Sounds good,' the man said, eyes on the door. 'But now let's see what's about to happen here.'

Tom turned to see a big man heading across the bar towards them. He wasn't coming fast, but there was purpose in his stride.

'Oh crap,' Tom said. 'That's the sheriff.'

Tom watched as Connolly and the reporter looked each other up and down. Then the policeman turned his attention to Tom.

'Mr Kozelek,' he said. 'See you just haven't been able to give up Sheffer's hospitality yet.'

'Who was it?' Tom asked. 'The waitress? One of the old boys in the corner booth?'

'Can't say I understand what you mean,' Connolly said.

'Think he's implying that someone let you know he was still in town,' Henrickson said. 'I'm inclined to believe he's right.'

'This isn't Twin Peaks, son. I just happened to be coming up the way, saw you two coming in.'

Henrickson took a sip of his beer, and looked at the policeman over the top of his glass. 'Do you have some kind of problem with us, Sheriff?'

'Don't even know who you are.'

'I'm a writer.'

'And what would someone like you be doing up in Sheffer?'

'Big feature article. Charming vacation towns of the North West.'

'Mr Kozelek helping you out, is he?'

'You could say that.'

'Never really had much time for writers,' Connolly said. 'Most of them seem to be full of shit.'

Tom didn't like the way the two men were looking at each other. He tried to think of something to say, something so banal that it might defuse the atmosphere. Then he looked up at the sound of the bar door opening again. Two people came into the room, shaking rain out of their hair.

'Hello,' said one of them, a woman. Tom realized it was the doctor who'd examined him. She came over and joined the group.

'Melissa,' she said, helpfully. 'Don't worry — you were pretty zonked when we met. How are you feeling?'

'Fine,' Tom said. Her husband was behind her. He nodded at Connolly and headed around the other side of the bar, towards the pool table in the far corner. He had the air of a man who didn't do polite conversation.

'That's good,' Melissa said, looking at Tom in that way doctors do: with bright, detached assessment, as if implying that his own opinion of his state of health, while mildly interesting, was of no diagnostic import whatsoever. 'No nausea? Headaches?'

'No,' he lied. 'I feel fine. Thank you.'

'Excellent. Oh — if I were you, I'd go easy on the herbal remedies for a while. You never know the effects of some of those things.'

Connolly seemed to stiffen slightly. 'That's been cleared up,' the policeman said. 'They didn't belong to Mr Kozelek.'

Henrickson cocked his head. 'Herbs?'

Melissa smiled tentatively, as if suddenly uncertain what she had wandered into. 'I found some,' she said. 'A little bunch. In Mr Kozelek's bag.'

'Melissa — do me a favour, would you?' Connolly said. 'Be glad to join you two in a moment. But there's something I need to discuss with these boys first.'

'Sure,' she said, stepping back affably. Normally she might have felt dismissed, but, as it happened, some of what Tom had seen in her eyes was not professional appraisal but the pleasantly lingering effects of a pretty major joint. 'You want a beer?'

'That would be great.'

The three men watched as she walked around the other side of the bar, and then turned to look at one another once more.

'So if these plants didn't belong to Tom,' Henrickson said, 'how did they get there, exactly?'

'Thought you didn't know what I was talking about.'

'I'm sorry if you got that impression. Actually, I believe you're talking about the valerian and skullcap Tom had in his bag.'

'What?' Tom said. He turned to the policeman. 'What is he talking about?'

'Beats me,' the cop said.

'I don't think so.' Henrickson reached into his jacket and pulled out a small plastic bag. He laid it on the counter. 'This the kind of stuff the doctor found?'

Connolly looked away. 'Plants mostly look the same to me.'

'Not to me. I know these are both medicinal herbs, and I know that both were used by a particular group of people.'

'The local Indians.'

'Little earlier than that, actually. So tell me, Sheriff. Judging by Tom's reaction when I found these earlier, I don't think he had anything to do with them winding up in his bag. But presumably you'll be able to tell me how that happened?'

'They were put there by a woman called Patrice Anders.'

Henrickson grinned. 'Is that right? This would be the woman with the boots.'

'When she came across Mr Kozelek's belongings in the forest it was clear to her that they belonged to someone in a poor state of mind. Mrs Anders has an interest in alternative therapies. She left these materials in his bag in the hope that, if he returned, he might recognize them and use them.'

This time Henrickson laughed outright. 'You're kidding, right?'

'That's what she told me.'

'Let me get this straight. She happens to be stomping around out there in her novelty footwear — kind of conveniently — and finds Tom's little camp. She divines from this that Tom's head is fucked up, and so she decides to leave some medicinal herbs in his bag on the off-chance he will work out that's what they are, and decide to take them? Herbs she just happened to be carrying around with her on a walk in the woods? And herbs that most modern people would dispense in a tincture, or at the very least in a tea?'

'People do strange things.'

'Yeah, they do. They surely do. Well, thank you, Sheriff. Those plants had been bothering me ever since I found them. I'm glad to have heard such a straightforward and credible explanation.' Henrickson stood, and grinned at Tom. 'Well, my friend, it's a shame we didn't run into this gentleman earlier. He seems to have all the answers. And now I'm kind of tired from our hike today, and so I think it's time to hit the sack.'

Connolly didn't move. 'I really would prefer it if you gentlemen would consider relocating to another charming North West town.'

'Maybe you would,' Henrickson said. 'And I'd prefer it if you'd stop trying to bully my friend. He knows what he saw, and so do you. He saw a Bigfoot.'

'There isn't any such thing. He saw a bear.'

'Right. You keep believing that. But unless you're going to make an official deal out of hassling him, I'd say it's time you got out of his face.'

Henrickson winked, and headed for the door without looking back. Extremely confused, and not sure whether things had just gotten better or worse, Tom followed him.

As soon as they were outside the journalist started walking fast, heading back towards the motel through rain that was beginning to turn to sleet.

'Jim?' Tom said, struggling to keep up. 'What the hell was that all about?'

'I knew I was onto something when I found that stuff in your bag. I just wasn't expecting it to be handed to me on a plate.'

'Explain.'

'You've heard of herbal medicine, right?'

'Sure. People using plants to cure illnesses, instead of pharmaceuticals. Like, I don't know, aromatherapy.'

'No,' Henrickson said, as he stepped over the low fence into the motel parking lot. 'Different thing. People have been using plants for a long, long time. Medicine's nothing more than a specialized form of food, right? In the 1970s they found a Neanderthal burial in Northern Iraq. The body had been buried with eight different flowers, almost all of which are still used by herbalists today. The Neanderthals knew about this stuff at least sixty thousand years ago, probably a lot longer. And that's why they're in your bag.'

'I don't get it. Why?'

'Because the creature you saw did come back. He came back and put this stuff where you might find it.'

Tom stopped walking. 'A Neanderthal man prescribed me herbs?'

'Got it in one.' Henrickson held his car keys up and pressed a button. The lights of his Lexus flashed. 'Hop in.'

'What now?'

'Get in the car, and I'll tell you.'

Tom climbed in the passenger seat. Henrickson yanked the car around in a tight circle and took it fast onto the main road, passing Big Frank's and heading east.

Tom thought, but couldn't be sure, that he saw Connolly watching them from the windows of the bar.

'Jim, where are we going?'

'To talk to someone,' the man said. 'Someone who knows a lot more than they've been letting on.'

— «» — «» — «»—

The man said nothing else on the half-hour journey. Tom knew where they were going long before the car turned onto the lonely road that led up into the development no one had wanted. Henrickson parked on the windy, empty road, five yards from the gateway to the Anders property. He left the engine running but killed the lights. Darkness fell like a stone.

'Wait here.'

Tom watched as the other man got out of the car and walked up ahead. By the time Henrickson was past the wooden sign it was hard to make him out. Ten minutes later he came back.

'Somebody's home this time,' he said. His face looked cold and hard and there was wet ice in his hair. 'Or isn't hiding well enough to remember to turn out all the lights.'

He pulled the car forward and through the gate. Drove slowly down the track between the trees.

'You haven't put your headlights back on.'

'That's right.'

As they took the penultimate bend the lake became visible, frigid in straggly moonlight. It looked flat and eldritch, proud that nothing had changed for it, ever, that it had always been this way. Then Tom could see the dark shape of the cabin, huddled in the trees, with two small, dim rectangles of yellow light.

Henrickson pulled the car over, turned off the engine. Sat a moment, watching the house.

'Okay,' he said. 'Let's go. Shut your door quietly.'

'Look, Jim,' Tom said. 'We can't do this now. We should have called ahead. We can't just turn up. Two guys appearing at her door, it's going to scare her to death.'

Henrickson turned to him then, and did something with his mouth. It wasn't a grin. It wasn't a smile, even. It was similar enough to the things he had been doing with it all along, however, and it made Tom wonder, with a low, quiet dismay, whether any of them had been grins after all.

'Get out,' the man said.

Tom climbed out into the cold, squinting against the sleet. He shut his door silently, looking over at the cabin. If Henrickson was right, this woman had lied to make him look foolish. At least once, maybe twice. Of course Connolly was going to believe her instead of him, especially as he evidently hated the mere idea of Bigfoot. And through her lies, this woman had destroyed his story. She'd taken away the only thing that could make his life take him back.

If it took a little surprise in the evening to undo that, maybe it was okay.

He turned at the sound of Henrickson opening the trunk of the car. The man pulled a large rucksack out and looped it over his back in one smooth movement. Then he leaned in again, reaching with both arms. When he straightened once more, Tom gaped at him.

'What the fuck is that?'

It was a stupid question. It was obvious what the man had slipped over his shoulder. It was a rifle. It was also obvious that the shorter, blunter thing he had in his hand was a large-calibre handgun. Neither looked like the sort of thing you saw in hunting stores. They looked like the kind of weapon you saw on the news, with plumes of smoke in the distance behind.

Henrickson closed the trunk. 'The forest can be dangerous,' he said.

'It certainly is now,' Tom said. 'Jesus. Look, can we leave those things in the car?'

The other man had turned and was walking towards the cabin. Suddenly very unsure about what was happening, Tom hurried after him. By the time he caught up, Henrickson had already rapped on the front door. They waited. Henrickson was just raising his hand again when he stopped, head cocked. Tom hadn't heard anything.

There was the sound of two bolts being pulled, and then the door opened.

Patrice Anders stood inside. Beyond was a small, cosy room. She looked a little older than Tom remembered, and smaller. But she didn't look afraid, or even much surprised.

'Good evening, Mr Kozelek,' she said. 'Who's your friend?'

'You know who I am,' Henrickson said.

'No,' she said, 'I don't. But I know why you're here.'

'That should make things easy.'

She shrugged. 'It does for me. I'm not telling you anything.'

'You will,' Henrickson said. There was something off about his voice. He walked straight past the woman and into the cabin, eyes raking the walls and surfaces. He yanked the phone out of the wall socket. He found the woman's cell, knocked it to the floor and stood on it.

'Jim,' Tom said, aghast. 'This isn't the way to go about this.'

'Go about what?' the old woman said. She was trying to seem unperturbed, but her voice was constricted and her face pinched. 'What do you think he's here for?'

'He's a reporter,' Tom said, stepping inside. 'He wants to write a story about what I saw. That's all.'

Patrice looked at him. 'God, you're dumb,' she said.

'What do you mean?' he snapped. He was tired of feeling that everyone understood things except him.

'He's not here to write. He's a hunter. He's here to kill.'

'Kill what?'

'Bear, I assume. Only thing we've got in these woods.'

Tom looked at Henrickson, and had to concede that his friend didn't look like a reporter any more. Partly it was the guns, partly the way he was yanking open the cupboards that lined the back wall of the room, rifling through the contents as though the fact they were someone else's possessions was of absolutely no moment. 'Jim, tell me this isn't true.'

'Ms Anders is dissembling, but otherwise she and I are in total agreement,' Henrickson said, without turning. 'On both my intentions and your intelligence. Aha.' He pulled out a thick bundle of rope and threw it to Tom. 'Tie her hands behind her back.'

'You're kidding me,' Tom said. 'I'm not doing that.'

The butt of Henrickson's rifle whipped round in a short, clipped arc that ended with Tom's face. He didn't even see it coming.

He crashed backwards into a kitchen unit, slipped on the rug, dropped to the floor. He was dimly aware of Henrickson stepping over him and kicking the front door shut; then of him grabbing the old woman by the hair. He shook his head, to try to clear it. It felt like someone had hammered a screwdriver up each side of his nose.

'You may as well do it now,' he heard the woman saying, through a fog. 'Because I'm not going to help you.'

Henrickson's response was a blow that sent her across the couch. Then he was standing over Tom, holding the rope.

'We're going to find this thing,' he told him, quietly. 'And I am going to do what I came to do.'

Tom stared up at him, feeling blood pouring out of his nose and knowing why Henrickson's voice sounded different. His accent had gone, the folksy lilt and the backwoods terms. Now he had the voice of a stranger. Tom felt as if he had never been in a room with this man before, and that anyone who had heard this voice would be likely to remember it, and remember it the rest of their life. His voice said that he knew you. That he knew you, and all about you, and all about everybody else too.

'You're going to help me because otherwise I will make you kill her, and I don't think you'll enjoy doing that.'

All Tom could do was shake his head.

'You'll do it,' Henrickson said. 'After all, it won't be the first time. Different circumstances, I'll admit.'

'Shut up,' Tom said. The woman was staring at him now.

'Tom's already on the board,' Henrickson told her. 'Used to be a partner in a design firm down in LA. Everything in place — cute car, cute family, regular fuckfest with one of the cute little designer girls driving the big-screen Apple Macs. One night they work late in the office and have a drink on the way home and round the corner from her apartment Tom slides a red light — can't be too late back, not again — and a Porsche smacks into the passenger side. The girl dies looking like modern art. So does the little boy Tom didn't know she was carrying inside. Tom's just under the limit, and fortunately the Porsche driver is completely shit-faced. So Tom walks.'

'You think so?' Tom shouted. He pushed himself to his feet. He swiped his sleeve under his nose, viciously, not caring how much it hurt. 'You really think I walked from it?'

'You're alive, they're dead,' Henrickson said. 'You do the math.'

Tom started to move, but the man knew about the thought before he did. A quick movement, and the barrel of his handgun was planted squarely in the middle of Patrice's forehead.

'I'll make you kill her and then when we're done I'll set you free,' Henrickson said. 'You couldn't kill yourself last time. I doubt you'll be able to again. I'll let you flail for a year or two, and then I'll come find you and put you out of your misery. Maybe. Or we can find this thing and we will photograph it and then it will escape, so far as anyone else knows. Everything will be good. You will attain the distinction and purpose you now know can't be found in a young woman's pants. Sarah might even take you back.'

'How do you know all this?'

'Because he's not human,' the old woman said, quietly.

Henrickson laughed shortly. 'Tom — are you going to tie her fucking hands, or what?'

Tom looked at Patrice. One side of her face was red, but her eyes were clear and locked on his.

'Don't,' she said. 'Not for me. For them.'

But he looked away, and when the bundle of rope hit his chest this time, he caught it.

24

'Ward, be still, for God's sake.'

'It hurts.'

'Well, just, be cool.'

'Screw that. Cool is for teenagers. I'm old enough to admit it hurts like a motherfuck.'

I was sitting on the passenger seat with my feet outside. Nina was crouched outside the car dabbing at my shoulder with a cloth soaked in disinfectant. I had no idea where we were except that we were in the parking lot of a gas station just outside a small town whose name we didn't know.

'It's clean,' she said. 'I think.'

I glanced across at my shoulder and saw a ragged tear across the deltoid muscle. It was bleeding still, but less than it had been for most of the fifty miles from Fresno. It hurt a lot, even though I'd eaten a fistful of the strongest pain pills we could find in the market where we'd bought the cloth and disinfectant. It hurt like I was eight years old and a bully was repeatedly smacking a fist into my shoulder, so hard and so fast that the impacts blurred into one long, keening ache.

Nina was looking up at me. She looked young and worried and as if she hoped she had done something well enough; also as if she hoped I wasn't going to keep whining for much longer. I realized the dent in my shoulder was nothing compared to the hit she'd taken up at The Halls. I also knew I should just be thankful the bullet hadn't landed about nine inches to the right.

'Thank you,' I said. 'It does feel better.'

'Liar,' she said. She stood and looked over the roof of the car at the station, where a man with a beard was standing in the window. 'We're being watched.'

'It's just the till monkey. Wondering if we're going to buy gas or what. It's okay. Not everyone is out to get us.'

'Attractive theory,' she said. 'You got any proof?'

'Not really.'

'What are we going to do?'

'You're going to have to call someone,' I said. 'Tell them about Monroe.'

'They'll know already,' she said, glumly. 'He'll have had ID on him.'

'I don't mean the fact,' I said. 'I mean what happened. And what it means.'

'We don't know,' she said. 'Not for sure.'

'Yeah we do.'

'I didn't see the man who came out of The Knights and killed the cop. I'm just going on the witness statements.'

'I know. But he sure sounded a lot like the man who just tried to kill us. Down to the clothes.'

'It's a very general description. The wage slave in there probably doesn't look so different.'

'I don't mean just physically similar. I also mean the kind of man who will walk into a restaurant and keep shooting — in front of witnesses — even when three people are shooting back. Don't split the atom. I don't think we need to look for two people here.'

'So who is he? You've got something on your mind again and I really wish you'd just tell me what it is.'

'We need to keep driving,' I said. 'Not just because we need to get ourselves as far from that disaster as possible. Also because there's a woman we have to see tonight and it's a long way.'

'Where?'

'North. Get my bag for me. I've got the address.'

— «» — «» — «»—

Mrs Campbell wasn't home.

This time I called ahead, long before we approached San Francisco. There was no answer, and no machine. It's funny how quickly you get used to the idea that houses have a memory, and liaise with strangers, and will pass on a message for you. This house wasn't there to help. So we just drove up there instead. Nina meanwhile continued to refuse to call the FBI in LA. They would either know about Monroe, or would do soon. She didn't feel inclined to trust them either way. I thought this was wrong, that declaring our position and innocence as early as possible made sense. There might be one strange person wandering the halls of justice: it didn't mean the whole organization was riddled. I couldn't convince her. In the end we stopped discussing it. The more time I spent with Nina, the more I got the sense that there were inner defences — a whole castle, with a moat and a keep and probably boiling oil in reserve too — that it would be hard or impossible to bust through.

The ache in my shoulder was manageable so long as I kept gobbling painkillers. More of a problem was that it started to tighten up. By the time we were at the outskirts of San Francisco it felt like it had been sewn on by someone who hadn't bothered learning how it was supposed to work inside the cloth. This kept me on map-reading duty, which was probably a good division of labour. Nina drove well. Her sense of direction wasn't so hot; the inconveniences of three-dimensional space seemed to irritate her. I wouldn't want to see her in a Humvee. I suspect she'd just drive straight through anything in the way.

'Why now?' she said, eventually. 'Why wait three months before pouring it on? Okay, you were AWOL and hard to find. But they could have clipped me and John right away.'

'Assume regrouping time, I guess, after The Halls got blown up.'

'But that can't have been all of them up there. If they're as powerful as we think, there must be more. Do we really think the guy I saw with Monroe was one of them?'

'I do,' I said. 'And that scares me.'

'Me too. But it makes it even harder to believe that they couldn't have had us killed.'

'They sure as hell tried, tonight.'

'Yes. But why not sooner?'

'You work for the FBI. If you turn up in a dumpster, questions are going be asked. Questions that wouldn't go away. I could see Monroe turning it into a crusade.'

'For the good of the department, of course. But I'm still dead.'

'These people take a long view. The cabin we found near Yakima says they've been at this kind of thing a long time. They were going to let us sweat on the grounds we were no real danger, and clear us up when the opportunity arose. Then everything went wide immediately after John capped this Ferillo person. He must have got hold of some huge great stick and pushed it right into their nest. They obviously had someone surveilling him after his daughter disappeared, taped him coming out of DeLong's house. Evidently they decided to let it go, maybe DeLong was overdue for retirement anyhow, but now John's done something big enough for them to dust it off. John's the key to this.'

'If he doesn't call soon I'm going to kill him myself.'

'Cool,' I said. 'I'll help.'

It was nine o'clock by the time we were getting close. I called again. Still no response. Either she wasn't answering the phone for reasons of her own, or she wasn't home. First didn't make much sense. Second worried me.

Nina parked right outside a house that showed a single light, over the door. We got out and looked at the house.

'Nobody home, Ward.'

'Maybe.'

I walked up the steps and rang on the bell. It jangled inside. No lights came on. Nobody came to the door.

'I don't like this,' I said. 'Old people don't get out much. They're always home.'

'Maybe we should talk to the neighbours.'

I looked down at myself, then at her. Her blouse had a decent-sized splash of blood on it. The arm of my jacket was hanging on by a string and looked dark and blotched under the streetlight. 'Yeah, right.'

'I see your point,' she said. 'So what do we do now?'

I got out an ATM card which still didn't work, but which I'd never had the heart to throw away.

'Oh great,' she said.

She turned and watched the nearby windows while I worked the card into the frame of Mrs Campbell's door.

Five minutes later we'd confirmed she wasn't home. I had been half convinced we'd find her with an axe in her head. All the rooms were empty, however, and tidy.

'So she's out,' Nina said. 'Maybe she's just got more of a social life than you.'

We sat and waited until half past nine. Then Nina sat some more, while I paced around. Finally this took me out into the hallway, where I saw something I hadn't seen in a while. A telephone table. One of those pieces of furniture designed to hold a phone, and someone using it, back in the days when being able to speak to people from afar was still something of a big deal. Next to the phone itself was a small notebook covered in a floral fabric.

A personal telephone book.

I picked it up and riffled through to the letter 'D'. No names I recognized. Then, realizing I would probably have done the same, I looked under the letter 'M' instead.

There it was.

I picked up the phone and dialled. It was late. Mrs Campbell had told me Muriel had kids, but I hadn't gathered what age. Probably I was going to get an earful even assuming she answered the phone.

'Dupree household.'

'Is that Muriel?'

'Who is this?'

'My name's Ward Hopkins. We met a few…'

'I remember who you are. How did you get my number?'

'I'm in Mrs Campbell's house. It's in her book.'

'What the hell are you doing there?'

'I need to speak to her urgently. I came to see her. She wasn't home. I got worried and thought I should check inside.'

'Why would you be worried? Do you know something I don't?'

'Muriel, could you just tell me: do you know where she is?'

There was a pause, and then she said, 'Wait there.'

The sound of the phone became muffled. I heard her voice talking, but couldn't make out any of the words. Then it became clear again. 'She says she'll talk to you,' Muriel said, making it clear she thought this was a mistake. 'You'd better come over.'

— «» — «» — «»—

It was a twenty-minute drive across town. Muriel Dupree didn't look at all welcoming when she opened her door, but she did eventually step aside. She looked at Nina suspiciously.

'Who's she?'

'A friend,' I said.

'She know she's got blood on her shirt?'

'Yes,' Nina said. 'It's been a long day. Ward has it on him too.'

'He's a man. What do you expect?'

Mrs Dupree's house was tidy and airy and one of the nicest decorated I'd seen in a while. Plain and simple, the house of someone who both lived and valued an orderly life. She led us down a hallway into the back, where a wide kitchen gave onto a sitting area. Mrs Campbell was in a chair right next to the electric fire. She looked more frail than I remembered.

'If you don't mind me asking,' I said, 'what are you doing here?'

'Any reason she shouldn't be?'

I glanced at Muriel and realized Mrs Campbell meant a great deal to her. Also that, beneath the screw-you exterior, there was something else. Concern, certainly. Fear, perhaps.

I sat on the end of the couch. 'Mrs Campbell,' I said. 'There's something I have to ask you…'

'I know,' she said. 'So why don't you go ahead?'

'… but why are you here?'

'Funny things been happening,' Muriel said. 'Joan had been hearing strange sounds outside her house in the night. Where she lives, that's not unknown. But then some man came to the door and asks her a lot of questions.'

'When was this?'

'The day after you came,' Mrs Campbell said. 'It's okay, Muriel. I'll talk to him.'

'What did this man look like?'

'Your height. A little broader across the shoulders.'

I looked at Nina. 'John. I hope so, at least. He's a detective. He'd have been able to find out an old employee list.'

'He knew I'd worked there, that's for sure. I didn't know the answers to his questions, though. He went away. He was polite. But he didn't seem like a man who would treat everyone that way.'

'What did he ask you about?'

'Same thing you're about to. But I know the answers now.'

'When we spoke before, you told me about a family who had taken Paul in. The one in which the woman had a dog that died in strange circumstances.'

'I remember.'

'Was their name Jones?'

Nina's head jerked around to stare at me.

'No,' Mrs Campbell said. 'It was Wallace. Jones was the other family. The one who let him go when they had a baby girl.'

I felt dizzy. 'How come you remember this now?'

'She had me find out,' Muriel said, quietly. 'After you'd gone, she called me up. First I thought she was going to be angry with me for putting you in touch with her. But she wasn't.'

'I asked Muriel to do a little detective work on my behalf,' the old woman said. 'Track down a couple of my old colleagues, people who had been there back then. Found one in Florida, of course, baking herself to alligator hide. Other one in Maine. Moved back to be close to family, then the kids died ahead of her. That's life, I guess. With three sets of memories, we could put it together.' She bit her lip. 'So tell me. What has happened?'

'Paul has killed both of them,' I said. 'Jessica Jones was found dead in a motel four days ago, down in Los Angeles. Katelyn Wallace yesterday morning.'

'Where?'

'Up north. East of Seattle. He murdered them and left erased hard disks in their bodies. This seems to be something about undoing the past, wiping a life clean, maybe even some kind of purification thing.'

'Oh my God,' the old woman said. Her hands were shaking. Muriel reached across and gently put her hand on top of them.

'Jessica and Katelyn were children in his foster families?' Nina said. 'He killed them just because of that?'

'They were families that tried to take him in for good, actually tried to give him a home. Something about him made it impossible. He evidently needs someone to blame. He's wiping his disk clean. He's… Mrs Campbell, do you have any idea where Katelyn Wallace's parents live now?'

'They're dead,' Muriel said. 'Natural causes, five years ago. Well, kind of natural. Nature, anyhow. They were on a sail boat that sank out in the Bay. Nobody seemed to think there was anything weird about it.'

'What about the Joneses?' I asked.

'Don't know anything about them.'

'LAPD had local cops looking for them down in Monterey,' Nina said. 'I told you. They had an address but there was nobody home. The neighbours said they hadn't seen them in six weeks. The assumption was they were on vacation.'

'Maybe they are,' I said, but I was thinking of two people, of about the right age, whose bodies I had seen on a desolate, isolated plain five hundred miles north of where I was sitting. Whom John had photographed, and might possibly have been able to trace — if he'd subsequently made progress in an investigation he'd chosen to keep secret from Nina and me. I wasn't sure enough to say anything. It was equally possible that John really had been in Florida, had talked to the old woman's other friend, and traced the background that way.

Nina was looking at me. 'How did you know, Ward?'

'I didn't,' I said, distracted. 'I just wondered why the killer took a picture of Jessica's parents. If you're going to take a souvenir, a typical talisman, it's generally something closer to the victim. A body part, perhaps, a piece of clothing. Instead he took a picture that wasn't even of the victim. Monroe said there'd been an attempt to locate her months ago; doesn't that sound more like tracing someone, rather than a serial murder MO? And assume the person who killed Jessica is different from the man who killed the cop. What's the cop-killer's motivation? It can only be to up the ante on Jessica's killer. You got a dead woman in a dusty motel, the cops can only spare so much time even if she's pretty and has got a hard disk in her mouth. If you've got that plus a policeman being capped in broad daylight — then suddenly you've got a full-on task force and a homicide lieutenant and a Bureau SAC competing for screen time — with a SAC who's already been called with a tip-off.'

'But what says it's the Upright Man who killed Jessica?'

'Nina, how much do you need? You've just heard Mrs Campbell confirm the only possible connection between two women killed in the same way. It's Paul.'

'Yes. But how did you know that before you got here?'

'I didn't. I was just… As soon as the guy tried to kill us in Fresno, and it seemed possible it could be the same man as in LA, then how else do you put it together?'

'About a million other ways, Ward. Okay, the shooter is working for the Straw Men. Maybe. Okay, he's trying to draw attention to a murderer. Perhaps. But how did you get from there to your brother being the killer? How was that the only solution?'

I didn't understand what she was getting at. 'Because… because I assume that if they're trying to get someone caught it can only be someone they can't get to by themselves. It can only be someone who is so out there, who is sufficiently dangerous and autonomous and outside standard human rules that they need the help of the regular law to try to catch him.'

'But why do they want him caught? He's one of them. He supplied them with people to kill and he helped them blow up buildings and organize shootings. Why…'

'Because he also did things — killing my parents, and abducting Zandt's daughter — which brought four dedicated people looking for them with guns. He got their lawyers killed. He got their multi-million-dollar nest in Montana blown to dust. And who knows what else he's doing now? If Paul turns on you, or you cast him out, I'll bet you're going to fucking know about it.'

Suddenly I realized that the two older women were staring at us, and that we'd been shouting. I tried to speak more calmly. 'Nina, I don't see the problem here. You've just heard what…'

'Ward, for God's sake — it could be John.'

I stared at her, suddenly winded. 'What do you mean?'

'Who do we know the Straw Men want hurt? John. Who's incriminated in the video they supplied? John. Who's murdered a man who can only be something to do with them? What's to say it wasn't John who killed these women?'

'Because… why on earth would he do that?'

'They were part of the Upright Man's life. You know what your brother did to him. He took Karen. He killed her but he didn't even do it fast. He disappeared her and only proved she was dead when he arranged her bones as a trail to lead John into a trap where he meant to kill him too. He took John's life and destroyed it. What do you think John's going to stop at in his revenge?'

I opened my mouth. Shut it again.

Nina stood. She was furious, as angry as I'd ever seen anyone.

'Fuck you, Ward. I'm going to wait in the car.'

She strode out of the house, slamming the door hard on the way. I turned to the two women, who were looking at me like a pair of interested cats.

'Thank you,' I said. 'I have to go.' I heard the sound of a child calling out from upstairs.

'Oh, shoot,' Muriel said. 'There goes the night.'

I was at the door before Mrs Campbell spoke. 'You know, you never even asked me what I thought you would want to know.'

I turned. 'What are you talking about?'

'I don't know anything about catching people,' she said, 'but I figured you'd want to know where he went last.'

'When?' I said, without a clue what she was talking about, half expecting to hear the sound of the car as Nina drove away.

'Back then. The family that took him,' she said. 'My friend in Florida was the case worker. She said the family moved up to Washington because the woman's mother was getting old and not so good at looking after herself. Last Dianne heard of them was a year after they moved. The husband had taken off with some young girl he met in a bar.'

'Did she remember a name?'

'She did. She remembered it because it was kind of like that dead guitarist who'd been so big a few years before. Dianne was into all that, back then. Spelled differently, though.'

I shook my head. 'Who?'

'The name was Henrickson,' she said. 'They lived in a place called Snowcalm, something like that, up near the Cascades.'

— «» — «» — «»—

Nina drove to the airport in a silence that was murderous and dark. I tried to talk to her but she was like a ghost driver, caught in some time to the side or in the past. So nobody said anything, and I sat thinking about John Zandt,

and what he might or might not be capable of. I remembered too something he'd said when we had our meeting outside the hotel in San Francisco, something that hadn't made much sense at the time:

Sometimes you have to go back a way to do what you need to get done. I could see a meaning for that now.

Nina parked in the lot and we got out. She marched straight towards the stairway and I followed, struggling with my bag.

'Nina,' I said, loudly. My voice bounced off dirty concrete and came back flat and dull.

She turned right round and smacked me in the face. I was caught so much by surprise that I staggered backwards. She closed in, slapping me, and then again, shouting something I couldn't make out.

I tried to hold up my left hand to ward her off, but the pain this caused in my shoulder was enough to make the movement awkward and incomplete. I saw her notice this, make to punch me again anyway — to actually hit me right on the shoulder — and then pull back at the last moment.

Instead she glared at me, with eyes so green and bright it was as though I'd never seen them before.

'Don't you ever do that again,' she shouted. 'Don't you ever keep anything from me.'

'Nina, I didn't know whether…'

'I don't care. Just don't. Don't treat me like whatever you choose to tell me is enough, like I'm some fucking… chick who just gets what she's given. John did that and if I ever see him again I'm going to break his fucking nose.'

'Fine, but don't take it out on…'

'… on poor you. In two days I've been suspended, my ex has started killing people, God knows how many, and I've seen my boss shot to death in front of my eyes. I've still got his blood all over my shirt, as people keep pointing out. So don't you, don't you dare…'

She stopped shouting, blinked twice, rapidly, and I realized her eyes looked brighter not just because I was so close to them, but also because they were full. I took a risk and put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off viciously, and suddenly her eyes were dry again.

'Nina, I'm sorry. Look… I'm just not used to having to say things. I've spent three months in a void and was not the world's best socialized person even before that. My whole life I've relied on the comfort of strangers, room service and barmen. I'm just not used to having someone around to listen or give a damn.'

'I'm not saying I give a damn. I'm just saying don't lie to me. Don't hide things from me. Ever.'

'Okay,' I said. 'I understand.' I did, too, or thought I did. John had cut her deep. Right now I was his surrogate. Given how angry she was, I thought he was lucky to be somewhere else.

She took a step back from me, put her hands on her hips. Looked away and breathed out in one harsh, long exhalation. 'Did I hurt your shoulder?'

'Least of my problems,' I said. 'My face feels like I ran into a wall. When you slap someone, they stay slapped.'

She looked back up at me, head cocked. 'Right. You know that about me now. So don't make me do it again.'

'I'll try.'

'Don't just try. Anyone can try. I need you to be better than that.'

'Okay,' I said, seriously. 'Trust me. I won't do it again.'

'Good,' she said, and cracked a smile that was briefer than a flap of a bird's wings but still made the hair rise on the back of my neck. 'Because remember — I've also got a gun.'

She turned briskly and started walking to the stairs.

'Christ,' I said. 'You really aren't like the other girls.'

'Oh, I am,' she said, and now I couldn't tell whether she was joking or not. 'You men just have no idea.'

— «» — «» — «»—

We made the last flight up to Seattle, but only just. By the time we were out the other side and in a rental, it was midnight. With a map and a pair of burgers from a Spinner's in Tacoma we were good to go, though by then neither of us was moving fast.

I drove, trying to keep my arm from seizing completely, and also leaving Nina free to do what we'd finally agreed on the flight. She still wouldn't talk to the FBI — for all she knew, the man who'd sat in the boardroom with Monroe might still be in town, and on her case — but there was one person she was prepared to try.

She called Doug Olbrich. They spoke for five minutes. I was sufficiently busy dealing with Seattle-Tacoma's freeway system to not get much of what was said, though at least some of the conversation sounded positive.

She finished the call, stared into space for a moment, then rapped her hand on the dashboard — tap tap — as she had the day before, but this time not seeming so pissed.

'What's the score?'

'It could be worse,' she said. 'Monroe isn't dead.'

'You're joking.'

'Nope. Fucker's still alive. Astounding. He evidently has far more balls than I gave him credit for. He's got five holes in him and has been in surgery for six straight hours. He's very sick. They're saying he's got a twenty percent chance at best. But he's not dead yet.'

I felt appallingly guilty for having abandoned Monroe, for having assumed he was as good as gone.

'You did the right thing pulling me out,' Nina said. 'Without that I probably wouldn't be here.'

'There's more bad news. I can hear it.'

'Doug went up to my place to try to find me. Someone's taken it apart. Smashed it up and stolen all my files.' She shrugged, and sounded weary rather than sad. 'You were right, Ward. It was time to leave.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Whatever,' she said, tightly. 'The Gary Johnson thing is getting very heavy. It turns out this lawyer in Louisiana has a lot of money behind him, and a powerful following wind.'

'Really. I wonder where that's coming from.'

'Indeed. Monroe's in a hard place even if he lives. You know how these things go. Once someone lifts up that kind of rock, they have to find something underneath to justify lifting it in the first place. I know I didn't miss a beat with the Johnson case, but what's to say Monroe didn't cut a corner somewhere? He wanted that ball down. It's how he made SAC

She stopped and sat quietly for a little while. I let her be until I was safely out onto 18, with 90 in sight, and I had a cigarette in my hand.

'You didn't tell him what we know,' I said then.

'Think we know.'

'Whatever. You didn't tell.'

'No,' she said, quietly. 'Does that make me a bad person?'

I laughed, but then realized she wasn't smiling. I glanced at her a moment, thinking she was hard to get to the bottom of. 'In the eyes of the law, yes. In a withholding-of-evidence kind of way. Which is a jail-sentence kind of thing.'

She nodded, but said nothing.

'Come on, Nina,' I said. 'The deal cuts both ways.'

'I know,' she said. 'So here it is. I didn't tell him because I don't think there's anyone other than us going to see this through to where it needs to go.'

'And where is that?'

'There's a place for men who stick things in women's heads, and it isn't jail.'

'You don't mean that.'

'Right at this minute I do. Even if it's John. And I also didn't tell Doug because he mentioned something in passing and after he said it I just couldn't seem to…' She turned to me, and finally smiled. 'You got some miles in you yet?'

'I guess so. How many do you need?'

'The car that Monroe mentioned, the one that was clocked passing through Snoqualmie the night before Katelyn's body was found?'

'What about it?'

'Three hours ago a local sheriff ran a check on it. It bounced because it's a rental and there was no felony involved, but Doug noted it as logged and said someone might get around to a look-see tomorrow, if it's a slow day. The shout came from about another fifty miles into the mountains after Snoqualmie. I think we should be there first.'

'So where are we heading, exactly?'

She looked at the map briefly, then stabbed her finger in a spot that seemed to be right in the middle of the mountains.

'This place. Sheffer.'

— «» — «» — «»—

At about one a.m. Nina drifted off to sleep, head lolling on the rest but arms folded tight in front. I listened to her breathing as I sped us east along 90. The landscape was way too dark to make out clearly, but some vestigial organ in my body or head clocked the steadily increasing altitude. Every now and then a car sped the other way, some other traveller on some other journey.

We climbed higher, and I dropped back to fifty, and then forty, as the road became more twisty. It was getting very cold, too, misty ghosts hanging in the trees that pressed the road, illuminated by sodium lights and a moon that kept swapping places with clouds way up above. I pulled over at one point, to get a clearer fix on where I was headed. Nina shifted, but didn't wake, and I set off again as gently as I could.

Just over the crest of the mountains I took an exit onto a smaller, local road, which signposted Sheffer ten miles ahead. After feeling as if the mountains and trees were a mere backdrop, I quickly felt like an intruder among them instead.

Sheffer was small, and closed. It was quarter of three in the morning. I pulled slowly down the main street, feeling like an alien invader who'd picked exactly the right time to make his move. I passed a market, a bar, a couple of diners. Then I saw there was a sign for a motel, right at the other end.

I pulled into the lot and pulled around in a big, slow loop to park up. There was no light on in the office. Out of season, a town this small, I didn't see there being a night bell. It was looking like a couple of cold, stiff hours in my seat.

I turned the engine off and opened the door, slipping out quickly before too much mountain chill could enter the car. My intention was to have a final cigarette before trying to get some sleep.

As I stood, sucking it down, I suddenly realized four cars were parked on the other side of the lot. Of course — there always are, in motel lots. But we were looking for one in particular.

I didn't know the licence we were after. Nina hadn't told me and I probably wouldn't have remembered it anyhow. And would it really just be parked outside a motel?

I walked across to the first of the cars, and peered in through the window. The back seat was full of vacation junk: spare fleece jackets, trail maps, and a selection of brightly coloured objects designed to forestall questions as to whether we were there yet.

The next was ten yards further on. It was very cold, and I'd finished my cigarette. I considered leaving it. Instead I walked over. It didn't look like something anyone would rent. It was big and rusty and covered with mud. But I leaned down to look in anyway.

I heard a quiet footstep at the last second, and started to turn.

Then my head was full of stars, which rapidly turned black.

25

Something red, like a light across a harbour in the dead of night. A sound, quiet, like the rustle of water on a shoreline — the kind of noise the world makes to itself when it thinks there's no one around to hear. Drowsy comfort, for a moment, before two types of pain came in like two long screws being slowly tightened. The ache in my shoulder. Another in the back and side of my head.

I jerked my head up, opened my eyes a little wider. I realized the red glow was a bedside clock. It took a moment to focus on the numbers properly. They said it was just after five a.m. The room was deadly quiet, the kind of silence where you think you can hear the carpet. It smelled of motel.

I was sitting in a chair, it seemed, slumped over. My head still seemed to be floating in cushioning ether, thoughts tottering forward like over-ambitious toddlers. I tried to sit up properly, and found I couldn't. This scared me until I realized it was because my feet and wrists were tied to the chair's front legs. Then it scared me in a different way.

I gave up trying to move and turned my head instead. A pain ripped down from my temple straight to my shoulder, and it was all I could do not to cry out. There was probably no reason why I shouldn't have. There's just something about finding yourself tied to a chair in a dark room. You tend not to want to attract any more attention than you've already received.

I waited a moment, while small flashing lights faded in front of my eyes. Then I tried again, more slowly this time. The room was very dark indeed, the darkness you can only get a long way from a city's ambient light. There was just enough glow for my heart to thud heavily when I saw someone was standing by the window.

My lips separated with an audible click, but I didn't speak. Couldn't, maybe. I kept my head rigid and my eyes open wide and saw that the shape by the window wasn't standing after all, but sitting cross-legged on a desk.

Finally I managed to speak: 'Paul?'

'Of course not,' a voice said, immediately. 'You think you'd be alive if it was?'

At that moment I mentally gave up hope. Just like that. How the man from the restaurant in Fresno had found us, I had no idea. But I knew I wouldn't be walking away a second time. Not tied to a chair. I wondered where Nina was, and hoped she was alive, or if not, that I'd never know.

There was a rustling sound, and I realized it was the same noise I'd heard while fighting to regain consciousness. It was caused by the man's thick coat, as he slid forward off the desk.

He took the four steps between us, stood a moment looking down. Then squatted to bring his face close to mine.

'Hello, Ward.'

'You fucker.'

It was John Zandt.

— «» — «» — «»—

He sat on the end of the bed, facing me, but made no movement towards untying the ropes.

'Where's Nina?'

'In the next room. Tied just like you, and with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.'

'She will shout when she wakes. She will shout like you won't believe.'

'Not gagged as she is. And if you even take a deep breath I'll hit you so hard you won't wake up for a week, or maybe ever.'

'What are you doing, John? What is wrong with you?'

'Nothing,' he said. 'I'm just not having you screwing things up.'

'Screwing what up? Your murder spree?'

'Who do you think I've killed?'

'Peter Ferillo, for one.'

He sniffed. 'Yes. I did kill him.'

'And who else?'

'Why do you think there's someone else?'

'Otherwise why would you ask? Did you kill the women? Did you kill Jessica and Katelyn to get back at Paul?'

'Stop calling him that. He doesn't deserve a name.'

'He's got one. Get used to it. Did you kill them or not?'

'You really think I'd kill a woman?'

'What's the difference? Why is it okay to kill a man? You start making distinctions like that and there's not so big a distance between you and Paul. You hit the Ferillo girl hard enough to give her concussion. Where's that lie on your new moral spectrum?'

'That wasn't planned. I knew what I was going to have to do to make Ferillo talk, and I was just too wired. I put her somewhere she'd be found quickly.'

'You're a prince. And once he'd talked, he had to die, right?'

'Yes. Once I'd found out that while he was in LA he helped organize the transportation of young girls to killers. He may have thought they were just going to be trained up to be whores — that's what he claimed. But you know what? That's enough.'

I could see in John's face that he either wasn't able or wasn't prepared to revisit Ferillo's death at his hands. 'John, untie me. For God's sake.'

He shook his head. 'Not going to happen. You'll get in the way. You're just not up to it.'

'Screw you.'

Suddenly his finger was in my face. 'Were you last time? With a clear shot? I'm sorry — did I miss that? Did you kill the man who dismembered my daughter, when he was right there in front of you?'

I couldn't answer that. I knew I hadn't. 'He's here, isn't he?'

'Yes,' John said. 'He's here looking for something because he believes it's going to make everything okay.'

'He screwed up. Is that it? He's not the bad guys' poster psycho any more. They've exiled him and now they want him dead.'

'You're not stupid, I'll admit that.'

'Tell me, John. I've got a right to know. And either untie me or get me a drink. It's freezing in here.'

He walked through into the bathroom. A couple of clinks in the darkness, and then he reappeared with a small glass with two inches of amber fluid in it. I opened my mouth and he tipped it in. It made me cough hard, but warmth flooded through my chest.

He stepped back, walked over to the window. Watched the parking lot for a while.

'He's not staying here, surely?'

'He was, along with some guy he's with. I got here mid-evening and he wasn't here any more. But he's still around.'

'How do you know?'

'Because he's insane. He thinks he's found a magic masterstroke that's going to make the world in his image.'

'What? What is it?'

He shook his head. 'You won't believe it.'

'You know the dead women were from foster families when he was a kid?'

'Yes. I traced people who'd worked on his case. I talked to the old woman in San Francisco. I put two and six together.'

'Why Ferillo?'

'He was a front for the Straw Men, one of many all over the country. They arranged for him to walk from prosecution four years ago. I don't think he even understood what they're into, but he was party to them laundering money through his restaurant. The apartment he died in belonged to a man called George Dravecky. Dravecky is a property developer and a very rich man. He didn't own a house up at The Halls but he put in the original application. He bankrolled the start-up costs. He's one of them.'

'How did you find that out?'

'I'm good at what I do.'

'You're no longer a cop and you obviously refused to involve Nina. So where's your in to information sources?'

'Guy I used to work with in LAPD. In the old days he had a habit of reallocating an occasional bag of pharmaceutical evidence for personal use. No big deal, but he's straight and more senior now and wouldn't want it widely known. He does what I ask.'

'Doug Olbrich, by any chance?'

John smiled briefly. It wasn't a nice sight. 'Not stupid at all.'

'No. Just prone to trust the wrong people, especially ones I thought were friends. Does Olbrich know about the rest of it?'

'No. He's just a cop.'

'Did you get to Dravecky?'

'Yes. He confirmed things I'd already begun to work out. You have no idea what we're up against.'

'I think I do.'

'No, you really don't. I mentioned Roanoke to see if it sparked anything. I watched your face for some sign that you'd got anywhere by yourself, and I saw nothing. How can that be, Ward? What have you been doing all this time?'

'Trying to stay alive.'

'Hiding, you mean. For what? Once you know about these people, there's no way back. You can't just sit and watch television and jerk off. There's no happy families, no walks along the beach, no normal life. There's nothing to do and nowhere to go.'

'John, what is it that you think you know?'

'The Indians didn't kill the settlers at Roanoke, Ward. The Straw Men did.'

I stared at him. 'What?'

'The Croatoans knew all about it. They told the next group of settlers that 'another tribe' did it, that another tribe had killed the fifteen left behind from the second expedition. That other tribe was the Straw Men. Ancestors to them, anyway, trying to wipe out other Europeans before they could get a foothold in a country that had been quietly theirs for a long, long time. They took out the next expedition too, except they kept some of the women and children — guess why. They did the same with the Spanish and with everyone else, whatever chance they got. That's why the word 'Croatoan' was on that cabin. Then it was a blatant attempt to pass the blame: now it's come to mean 'we were here' or 'this is our place'.'

'The Straw Men were here back in the 1500s? Get real.'

'They were here long before that. They got here first, Ward. They stole America from the locals four thousand years before anyone else even knew it was here. You ever hear of a place called Oak Island?'

I shook my head. He wanted to tell, and I wanted to hear. But most of all I wanted him to keep talking, in case his voice made it through to the next room, and Nina was awake, and could hear I was still alive.

'It's a tiny rock off Nova Scotia. In 1795 a guy called McGinnis discovered an old shaft covered by flagstones made of rock you don't find in the area. Since then hundreds of people have tried to find what's at the bottom. When they dug it in 1859 the thing flooded because there was a clever second tunnel which led out to the sea. They're still trying. They've gone down through six oak platforms, down and down to two hundred feet without hitting the bottom. Nobody knows who put it there, they've guessed at everything from privateers to Vikings to the Knights Templar.'

'So who was it?'

'The Straw Men. The pit is nearly a thousand years old. It was one of the places they stashed money once they realized they couldn't keep the continent to themselves for much longer.'

'But who are they?'

'No one, and everyone. They came from all over the world at different times. Phoenicians, Romans, Irish, ancient Egyptians, Portuguese, Norse. The Romans conquered half the world, moved tens of thousands of men across whole continents — you really think some of them couldn't make a few hundred-mile hops up around the North Atlantic? They came in handfuls, people who didn't want to live with the new rules of the world, who didn't want any part of the way it was going, especially after Christianity started screwing things for the old beliefs. There are signs of them all over the country, pieces of suppressed evidence. Western artefacts in the wrong strata, ancient Chinese coins in the North West, folk tales of natives speaking English or Welsh, a hidden Egyptian shrine in the Grand Canyon, old Celtic Ogham script carved into rocks in New England, megaliths in New Hampshire, legends of red-haired Indians in Oregon. The New World has always attracted those who didn't like the old one, who thought it was getting tainted with the virus of modern civilization — and gradually the groups came into contact and worked together. Every now and then a story would leak back — the journey of St Brendan, or the Piri Reis map, showing sections of the world we now claim we didn't know about back then — but it was always quashed. The Straw Men wanted the place to themselves, their own private country and kingdom and lair — not least because it was making them rich.'

'How, precisely?'

'Copper. Starting from 3000 BC, half a million tons of copper was mined out of the upper peninsula in Michigan. Five thousand mines, stretching one hundred and fifty miles, with work taking place over the course of a thousand years.'

'I've never heard anything about that.'

'Strange, huh? Despite the fact they left behind millions of tools and thousands of holes. Where did five hundred thousand tons of copper go? It was exported around the world, and it's what first made the Straw Men rich — and gave them the power to keep the place secret. When anyone here gave them trouble, they simply took them out. They took out the Anasazi when it looked like their civilization was getting too advanced. They wiped out Roanoke. They nearly did the same with Jamestown. They just picked off as many of the pioneers as they could. In the middle of the diary of Patrick Breen, a member of the Donner party, there's this weird reference where he says in the entry for Friday 18th: 'Saw no strangers to day from any of the shantys'. What strangers? Through the rest of the diary, there's no mention of these 'strangers'. What were they doing out there, out in a place so remote that the original party was dying left and right and — interestingly — starting to eat each other? Who were they?'

'Straw Men, presumably, according to you.'

'Yes. They were here before us. They had always been here. People knew, occasionally came into contact with them, but it didn't fit in with our genesis myths for the country we've become and so gradually mention of them died out.'

'And they just gave up?'

'Of course not. But you can't fight an influx of millions of sane people, and there's never been many of the Straw Men. They faded into the shadows, did their business the quiet way. I think they have connections with the neo-Conservatives now, but I'm never going to prove it. They make their money and do the things they like to do, the kind of things we're not supposed to do any more, and every now and then they create an atrocity just to keep their hand in and honour the gods. It's their way.'

'Murder isn't a belief system.'

'Yes it is, Ward. That's exactly what it is. We all did it. These days we only ever kill out of hate, or through greed, or as a punishment, but for a hundred thousand years our species believed in a kind of killing that was to do with life and hope.'

'Which was what?'

'Sacrifice. We sacrificed animals, and we sacrificed each other. Sacrifice is killing for magic purpose, and serial murder is a misplaced version of this instinct. They're turning teenage girls and lost boys into symbols of the 'gods' — perfect, unattainable, cruel — and their whole MO is a curdled version of an ancient ritual.'

'I don't get it.'

'Every step is the same. They make preparations, choose a victim; they take the victim off to a secret place, then wash/feed/attempt to communicate with them — honouring before sacrifice. They may have sex with them, too, and partly this is an attempt to mate with these gods but it's also because sexual dysfunction is the only thing strong enough to pull modern man down through civilization back to these elemental, innate impulses. Then they sacrifice them or 'kill' them, to use another word. Sometimes they'll eat parts, to take on their power. They'll often keep a piece of the victim or their clothes, much like a bear's pelt or a wolf's tooth, putting it in a special place, keeping it with them to keep the dead alive. Does this not sound familiar to you?'

'Yes,' I admitted. 'It does.'

'Then they'll bury the remainder, returning it to the earth, or they distribute it — and dismemberment was a common feature of sacrifice too, breaking the body down to parts. They will be dormant for a while then, until the cycle starts again — until the music of the spheres tells them it's time for another sacrifice.'

'But serial killers are not priests.'

'No. They're fucking lunatics, and so there will come a point at which the cycle starts to speed up. Most killers know they are wrong, deep down. They understand they're at the beck and call of a neurotic dysfunction they try to rationalize but can't understand. They speed up in the end because they give up giving up. But the Straw Men do believe that this is acceptable. That's the difference. They believe what they're doing is more than okay, that it's essential, that it's what put our species where it is. They believe that if you kill the right thing at the right time, everything will be well. It's the original magic act. They've stuck with an ancient belief system that says killing is right.'

He stopped talking. His jaw was thrust forward belligerently, and his whole body vibrated with an unwillingness to see the world any other way. I looked back at him, not knowing what to say. I didn't know how to tell him that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, or that not everything he had read on the internet was true, or that the willingness to fit any piece of information into a predetermined plan was a sign of mania. I didn't know how to tell him that if he believed everything he'd told me, he'd lost his mind. You don't want to use any of those words, when you've been tied to a chair by a man with a gun.

'Did you get all that from Dravecky?'

'Some of the history. He also confirmed that the view amongst some of the 'tribe' — he used that actual word — was that the Upright Man had become a liability, and he told me what he's doing here. A sacrifice that hasn't been made in a long, long time.'

'Does Paul think the Straw Men will take him back if he pulls it off?'

'I doubt he cares. He's off on his own thing. This is a guy who thinks even the Straw Men are going soft.'

'Where's Dravecky now?'

'In the Columbia River.'

'Great. You're the man. Tell me, John: did you kill the women or not?'

'No.'

The word was said immediately and simply. I still didn't know what to think. 'So what is Paul doing up here?'

John shook his head. 'You don't believe what I've told you,' he said. 'And I don't care.' He stood and took something from his pocket. It was a thick piece of cloth, about two feet long.

'Don't put that—'

But with one quick movement the gag was on. He yanked it tight. Then he came round and squatted in front of me, looked deep into my eyes. I hadn't even noticed that, while he'd been talking, the drapes had started to lighten. Dawn was on the way. In the murky light I could make out the sharp blue of his irises, the dark circle in the centre. Beyond that, I couldn't go.

'Stay out of my way, Ward,' he said. 'Him being dead is a lot more important to me than you being alive.'

He checked the knots, straightened and then laughed. 'You want to know the kicker? Forty years ago they believed the country was going to liberal ruin. That called for the ultimate. The sacrifice of the king. November 22nd, 1963.'

I just looked at him. He winked. 'They killed JFK.'

Then he went to the door, stepped out into dark blue-black, and was gone.

26

During the night the man with the guns sat bolt upright in a chair in front of the door. The other man, Kozelek, tried to talk to him on two occasions, and got nowhere, after which he seemed to give up. He sat slumped in another chair, staring into space for a while. Then he poked around in the kitchen until he found a bottle of wine. He drank it in twenty minutes flat, and fell asleep. His dreams did not look good. He said a woman's name twice.

Patrice meanwhile lay on her side on the couch. With her hands tied behind her back, there wasn't much else she could do. For a while she had kept her eyes open. When she realized this would do little to prevent any harm befalling her, she let them close. She didn't sleep, however. Sleep didn't come anywhere near.

They set off at first light. The man with the guns, Henrickson, made her walk in the front. Kozelek staggered along behind her. Partly it looked like hangover, partly a problem with one ankle. Mainly it seemed like he had given up in general.

Henrickson walked in the back. Every now and then she glanced that way to check where he was. Though the night had finally brought new snow underfoot, after the rain and sleet, he seemed to be able to move with very little sound.

She led them up around the north shore of the lake. There seemed little point in not doing so, little point in not taking him where he thought he wanted to go. It was much further than he realized, it wouldn't get him what he wanted — and might have other advantages.

As they passed the second cabin she glanced up, and saw her reflection in the dusty window. She smiled, just in case something of Bill still lingered there, and in case she didn't come back.

— «» — «» — «»—

'I hope you're not screwing me around,' Henrickson said.

Tom stopped, glad for an excuse to rest. Two straight hours' walking, all of it uphill, had taken him to the brink. The sky, at first a pale and searing blue up between the trees, had gradually turned dark and mottled, clouds arriving like clumps of dropped clay. His head felt bad, and — wretched though he felt — he couldn't help appreciating the parallel with the first time he'd returned to the place they were headed for, brain cracked wide. Of course he hadn't planned it this way. He'd just wanted to be asleep, and getting drunk had done that. He wanted to be asleep now, too. Asleep, or far away. His absurd belief that somehow he was going to be able to get away with everything, that his find was going to heal his life, had disappeared.

Henrickson stood right in front of the old woman. 'You told the cops this place was an hour's walk from the edge of your land. Unless you own a State Park, that's beginning to look far-fetched.'

'I lied,' she said, simply.

'How much further is it?'

'Quite a ways.'

'You can try to get us lost,' Henrickson said. 'I could see that might look like a good plan. But I can out-walk the two of you put together, and will be going long after you both collapse. Sure, you'll have stopped me finding the place today. But I know it's here to be found now, and so I'll stay. I'll find it sooner or later, and I'll find them, and all that will have happened is that the two of you will have died and I'll have lost a little time.'

'What's the difference?' Tom said. 'If you're just going to shoot it, kill this amazing thing, who cares whether it's today or next week?'

'What exactly do you think is out there?' Patrice asked, looking at him curiously.

'You know,' Tom said.

She shrugged. 'All I know about is bears. Just some animals been living out here a long, long time, and deserve to be left alone.'

Tom looked at Henrickson.

He didn't say anything, just nodded ahead.

So they walked some more. After a time Tom began walking level with the old woman. He started talking, and she seemed to listen. He told her about his walk in the woods, and what had brought him there, and in the end he found his mouth telling her the thing no one else knew. It came out slowly, but it wouldn't stop. He told her how he had turned to see the girl in the passenger seat of his car, how broken she was, and how hard she still fought to stay alive. He told her about the problems with the accounts of the company he had worked for, discrepancies which would almost certainly come to light sooner or later. Restaurants are expensive, as are gifts, and Rachel's tastes had not been cheap. It is hard to run an affair without financial implications, especially if it's your wife who checks the card and bank statements. Sarah would have spotted the spending even if all had come from withdrawals of cash. The company's accounts were more complex, and there was a chance it might go unnoticed. But there was a chance it would not, and Tom knew that because of what had happened his name would be on the top of any list. The really screwed-up thing, he admitted, was that the guilt he felt over this was actually more acute than at Rachel's death. Of course he should not have been having an affair with her — but she was very pretty, and once he'd started it was hard to stop. He should not have tried to get across the intersection that night — the arrival of the Porsche and its drunk driver, however, had been completely out of his hands. The theft of the money had not. He had stood there, made the decision and worked out the method. He had done the thing of his own volition, knowing it was wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, and he could categorize just about everything else that way. Very human errors. Not the stealing. He had started, deliberately, and then he couldn't stop. The chance to tell Sarah about it had come and gone in the week following the accident. Not telling her had either been a second crime or doubled the magnitude of the first, he wasn't sure which. He crossed that road. He was now trapped on the other side.

The old woman listened, and didn't say a great deal. Telling her made him feel a little better, but not much, and he realized the only thing that would make a real difference was telling Sarah. The crime against the company was the stealing; the crime against her was lying. The latter was far worse. He decided that tonight, regardless of what they did or did not find this afternoon, he was going to phone home. She had loved him once, and maybe she did still. At the very least she would tell him what to do, and that might be as much absolution as he could expect.

Eventually, at a time Tom's beleaguered guts told him was past midday, they got where they were going.

— «» — «» — «»—

They had been cresting a rise for a long time. Tom had absolutely no idea of where they were by now. For a time he had believed that Henrickson might be right, that the woman was simply trying to get them lost. But he watched her carefully and saw she never seemed to hesitate, even for a moment, the beat required to decide which wrong way to go. Progress had been slow but constant. She had turned this way and that, taken them around some features and over others. For a woman of her age, she was surprisingly fit. She winced occasionally, however, and twice slipped and fell quickly on her side, unable to use her hands to halt her fall; and gradually she began to get slower, and to tire.

Then she stopped. She was panting. She indicated with her head.

'It's down there.'

Henrickson walked past her and up to the edge of the gully. He looked down for a few moments, and then beckoned to Tom.

'That the place?'

Tom walked up and stood with him, looking down into the stream bed. At first it looked just like any of the others they'd passed through. Then he picked out the little area where he'd sat in the dark, then returned to the next morning. Still less than a week ago, but it felt like an eternity. As if this was some place he was bound to come back to, over and over.

'Yeah,' he said. 'That's where it happened.' That defining moment, before which everything seemed grey and indistinct.

'Good,' Henrickson said. He turned away from the edge and walked back to Patrice. 'Thank you, ma'am.'

'What was the big deal, anyway?' Tom said. 'Why did you want to come back here? Or was that just part of pretending to be something you're not?'

'Not at all,' the man said. 'Follow me.'

He turned and started walking up the edge of the gully. They followed. After five minutes Henrickson started cutting left again, through the trees clustered around the lip of the drop. In another few minutes he stopped.

Tom stared. The man had led them to the trunk which had fallen across the gully.

'Ms Anders — would you tell Tom what we've got here?'

'A fallen tree,' she said.

Henrickson shook his head, walked the last few yards to the edge, and then stepped up onto the tree. He examined the end, and then walked straight across to the other side, as if the trunk was ten feet wide.

'Both ends have been worked,' the man said, squatting down to examine the wood. 'And branches along the trunk trimmed off. It's also been pulled about twenty degrees round from the angle it fell. I'm astonished you didn't notice, Tom.'

'I wasn't well,' Tom said. This was true, but in all honesty he couldn't believe he'd missed it either. Once you'd seen it, it was so obvious.

'You can cross the river down the way for the time being,' Henrickson said, 'but come the spring it's a long, long walk in either direction. This is a bridge, and it was manufactured. Some of our forest friends put it together. Consciousness solidified. We are here, but we want to be over there. So we build a simple machine. There's your proof, Tom. Told you it would be worth the walk.'

'How do you know it wasn't just some guy? Or something left from logging?'

'Because I know this area has never been felled, and that it's unlikely a human would do the job with stone tools.' He looked at Patrice. 'Just a fallen tree, right?'

'That's all I see. Think perhaps you're seeing something in your head, not what's actually there in front of your eyes. Lots of people are like that.'

Henrickson walked back over the bridge, and one last time, he grinned. He looked up the gully.

'Have it your own way. But let's walk a little more. See what we find.'

They walked another ten minutes, keeping close to the edge of the gully. The sides grew steeper and deeper, and the stream grew in width and sound, swollen by waterfalls, winter-thin but relentless.

Finally they got to the top of the ridge, and Tom gasped.

Beneath their feet the ground fell away. To the left the river suddenly dropped out into space, to tumble helplessly into a large rocky bowl two hundred feet below. The forest stretched out in front, a craggy carpet of white-crusted green, limitless, towards Canada and beyond. Way up above was the thin, fading trail of a jet, across the remaining narrow band of clear sky. That was the only work of man you could see. Otherwise it was if we had never been here. Tom watched as cloud slowly filled the gap, until the sky was all over grey, then tilted his head back to look back over the forest.

'It's beautiful,' he said.

'Imagine when this was all there was,' Henrickson said, quietly, standing beside him. 'When nobody else was here.' Tom could only shake his head again, faced with the world as it was before words. He kept on shaking it, slowly, feeling his eyes fill up with water. He didn't know why.

'I want to thank you, Tom,' Henrickson added, and suddenly his accent was backwoods again, and he was the person Tom had thought he'd come to know. 'You tried real hard, my friend, and it's not been an easy time for you, I know. You know the weirdest thing? I've actually enjoyed having someone to talk to.'

Tom's head, shaking still, and then nodding. He looked up, saw the blurry shape of the old woman, hands still behind her back. She smiled at him, sadly, then looked away.

And then Henrickson put his hand on Tom's shoulder and pushed him over the edge.

There was a feeling of tilt, the hollow wrongness of knowing nothing was beneath, as if he was back on the bridge he had found all by himself, and the voice in his head had not been there to help him. Then the weightlessness of pure free fall, fast and brief, before he started hitting things. The collisions were not rustles or slides this time, but brief, bone-cracking impacts that spun and twisted him into a rag doll. Another momentary unbroken plummet, and then he landed like a dropped glass.

— «» — «» — «»—

Two hundred feet nearer heaven, Patrice glared dully at the man.

'Did you have to do that?'

'Yes. I don't expect you to understand.'

'You going to shove me over too?'

'One human is enough. And you've got a job to do.'

'This place is all I know and I can't go any further. You want a bear, you're going to have to go find one by yourself.'

The man shook his head. 'If it comes to it, I'll make you tell me where they live. But for the time being we're going back down to the stream, where Tom saw his 'bear', and we're going to sit and wait.'

'You think they're just going to wander by?'

'No. But they mean a lot to you, which makes me think you might mean something to them. When they know you're there, they may choose to visit.'

'Like I'm some big mother bear? Right. My own kids haven't visited in eighteen months.'

'Patrice, you're beginning to piss me off with this denial.'

'They'll know I'm not alone.'

'Of course they will. Especially when I start doing things to you. On short acquaintance I already suspect you'll be good at keeping quiet, but they'll hear your discomfort in other ways. And they'll come.'

She looked at the ground, dismayed.

'I thought someone would come,' she said, eventually. 'But I thought it would just be a hunter. Some asshole who wanted to make his fortune or get on the Tonight Show. But you're not one of those.'

'No,' he said. 'I'm not.'

'So what are you?'

'My name is Paul,' he said. 'Sometimes I'm called the Upright Man. I'm just doing what needs to be done.'

— «» — «» — «»—

Tom lay wedged between two big rocks, hidden beneath a mossy overhang thirty feet above the ground. He tried to make a sound, but heard only a liquid bubbling. His body was bent around and smashed, clothes torn and bloodstained, and something appalling had happened to his left leg. Cold water ran over his feet and his outstretched left hand, but he couldn't feel it. Though his skull was broken, and his cheekbone, his eyes still saw, and his right arm still worked, a little.

Over the next twenty minutes he managed only one thing. He worked his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He navigated laboriously to the text messaging facility, and, with a thumb that alternatively tremored and stalled, he got as far as:

i saw bigfoot. i lov

Then he died. There was no signal anyway. His body was never found.

27

I had slept for a little while. Incredible, you might think, but just as the guilty will sometimes nod off in a holding cell, the spastic tension of their lives momentarily resolved into an incarceration they can no longer flee, so you're largely absolved of action when you're securely tied to a chair.

Once I woke, I couldn't get back there. It was worse being awake. It left me free to think, and also to attempt to escape. I tried rocking the chair, using my back to pull the legs off the floor. When a rash movement nearly tipped the whole lot straight over forward — gateway to a smashed face and broken neck — I stopped. Screw that. I'm not Jackie Chan.

Doing nothing was worst of all. I watched the curtain get lighter still, heard the sounds of a world waking up outside: gravel under tyres, distant half-second bursts of laughter, clangs and tweets and coughs. I felt a pain in my lower back gradually get more and more acute, and my shoulder begin to glow like fire. I stared at the bedside clock and yearned for each number to increment by just one unit — sometimes I thought it must have broken, it took so long — but when they did, nothing changed.

It was a long, long wait until 12.51, when Nina finally kicked the door down, accompanied by two men I'd never seen before.

— «» — «» — «»—

'He sure as hell looked like you,' the big one admitted. I had been told he was called Sheriff Connolly. The other one was called Phil and he was young and game and sandy-haired. 'But I can see you're not the same.'

'His name is Paul.'

'Mr Kozelek was overheard calling him Jim.'

'He may be using the name Henrickson.'

Connolly nodded, slowly. 'Yes, that would be him.'

Phil's eyes were like saucers. 'He's a serial killer?'

'Oh yes. And then some.'

We were in the police station. We had coffee. My hands were still numb and I had problems holding the cup. Nina wasn't faring any better. The motel maid had found her tied up, and fetched the police before thinking to untie her. Her face was pale and she looked exhausted and thin. I wanted to find John Zandt and punch his head more than once, and not just for the previous night.

In a half-hour we had given the cops a very limited account of what had happened and what we knew. In this version it had been the Upright Man who had tied us up, rather than John. Nina had made it clear she was a Federal agent, and managed to dissuade the head cop from calling it in. For now. A lady doctor with a nice smile had looked us over and put a bandage over the open stripe across my shoulder, and then gone away. My eyes felt dry and scratchy and wide, and the light in the room seemed very bright.

Phil shook his head. 'Holy crap.'

'So what's he doing here in Sheffer?' Connolly said. 'And where has he gone?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'But…' I glanced at Nina. 'He said some weird things last night. Things about sacrifice. He seems to be on some kind of weird purification thing. He's already murdered everyone from his past, though, so I can't think who might be next on the list. Unless it's something to do with the people he used to work for.'

Connolly was looking right over my shoulder, a strange look on his face.

'Mr Kozelek spent some time in the woods,' he said. 'He came back dishevelled, claiming he'd seen something.'

'What kind of thing?' Nina asked.

'Said he'd seen a Bigfoot.'

I was surprised into a laugh. 'Right.'

Connolly smiled tightly. 'Exactly. It was a bear, of course. But this brother of yours spent a lot of time with Mr Kozelek, and I can't see why he'd do that unless Kozelek's claim was of interest to him. Can you think of any reason why that might be?'

I couldn't. I shook my head.

Connolly looked away, bit his lip. 'Phil. Give Mrs Anders a call for me, would you?'

'Why

'Just do it. Number's 3849.'

The younger policeman grabbed a phone and punched in the number. Let it ring for a while, and shook his head. 'No answer.'

'Try her cell.' He reeled off that number too. Phil tried it, waited, and again shook his head. The sheriff bit his lip thoughtfully. 'You seen her around town this morning?'

'No.'

'Me neither.' Connolly stood up. 'And I mentioned her name last night. I think we'd better go take a look-see. Phil — get some coats and gloves for these people. See if we got any boots in the right size, too.'

'Sure.'

'Also go to the cabinet and get us some guns.'

'Which ones?'

Connolly looked at me, and I nodded.

'The big ones.'

We walked quickly out to the lot behind the station to find it had started to rain. Neither policeman seemed to notice. If you live in the NW, rain is evidently business as usual. Connolly pointed us to one vehicle, and his deputy to another.

'Don't be trying to get there first,' he told him. 'Just stick behind me, you hear?'

Nina and I climbed into the back seat. Connolly got in the front, and closed the door. He started the engine, then turned in his seat to look back at us.

'Funny thing,' he said. 'I saw Henrickson and Kozelek leave town around eight thirty last night, which is when I ran his registration. Checked in the motel lot later. No sign of the car. But then you get here in the small hours, and he's around to tie you people up.'

We didn't say anything.

Connolly sighed. 'That's what I thought. This other guy. He going to be a problem to us?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'He with you or with them?'

'He's with nobody.'

'Everything else you told me was true?'

Nina replied. 'Mostly.'

Connolly faced front and put the car in gear. 'Great. I am so glad you people came to town.'

He pulled quickly around the lot and onto the wet blacktop of the main road; waited for his deputy to catch up, and then sped off up the road. Later I heard that two minutes after the patrol cars set off, a woman in Izzy's coffee shop saw a car come around from the back of a bar called Big Frank's, and follow us out of town.

— «» — «» — «»—

I spent the next fifteen minutes trying to rub feeling back into my hands. Nina did the same. I wanted to tell her more of what John had said, but it didn't seem the right time. Connolly took us fast along a road that had very few other cars on it. Though it was only a little after two, the sky was trying hard to make it look later. The rain stopped, but not in a good way. It was getting colder.

We took a turn-off just past a coffee hut, onto a narrow road that didn't seem to have a name. We'd only been on it thirty seconds when the deputy's voice came crackling over the radio.

'Chief,' he said, 'you missed the turn. Cascade Falls is back up…'

'Just keep your eyes on the road and follow me,' Connolly said. 'We're going a different way.'

He kept driving for a lot longer than I expected. From what I gathered the woman we were going to visit had lived in a development not too far off the main road. This road didn't look like it was going anywhere. After twenty minutes it narrowed to a single lane and he dropped speed because of the snow still on it. Tall trees grew right up to the sides, and there were no little signs saying the local Kiwanis were proudly sponsoring the road's upkeep. Still he kept driving. I glanced through the rear windshield once in a while and saw the deputy doggedly hanging on our tail. He kept a decent stopping distance but was still close enough for me to make out the puzzlement in his face.

Then Connolly slowed, for no reason I could see. He was peering out to the right. I glanced at Nina.

'Sheriff — are you sure you know where you're going?'

'I am,' he said. 'Matter of fact, we're here.'

He killed the engine and climbed out. When Nina and I were standing by the side of the road, the place we were in seemed even more remote. Bushes and trees stopped you from being able to see very far on either side, and the ground was carpeted with unbroken snow. The road petered out completely about fifty yards ahead.

Phil had parked right behind us. 'Chief, where are we?'

'End of the old service road,' he said. He pointed into the trees over my shoulder. 'You see?'

If you looked hard, you could just make out the shape of a ruined building, hidden amongst trees about ten yards away.

'Okay,' I said. 'Why?'

Connolly slung his gun over his back and started walking.

'I talked to Mrs Anders couple nights ago,' he said. 'And she told me she'd not been truthful when she said where she'd found Mr Kozelek's stuff. She thought he didn't seem like a man quite in his right mind, and didn't want him going back out there again. She gave me an indication of where it was. If Henrickson's got her, which I guess he has, then he'll make her take him there.'

'Is it close?'

'No,' he said, turning off the road and heading into the forest. I saw there was an area ahead where the trees were thinner on the ground, and looked a little younger. An old logging road, I guessed, now overgrown. 'Not as such. This will get us some of the way. Then it's a hard walk.'

— «» — «» — «»—

So far as Nina and I were concerned the walking got hard pretty much immediately. We just seemed to go up and up. After an hour there was no longer any sign we were on a track. I didn't really notice it go. The trees around us were huge and thick now, and the way was steep. I'm no kind of hiker, as I'd told Zandt, and was finding it tough. With the snow on the ground it was difficult to tell what was underneath. Sometimes it was rocks, sometimes you'd step somewhere that looked dependable and without warning find yourself up to your knees. It started getting darker, partly because of the wall-to-wall cloud. It still wasn't raining. It had been cold when we started out, but I soon began to look back on that as a halcyon period of balmy comfort. If Kozelek had spent two days out in this, I was amazed he'd come back alive. I was also amazed at the dedication of the pioneers who'd forged roads across this landscape. The thing about us is we always want to be on the other side. We bring our saws and trucks and sweat and make it so. Turn your back, though, and it comes creeping home again, and it creeps fast.

'You okay?'

'More or less,' I said. Nina and I were walking together, a couple yards back from the two cops. 'You?'

'I guess. Unbelievably cold.'

And tired, and hungry. I called out, 'Are we nearly there yet?'

'No,' he said, without turning. 'About halfway.'

'Fuck,' Nina said, quietly. 'I hate the outdoors. It sucks.'

We kept on walking. I quietly told Nina more of what John had said the night before. She concurred that it sounded as though he'd lost his mind. It's funny, though. First time you hear something, it sounds outlandish and broken and like it doesn't make sense. But once it's been in your head a while it's as if the other thoughts in there wriggle out of the way to give it some room. The stuff about serial murder and a curdled sacrificial instinct was easiest to accommodate. As a theory it made as much sense as any. I found it harder to believe that any anomalous rumour about my country could be laid at the feet of the Straw Men. There were lots of things about them which took them outside the realm of the explicable, however. So who knew?

After a while we stopped talking, mainly because we ran out of breath. Phil looked to be struggling too, but Connolly kept up an even pace. It was loud, the sound of four pairs of boots in the snow, four rhythms of panting breath. The combination of tiredness, sleeplessness and the semi-constant white in front of my eyes began to have a hypnotic effect. I stopped thinking, seeing only the next step, which rock to head for; feeling the rises and dips and smelling pine needles and bark in the shockingly clean air. My face began to lose elasticity, feeling numb when I rubbed it, and when I blinked there was a flash in front of my eyes. I stumbled every once in a while, and Nina did too.

'Stop.'

When Connolly spoke it was low and quiet and intent.

I was pulled out of a reverie; I jerked my head up and stopped dead. 'What? Are we there?'

He turned around to face us, but didn't reply. Just squinted into the forest back the way we'd come, over to our left. After the walking, the silence was very loud, and my ears sang.

'What did you hear?' Nina asked.

Connolly was silent for another twenty seconds. 'Nothing,' he said, eventually. 'Thought I saw something. Looked back to see if you two were bearing up and I thought I saw a shadow back there, about forty yards over to the side.'

'Lot of shadows,' I said. 'It's getting dark.'

'Maybe,' he said. He looked at his deputy. 'Our friends here know another party who might be interested in Henrickson. Seems possible he might be in these parts too.'

'Oh yes?' Phil said, suspiciously. 'And who's that?'

'An ex-cop. The Upright Man fucked up his life pretty bad,' Nina said. She tramped a couple of yards in the direction Connolly was looking, also peering hard between the trees. 'He wants him as much as we do.'

'Is this guy dangerous?'

I nodded. 'But not to us, I hope.'

Suddenly Nina called out, startling the rest of us.

'John!' she shouted. 'John — are you there?'

Four pairs of eyes open wide, watching the spaces between the trees. Nothing seemed to move.

She tried again. 'If you're there, John, come up here. We want him too. Do this the right way. Come with us.'

Nothing stirred. Nina shook her head.

'Just shadows,' she said. She frowned, then looked up. 'Oh Jesus, great. Now it's starting to snow.'

She was right. Tiny little flakes of white had begun to spiral down.

'Wish you hadn't done that,' Connolly said. 'Sound travels a long way out here. I wouldn't want this guy to know we're coming.'

'I'm familiar with the way sound travels,' she said. 'He'll already know someone's coming. Right, Ward?'

'Yes. And I've got to warn you, Sheriff, it won't make any difference. He won't run, he won't hide. He'll just do what he was going to do.'

The cop reached across his shoulder and pulled his shotgun over into his hands. He stood with it in the port arms position and looked down at me. Though Connolly was ten, fifteen years younger than he'd been, there was something of my father in his eyes: a cool appraisal, and a sense of not really understanding the concept of backing down.

'Okay,' he said. 'Then that's the way it will be.'

The wind was picking up now, and snow swirled around his face.

28

Patrice was colder than she had ever been before in her life. The man had let her put a coat on before leaving the cabin, and for most of the journey she wished she hadn't. When you're moving, a coat is no use to you: it's the parts it doesn't cover, the face and hands — especially hands tied behind you — which get the coldest. All a coat does is sweat you up. But for the two hours they'd now been sitting, waiting, she'd been very grateful for it. Probably dead without it, she knew. Her nose had run a little, and the water had frozen into little icicles in her nose. She'd asked if he could retie her hands in front, so she could keep them warmer, but he'd said no. She knew why. Her arms and shoulders were beginning to hurt. A lot. This was the start of what she knew he would do if he didn't get what he'd come for by sitting still. He thought this would make some difference to what happened here. She thought he was wrong.

The snow began to come down just after four o'clock. The light had begun to die and though some of the flakes sparkled as they fell, others looked like tiny floating shadows. She knew that some of the locals regarded snow as a cross to bear. She didn't. Even after three years, to her it still seemed like magic. It made her sad, sometimes, bringing memories of Bill, and the children when they were much younger; but nobody said all magic was of a happy kind.

The man had seated her close to the steep wall of the gully, which was something. At least she only got the wind from one direction. Meanwhile he sat up on the low bank on the other side of the stream, with his gun on his lap, in utter silence. If he was cold, he didn't show it.

The snow had been falling for maybe twenty minutes, and getting harder, when she saw him suddenly look up. He listened for a moment.

'Hear something?'

'Long distance away,' he said.

'I really have no idea what you're talking about, you know. Tom saw a bear. That's it. I led you out here because you're a very bad man and I think it would be best if you froze to death somewhere you'll never be found.'

'Maybe,' he said. 'I could see you doing that.' He smiled. 'I like you. You remind me of someone.'

'Your mother?'

'No,' he said. 'Not her.'

'Is she still alive?'

He said nothing, and she knew suddenly and with certainty that this man's mother was dead, not buried in a conventional place, and that he knew where the bones lay.

'Were you an only child?'

Henrickson's head swivelled towards her.

She shrugged. 'I'm just moving my mouth to keep my face from freezing solid.' This was true. In teaching she had also discovered that, very occasionally, you could get through to a child by just talking and talking at them. This man wasn't a child, she knew that. He was a psychopath. Perhaps they worked the same. 'Hey — and maybe they'll hear us. Come see what we're talking about. So were you, or not?'

'I became one,' he said, without emotion. 'I had three mothers. All of them are now dead, which gave me strength. I was born in a forest, my father killed my mother, and then people came and killed him too. They kept me and my brother for a while, and then they kept him and got rid of me. People tried to make me live in places, but I didn't, until in the end I lived with my final mother not far from here.'

'Did she treat you badly?'

'Patrice, I am so far beyond pop psychology you wouldn't believe.'

'So who do I remind you of?'

'The woman who was my grandmother for a while.'

Patrice supposed that was something like a compliment, for what that was worth. 'Why do you want to do this?'

'Killing is what animals do. Carnivores kill to eat. Wild dogs kill the young of other wild dogs. Flies lay their eggs in the flesh of dying mammals. They don't care and neither should we. Arab slave traders in Zanzibar would throw sick men and women into the waters of the bay, so as not to pay duty on goods they couldn't sell. Russian peasants in Siberia sold human body parts in the killing winters of the 1920s. We are the animal that will invent flying machines and then crash them into buildings full of our own kind. We are the ones that will rigorously attempt genocide. Humans are animals and we kill and we destroy.'

'I'd like to hear you sounding more like you thought these were bad things.'

'It's neither bad nor good. It's merely the truth. Our species walked into Europe, where beings had lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and within a few millennia it was ours. How do you think that happened?'

'We were better adapted.'

'In one way only. Our advantage was the willingness to kill other human-like creatures. We killed the Neanderthals until we ran out of them and then we started on each other. We don't respect animals like hyenas and vultures, scavengers. We glorify lions, tigers, sharks: animals with fresh blood around their maws. The fact we have words and thumbs and delusions of spiritual grandeur makes no difference. There is no evil. There is no good. There is only behaviour, and this is ours.'

'So go kill someone already. You obviously have before, right?'

He didn't answer, which was somehow worse. Frozen though she was, Patrice felt the flesh on her neck crawl. She knew she was with someone who did not understand what others understood. 'So go kill some other human. There's millions of us. Why not go kill some more of them?'