PROLOGUE

Boston, Massachusetts   1980

Free!

Kate Summers pulled the last page from her word processor and dropped it with the others in her OUT basket.  Now for the hard part—saying good-bye and making a quick exit.  She glanced at the pebbled-glass door to Tyrell Clark’s office.  His desk lamp shined through the opaque barrier.

Get a grip, Kate.  You can do this.

She’d agreed to work late, hoping that he wouldn’t return, but she hadn’t been so lucky.  She’d heard his heavy tread on the back stairs just forty minutes before, and though he hadn’t paused at her desk, hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction as he’d beelined to his office, she knew she couldn’t leave without collecting her last paycheck and a letter of recommendation.

The rest of the building was quiet.  Only the soft rumble of the building’s tired furnace and the muted sounds of traffic outside disturbed the silence in the once-hallowed halls of Clark & Clark.  The elder Clark, Tyrell Senior, had died just two years before and new there was only his son to carry on the tradition.  In the meantime business was shrinking.  The staff that had once filled eight offices now occupied just two.  Tyrell, a brilliant lawyer, also loved women, drink, and a friendly, if fatal, wager at the race track.  And he had not only the IRS after him but other, more sinister adversaries—loan sharks and bookies and the like.

In two days Kat planned to leave Boston—and the nightmare she’d been living—behind.  She’d never have set foot in the offices of Clark & Clark again.  All she had to do was ship her meager belongings to Seattle and hand her keys over to the landlord of her small apartment—four tiny rooms that had been her home for the past three years.  A lump filled her throat, but she ignored it.

No more memories.  No more pretending.  A new start.  That’s what she needed.

“Kate?”

She sucked in her breath.

From the adjoining office, Tyrell Clark’s voice, smooth as well-oiled machinery, caused a chill to creep up her spine.  She hated that well-modulated, nearly patronizing tone.

“No more,” she whispered under her breath, and one of her hands curled into a tight fist.  She didn’t have to put up with his advantages—gentle touches and suggestive innuendos—a second longer.  She found her coffee cup, favorite pen, address book, and dropped them all into her oversized bag.

“Before you leave, I’ve got something I want to discuss with you.”

The light in his adjoining office snapped off.  Her stomach knotted in apprehension.

Now what?  Bracing herself, she glanced at the clock.  Nearly seven.  And she was alone with him.  The building was probably empty.  Nervously she looked out the single window in the reception area, through the trails of rain that drizzled down the glass.  Outside it was dark except for the illumination from streetlamps and flash of headlights from cars as they passed.  She’d been a fool to stick around after Ava had gone home for the day, but she’d needed the money the overtime would bring, had naively thought that Tyrell wouldn’t return from his late afternoon meeting with a client.  She’d been wrong.  Stupid, stupid girl.

He scraped back his chair and it squeaked as he stood.  His familiar tread followed.

Just a few more minutes.  You can handle it, Kate.  Whatever you do, don’t blow it; you need his letter of recommendation so you can get another job in Seattle.

She managed a thin, watery smile as he approached her L-shaped desk.  Fake it, she told herself, though her palms began to sweat.  Be friendly, but firm.  She resisted the urge to wipe her suddenly moist hands on her skirt.  A few more minutes, then you’ll never have to see him or put up with his harassment again.  Just hang in there.

Tyrell was an imposing man and a cliché of the highest order.  Tall, dark, and handsome, he’d been compared to Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler time and time again.  He made a point to see that his tie was never askew, his dark hair always in place, his three-piece suits without so much as a thread of lint or wrinkle to detract from his polished image.

Except lately.  He’d been slipping.  His shoes weren’t always shined to a high gloss, a few gray hairs had dared invade his temples, and lines of worry had collected near the corners of his mouth.  But it was his eyes that had changed dramatically.  Usually full of a mischievous light, they’d dimmed with worry and he was forever playing with the wristband of his watch, as if he were running out of time.  She knew why.  The continuous correspondence from the IRS explained it all.

“So this is good-bye,” he said.

“Yes.” She reached for her purse.  “I was just getting ready to call it a day.”  Her mind was spinning ahead, creating an excuse to flee the building.

“I thought we might have one last drink together.”

“Sorry.”  Not really.  “I told Laura I’d stop by.  I’m already late.”

“Your sister will understand.” He picked up her favorite paperweight—a crystal porcupine—and tossed it lightly, as if testing its weight.  “This is important.”  He offered her an infectious smile that had worked its magic on dozens of women with weaker hearts and landed them in his bed.  The sorcery hadn’t affected Kate.  She wasn’t interested in a man, any man, and especially not one as well worn as Tyrell.  And now his grin seemed forced, his usually tanned skin, paler, as if the life were being sucked out of him.

“What?”  Her damned curiosity always got the better of her.

“I thought you might like to be a mother again.”

She felt as if the floor had just dropped out from under her feet.  “A mother?” she repeated, her voice a whisper.  Her head began to pound.  She’d never known him to be so outwardly cruel.  “If this is some kind of joke—“ 

“It’s not.”

She could barely breathe, hardly hear above the dull roar in her ears.

“I’m offering you a son.  No strings attached.  Well, not many.”  Easing his hip onto the edge of her desk, he clasped his hands around one knee and stared at her with dark knowing eyes.  The tic beneath his eye kept up its steady rhythm.

“I don’t understand,” she replied, trying to calm down.

“It’s a long story and one I’m not privileged to discuss in too many details, but I have a client, and important, socially prominent client, whose daughter just had a baby—a little boy—out of wedlock.  He was born this afternoon.”

“You—you want me to adopt him?”

He hesitated, his eyebrows drawing together.  “Not just adopt him, Kate.  I want you to take him with you to Seattle and pretend that he’s yours.  The child’s white, his hair dark and he could certainly pass as yours.”

“What? Wait a minute—“

“Just hear me out, Kate,” he insisted and the roar in her ears became louder.  He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and withdrew an envelope.  From within, he found a Polaroid snapshot, which he handed to her.  The picture was of a newborn infant, still red, eyes out of focus as the camera had flashed.  Little fists were coiled and his expression was one of shock at being brought into the harsh lights of the real world.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

“I thought you wanted another child.”

“I do, but …” There was nothing—nothing—she’d love more than a child.  But the idea was impossible.  A pipe dream.  You had your chance, she reminded herself grimly before the tears could come again.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

A small drop of hope slid into her heart.

“I don’t understand.”  This conversation was moving too fast.  Way too fast.  “You want me to adopt him?” She felt as if she had cobwebs in her mind that were slowing down her comprehension, as if she couldn’t quite keep up with the discussion.  “What’s the catch?”

“The catch,” he repeated under his breath and bit his lower lip.  “Unfortunately, there is one.”

“Always is.”  Trepidation chased away that little bit of hope.

“I prefer to think of it as a condition that comes with this kind of instant motherhood.”

Motherhood.  The sound of the word brought back images of her own mother and a small farm in Iowa.  Spring flowers, the scent of mown hay, and cinnamon lacing the air form Anna Rudisill’s prize-winning apple pies.  Her mother’s kind smile or razor-sharp tongue when one of her daughters dared take the name of the Lord in vain whispered through Kate’s mind.  Summers had been full of hard work and long days, nights staring up at a wide dark sky sprinkled with millions of stars.  The winters had been fierce, frigid, and brutal as well as gorgeous with the thick blanket of snow that crunched under Kate’s boots as she trudged through the drifts to the barn holding on to her mother’s hand.  Icicles had hung from the eaves of the barn, and even the moisture collecting on the flat snouts of the cattle had sparkled in the pale winter sunlight.

From those few glorious years, Kate’s mind spun ahead as it always did, past the unhappy and horrifying part of her childhood to her short-lived marriage and her won darling baby girl.  Erin. Sweet, sweet baby.  If only her precious daughter had lived!  Guilt squeezed Kate’s heart in its cruel, unforgiving fist.  She blinked and found Tyrell still balanced on the desk’s corner, that pulse beneath his eye jumping.

“Why?” she finally asked.  “Whose baby is this?”

“I can’t say, but he mother doesn’t want him—she’s broken up with the father and the family just wants to get the whole unhappy incident behind them.  They don’t want any publicity, any hint of a scandal, and so far they’ve managed to keep the pregnancy a secret.  Now, all they have to do is make sure the baby is bought up by someone who will keep their secret and love the little boy as her own.”

“But I’m single…I don’t have a lot of money and there are hundreds of couples anxious to…”  Something was wrong here.  Very wrong.  She glanced at the picture again and already this precious child, this unwanted and unloved baby, was starting to attach himself to her.  “What about the father?”

“Bad news.”

“He doesn’t know?”

Tyrell shook his head.  “The family doesn’t want him to ever find out.”

"But he has rights—“

“He’s in prison.”

“Oh, God.”

Tyrell’s lips flattened together and he sit the paperweight back on the desk.  “The guy’s bad news—someone my client’s daughter hung around with just to rebel against her folks.  He’s into drugs, leather, chains, motorcycles, and crime; everything my client abhors.  The guy also has a history of violence—serious, domestic violence.  There’s a rumor floating around that he already had a son who died suspiciously as an infant.  The police couldn’t prove that he was the reason the kid quit breathing, but they suspect him.  My client doesn’t want anything like that to happen to his grandchild.  Right now the kid’s safe as the father is locked up for assault so he’s out of the picture.  Won’t be paroled for a few years.  Believe it or not, the family wants what’s best for the baby.”

“As long as he doesn’t inconvenience them.”

“If you don’t want to do this, Kate—“

"No!”  she said so vehemently she surprised herself.  It’s not the baby’s fault that he isn’t wanted, is considered nothing more than a nuisance.

Kate felt sick inside but the first little glimmer of what he was suggesting tugged at her heart.  Could she?  Could she take this child and pretend that he was hers?

A baby. A newborn. Her own child. A mother again.

Tyrell tugged on his tie.

“You know, Tyrell, this just sounds like trouble.  Big trouble.”  But there’s a baby involved, a baby who needs a mother, a child whom you need to care for.  “The pregnant girl should tell her folks to take their Machiavellian opinions about children being born out of wedlock and shove them.  That child belongs with his mother!”

“It’s not that simple,” Tyrell said, the patience in his voice belied by the lines of tension near the corners of his mouth.  “The baby’s mother…she’s not well either, or at the least stable.  She’s been in and out of mental hospitals for depression; always on some kind of medication, though the doctors have assured everyone that the baby’s healthy.  The girl’s been monitored ever since she found out about the pregnancy.  It’s been decided that the best thing would be for the baby to be adopted privately to someone who lives out of state.  You’re moving to the West Coast, and since you lost your own family, I thought it would only make sense…”  He let the thought trail off, leaving it to be finished by her own imagination, attempting to persuade her that he was only trying to help.  She didn’t buy it.

“As I said, the deal would be that you would claim the baby as yours—we’d even manage to make the birth certificate say as much.”

“How?”

“When you have money, anything’s possible.  My client has money, lots of it.  And influence.  It’s not that difficult to get a phony birth certificate and you’ll be moving so far away that no one will ever guess the truth.”  He glanced pointedly down at the pictures resting on the corner of Kate’s desk, then picked up a framed photograph of Kate holding Erin as an infant.  Her husband, Jim, was standing beside them, ever the proud father.  Jim was smiling widely, his arm around Kate’s shoulders, her own eyes shining with pride and happiness.  The perfect family.  How long ago it seemed.

Kate’s heart tugged and tears clogged her throat, tears she needed to hide.  Oh, God, could she go through with this?  Could she not?  She knew she should leave, right now, before he reeled her in and she became a part of something corrupt, something darker than it appeared on the surface.  Something she wanted.  Standing, she slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder.  “I think I’d better go.  Laura’s waiting for me—“

Setting the picture back in its resting place on the desk, Tyrell straightened, then walked slowly around the desk to stand behind her.  Gently, he placed his hands on her shoulders.

She shifted away, turned, and glared at him.  “Don’t.”  

“I know how hard it was for you to lose Jim and Erin,” Tyrell said kindly.  “You…well, you’ve never been the same.  I thought that this might be a godsend to you, to give you new purpose, a child.  But if you’d rather pass—“      

“No!” she blurted out, though her rational mind told her to walk out the door, to stay as far as possible from Tyrell and his unethical scheme.  This was crazy.  Ludicrous!  Impossible!  Illegal, for crying out loud! And yet despite all her well-laid arguments, she couldn’t let this opportunity slip through her empty fingers.  A baby!  Her baby!  “I—I don’t know what to say, I mean, I’d have to know more.  How do I know this baby isn’t kidnapped?”

His face muscles relaxed.  He knew he had her and she felt incredibly weak and manipulated.  “Trust me, Kate.  We’re talking about a newborn who isn’t wanted, who needs a mother, who deserves to be loved.  He’ll have to be hidden far away so that his psycho of a father never finds him.  This is an opportunity that may never happen otherwise.”

She blinked against a sudden wash of hot tears.  For the past two years she’d felt and overwhelming sense of guilt and remorse for the deaths of the two people closest to her.  Maybe this was a chance to make it up; or maybe it was God’s way of giving her a reason to live.

Chapter One

The cereal spoon stopped midair. Rina turned to her husband. "What was that?"

"I don't know." The lights flickered and died along with the TV, the refrigerator, and probably everything in the house electrical. Decker reached over and picked up the portable phone. He punched in one of the landlines but got no response.

Rina lowered the spoon into the cereal bowl. "Dead?"

"Yep." Decker flicked the light switch on and off, a futile gesture of hope. It was eight in the morning and the kitchen was bathed in eastern light that didn't require electrical augmentation. "Something blew. Probably a major transformer." He frowned. "That shouldn't affect the phone lines, though." He pulled out his cell and tried to contact someone on a landline at work. With no response coming from the other end, Decker knew that the damage was widespread.

The Los Angeles Police Department's West Valley substation—Devonshire Division in another age—was a few miles away from where Decker lived. When this kind of thing happened, the place was a madhouse, a switchboard of panicked people with emergency lines ringing off the hook. "I should go to work."

"You didn't eat," Rina said.

"I'll grab something from the machines."

"Peter, if it's just a transformer, there isn't anything you can do about it. You'll probably have a long day. I think you should fuel up."

There was logic to that. Decker sat back down and poured some skim milk into his cereal bowl, already laden with strawberries and bananas. "I suppose the squad room can wait another five minutes." They ate in silence for two bites. He noticed the wrinkle in Rina's brow. "You're concerned about Hannah."

"A little."

"I'll stop by the school on my way to work."

"I'd appreciate it." Rina tried to think of something to say to distract both of them. The default conversation was the kids. "Cindy called yesterday. She and Koby are coming over Friday night for dinner."

"Great." A pause as Decker finished his cereal. "How are the boys?"

"I talked to Sammy yesterday. He's fine. Jacob only calls before Shabbos or if he's upset. Since he hasn't called, I'm assuming everything's okay."

Decker nodded, although his mind was racing through emergency procedure. He stood and tried the land phone again. The machine was still lifeless. "Is the den computer still plugged into a battery pack?"

"I think so."

"Let me try something." Decker unplugged the small, portable, kitchen TV and lugged it into the back den. Rina followed and watched her husband drop to the floor and insert the electrical cord into one of the empty sockets. The seven-inch screen sprang to life. Decker tried one of the local stations. The TV was color but showed only images in shades of black and gray.

"What are we looking at?" Rina asked.

"A fire." As if to underscore Decker's pronouncement, a billowing cloud of orange flames materialized. His cell jumped to life. "Decker."

"Strapp here. Where are you?"

For the captain to be calling him on his cell, something was really wrong. "At home. I'm just about to leave—"

"Don't come into the station. We've got a dire situation. Plane crash on Seacrest Drive between Hobart and Macon—"

"Good Lord—"

"What?" Rina asked.

Frantically, Decker waved her off.

"Is it Hannah?"

Decker shook his head while trying to digest the captain's words. ". . . took down an apartment building. A few firefighters are already at the scene, but the local units are going to need reinforcements ASAP. All units are being directed to...

Racism is man’s gravest threat to man—the maximum of
hatred for a minimum of reasons.

--Abraham J. Heschel

Chapter 1

Benita Hernandez was almost as afraid of running into a rattlesnake as she was the INS. Immigration would send her and her husband back to Mexico. But a snake... The way Jose was insisting she creep across the ground--always staying low, very low--left her feeling so vulnerable. Snakes came out at night, when temperatures cooled. She or Jose could very easily stumble into one. Maybe they’d hear a brief shake of the rattle, but they’d never see its beady eyes or sharp fangs before it was ready to strike. Since they’d lost their coyote, or smuggler, they had only the moon to help them along. And it was barely a sliver--a sliver that looked like a tiny rent in a gigantic dome of black velvet, which was slowly turning purple as the night edged toward dawn.

Although they’d crossed the border with thirty-one other Mexican nationals, they were now alone. Everyone had scattered when the Border Patrol spotted them over twenty-four hours ago. Had any of those people made it safely back to Mexico? Or were they currently in some holding cell? She and Jose had escaped “La Migra,” but she was no longer sure she considered them lucky. Did Jose even know where he was leading her? He said he did. He’d come to America once before. But it had been six years since then. And their coyote had promised they’d have only a six-hour walk. Even if she deducted for the time they’d spent sleeping, they’d been on their feet for eighteen.

As they came to a cluster of mobile homes, Jose whispered to circle wide and crouch even lower. He’d once told her that it was easy to sneak across la frontera. But it hadn’t been easy at all. Although he’d insisted she wear several layers of clothing, the thorny plants that scrabbled for purchase in the rocky soil still managed to sink sharp spines through the fabric or scratch her somewhere she wasn’t covered. Add to that the hunger, thirst, homesickness and fear--fear of snakes, dogs, drug runners, thieves, unfriendly Americans, La Migra—and it was almost unbearable. The whole world felt hostile.

Tears began to burn behind Benita’s eyes. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could go on. She hoped the presence of these trailers meant they were on the outskirts of a town where she could at least get a drink of water, but even if they were close, two miles seemed like fifty when walking through the desert.

“Jose?” She could hear the determined crunch of his footsteps in front of her.

At the sound of her voice, he stopped. “You must be quiet,” he replied in rapid Spanish. “Do you want the people in that trailer to hear you? If they do, they’ll call the INS!”

The mobile home they skirted was one of the nicer ones she’d seen, a double wide with a yard and everything. But its white paint seemed to glow in the dark, making it look like a giant ghost with flat, empty eyes. This was a soulless, Godforsaken land. How could it be the paradise Jose promised?

“Maybe we could get a drink through the hose,” she suggested.

He hesitated and finally agreed. He had to be thirsty, too. But as they drew close, a dog began to bark, so he grabbed her hand and yanked her away.

“Agua!” she complained.

“We can’t risk it.”

“Then let’s try another place. Maybe the next one won’t have a dog.”

“We’re almost there.”

He’d been saying that for miles. Unable to believe him any longer, she quit walking. “I’m scared. I want to turn back.”

“¿Estás loca?” he said, instantly angry. “We’ve come too far. We can’t go back.”

“But...” She swallowed hard. “How much longer?”

“We’ll be there soon,” he promised.

But would she be any happier after they arrived? They were going to a safe house and then the home of his cousin, Carlos Garcia. She’d met Carlos on two different occasions and didn’t like him. He enjoyed playing the big shot, pretending to be something he wasn’t. She didn’t want Jose to become like him....

“Hurry!”

Her husband was getting impatient. Benita knew how much this trip meant to him. He’d talked of it the whole time they were dating, painted appealing pictures of the opportunities to be found in America. But...

Gathering her courage, she started after him again. She wouldn’t be a disappointment, wouldn’t make him regret marrying her. Besides, as he said, they’d come too far to turn back. Surely, the number of mobile homes meant they were indeed close to the safe house. Bordertown was as far as they had to go tonight. It was all arranged. They’d recover, then they’d call Carlos and he’d pick them up and take them to Phoenix. There, they’d live with him and two other roommates and, hopefully, find work so they could help pay the mortgage until they’d saved enough to afford their own place.

“Aren’t you concerned about snakes?” she grumbled.

“Snakes will be the least of our worries if you don’t shut up.”

Sighing, she tried to move faster, but with every step she wished she’d managed to talk Jose out of this. They were young and in love; they could make a living in Mexico somehow, couldn’t they? She didn’t want to come to America. Maybe he could make more money here--big money, like he said--but could they ever be happy living in a foreign land? A land that didn’t want them? And what if they were caught and deported after they’d begun to build a life here?

It was a risk Benita didn’t want to take. “Jose, I really, really want to go home.” The tears she’d been holding back finally got the best of her and began to stream down her cheeks.

He didn’t even turn around. “You’ll be glad we did this. Just... trust me.”

She thought of the water bottle they’d finished hours ago. Would they find themselves lost in the desert when the sun came up in less than an hour? Would they stagger around in the 115 degree heat without food or water and eventually die a terrible death?

The mere possibility made her shudder. All she had left was a pocketful of nuts. And they were covered with salt.

“We shouldn’t have crossed,” she said. “We should not have done this.”

A gruff chuckle alerted them to the presence of a third party. “Well, well...what do you know? It sounds as if someone is coming to their senses.”

Benita squealed before clamping a hand over her mouth. A dark amorphous shape stood in front of them, blocking the faint rays of the moon. She couldn’t make out specific features, but she knew he was a stranger. And she was pretty sure he was wearing a cowboy hat and holding a gun. He had something in his hand....

Was he white? She might’ve thought so except he spoke perfect Spanish.

Her husband inched toward her, placing his body in front of hers, and she let him. She hadn’t yet told Jose, hadn’t wanted to worry him before their trip el norte, but she’d just found out she was pregnant.

“Disculpe, señor,” he said. “We-we mean no harm. We are only passing through, that is all.”

The stranger switched to English, which seemed to come as naturally to him as Spanish. “What you’re doing is illegal, mi amigo.”

Although he knew bits of English, much more than Benita did, Jose wasn’t fluent. He stuck with his native tongue. “But we are only visiting family. We mean no harm. We plan to go back to Mexico after two weeks. We stay only two weeks.”

It was an obvious lie, and the man was far from fooled. “Shut up.” Again he spoke in English but even Benita understood the meaning of those sharp words.

“Señor, please.” Jose edged even closer to her. “It is only me and my-my little brother. We have no drugs, nothing.”

This time, the response came in Spanish. “Your brother.”

He’d heard her speak, which made this another transparent lie, but Benita kept her mouth shut, in case he believed Jose. Some boys had high voices, didn’t they?

“Si. He-he is frightened. Por favor...please, do not hurt him.”

Benita could hardly breathe. The stories of rape, beatings, robbery and other abuse that occurred during border crossings had circulated throughout Mexico. Parents used them to warn their children to stay home, as her father had warned her. But, other than to insist she chop her hair short and wear a baseball cap and men’s clothing, Jose had shrugged off her parents’ concerns. He said they worried for no reason and promised her everything would be fine.

“Stop groveling or I’ll shoot you both right where you stand.”

Those words and the disgust in the stranger’s voice made Benita start shaking. Who was this man? What was he doing out here? If he was a border patrol agent, he would’ve told them by now, wouldn’t he? Had they inadvertently landed in the middle of a drug run? Or was this a local farmer, fed up with those who trampled his land, ruined crops and left trash, toilet paper and human feces, behind?

“I-I have money,” Jose said.

They didn’t have a lot. It was Carlos who was supposed to pay their coyote once they made it safely across. But at this point Benita was ready to turn herself in to the authorities. She didn’t care if he sacrificed every peso.

The man chuckled. “You think I’m a dirty cop—like the kind you have in Mexico?”

Jose didn’t answer the question. “Forgive me. I am not trying to offend you, señor.”

“Your smell offends me, amigo. Your being where you don’t belong offends me. And the fact that every word out of your mouth is a lie offends me.”

There was a click, and a brief flash of light. Benita covered her face, bracing for the worst. But he was only lighting a cigarette. She caught a brief glimpse of his chin, which was covered with dark razor stubble, before he closed his lighter.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said, blowing smoke into their faces.

“Si. Money. You want money?” Jose bent to get the cash hidden in his sock.

“I don’t want your lousy dinero. You couldn’t have enough pesos to buy me a new pair of boots, amigo. What I want is for you to undress your little brother here. I’ll use my night vision goggles to take a peek at his chest. If he is, as you say, a boy, I’ll let you pass. You can head on to Tucson or L.A. or wherever else and bleed this country dry just like all your wetback relatives who’ve snuck over the border before you. But...” he took another long drag on his cigarette “...if she’s got tetas...” Another blast of smoke hit Benita in the face, making her cough. “I’m going to punish you for being the lying sack of shit that you are.”

Jose didn’t move. Benita could feel his tension, could tell he was weighing his options. What had the man said? She’d recognized only a few words. Would Jose decide to run? They couldn’t. They’d be shot.

“Okay, I-I admit it. This is my wife, not my brother.” Jose’s voice was raspy with desperation. “But...she’s barely twenty, señor. And she’s frightened. Please, I beg you. Let us go. We will head back to Mexico. Right now.”

The man took another drag. “Until next week or the week after. Then you’ll come creeping across the border again.” He switched to Spanish, probably to make sure she could understand. “I once read an article that said you wetbacks try at least six times before giving up. That takes some pretty big balls to be so bold, you know what I’m saying? Besides, someone’s got to die. Might as well be you.”

Die? Benita sank to her knees. “No, por favor!”

“I’ve got to make an example of you.”

“But I-I didn’t even want to come here,” she said. “I’d rather go home. I’ll stay home. I’ll make sure Jose stays with me. Don’t hurt us.”

He made a tsking sound. “How could you put your wife in such danger, Pedro?”

He had never asked for Jose’s name. He was using Pedro as a racial slur. She could feel this man’s hatred as palpably as the heat of the sun when it beat down at midday. But she was glad Jose didn’t complain. He squeezed her shoulder. Probably to comfort her. Maybe even to convey an apology. You were right. We should’ve stayed. “I was just...trying to give her a better life,” he said.

A light went on in the closest trailer. When the man turned to look, Jose grabbed a handful of Benita’s shirt and jerked her forward. He wanted her to run, but she couldn’t get up fast enough and they lost the precious second that might’ve allowed them to escape.

The cowboy swung back, and they both froze with fear. Thanks to the light coming through the trailer window, the barrel of his gun was now limned in silver, and they could see that it had something on the end.

Benita knew what that something was; she’d seen a silencer before. Her brother hadn’t always lived the kind of life he was living since he’d settled down and had a couple of kids.

“Someone’s awake,” Jose said. “They’ll see you. You’ll get caught if you shoot us. Let us go.”

The stranger didn’t seem the least bit worried. Chuckling deep in his throat, he tossed his cigarette on the ground and fired so fast Benita didn’t realize he’d actually pulled the trigger until Jose collapsed. Her husband’s hand clenched at the same time, dragging her to the ground with him, so the shot intended for her went over her head. But that was all he could do to help. In the next second, he made a funny noise and went still, and she knew the man she loved, the father of her unborn child, was dead.

“You killed him!” she wailed, crouching over his body. “You killed him!”

“Hey, what’s going out out there?” A woman had opened the door of the trailer and called out in English. Although Benita couldn’t understand her words, she thought the interruption would make the man run away. But it didn’t. With a curse, Cowboy brought up his gun and aimed again.

“This oughta teach you spic cockroaches to stay in your own damn country,” he ground out and pulled the trigger.

Benita felt a flash of pain between her eyes. Then she felt nothing at all.

Chapter One

Johnny Merton was playing with me and we both knew it. It was a fun game for him. He was doing endless years for crimes ranging from murder and extortion to excessive litigation; he had a lot of time on his hands.

We were sitting in the room reserved for lawyers and their clients. I couldn’t believe Johnny was stringing me along thinking I’d get him out early: it had been too many years since I’d practiced criminal law for me to be a good bet for any convict, let alone someone who needed Clarence Darrow and Johnny Cochran working double shifts before he had a prayer.

“I want the Innocence Project working for me, Warshawski,” he announced that afternoon.

“And you are innocent of exactly what?” I pretended to make a note on my legal pad.

“Whatever they’re charging me with.” He grinned, inviting me to think he was clowning, but I didn’t smile back: whatever else he might be, Johnny Merton was no buffoon.

Johnny was past sixty. During my brief stint as his lawyer when I’d been with the Public Defender, he’d been an angry man whose rage at being assigned yet another new-minted attorney made it almost impossible to stay in the bullpen with him. He’d earned his nickname, “The Hammer,” because he could bludgeon anyone with anything, including his emotions. Thirty years—many behind bars—hadn’t exactly mellowed him, but he had learned better ways of working the system.

“Compared to you, my wants are so simple,” I said. “Lamont Gadsden.”

“You know, Warshawski, life in prison, it takes away so much from you, and one of the things I’ve lost is my memory. Name does not ring a bell.” He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. The snakes coiling around his biceps, looping down so that the heads rested on his wrists, seemed to writhe against his dark skin.

“Word is, you know where every Anaconda past and present is. Even to their final resting places if they’ve left the planet.”

“People do exaggerate, don’t they, Warshawski? Especially when they’re in front of a cop or a states attorney.”

“I’m not looking for Lamont Gadsden for my health, Johnny, but his mama and his aunt want him found before they die. Even though he hung with you, his auntie continues to think of him as a good Christian boy. She’s even keeping his Bible safe for him until he gets back to claim it.”

“Yeah, every time you mention Miss Claudia, I start to cry. When I’m by myself and no one can see me, of course. You can’t afford to get a reputation for softness in the joint.”

“I doubt your tender heart will ever be your downfall,” I said. “You remember Sister Frances?”

“I heard about her, Warshawski. Now there truly was a fine Christian woman, and I hear you was with her when Jesus took her home.”

“You hear a lot.” I put just the right amount of admiration into the sentence and Johnny preened, but he didn’t say anything.

“You don’t care what she said to me before she died?” I prodded.

“You can make up anything a dead person said. It’s a good angle, but I’m not biting on it.”

“What about the living, then? You care about what your kid has to say about you?”

“You been talking to my girl?” This was news to him and rage swept him off his feet, making the veins in his throat bulge. “You been around harassing my family and I hear about it from you in here first? You stay away from my girl. She’s living a life any father’d be proud of and I won’t have scum like you bring her down. You hear?”

The guard came over from the corner and tapped his arm. “Johnny, take it easy, man.”

“Take it easy? Take it easy? You take it easy when this bitch, this cunt comes after your family—I wouldn’t run you as a whore, Warshawski, you stink so bad.”

The guard was summoning help; someone came in with manacles for Johnny.

“The Innocence Project, huh?” I pulled my papers together. “About the only thing you’re innocent of is the smarts to keep your sorry ass out of jail.”

I went through the search even lawyers undergo on their way out of Stateville. I hadn’t brought anything in with me, and I was leaving empty-handed, too: Johnny and I certainly hadn’t exchanged anything in our forty-five minutes together. Just to be on the safe side, the guards searched the trunk of my car.

As soon as I was clear of the prison grounds, I pulled off the road to stretch my arms. Tension builds in the calmest muscles when those gates close on you, and nothing about time in the Big House made me calm.

Joliet, where the prison stands, lies on the far side of Chicago’s heaviest exurban sprawl and I’d be hitting the road at the same time everyone in the western suburbs was going home. The thought of the traffic knotted my shoulders even more. As I crept forward, I jotted a note in my time log. Forty-five minutes on the Lamont Gadsden inquiry. I’d long passed the point where I was making money on the case, but I couldn’t let the inquiry go, not as deeply mired in it as I’d become.

I oozed through the I-Pass lane at Country Club Plaza and finally found myself near streets I recognized, ones where I could take shortcuts around the expressways. It was almost seven and the September sun was close to the horizon, blinding me every time the road curved west.

I needed to run in the fresh air with my dogs; I wanted to blow Stateville out of my lungs and hair, then curl up with a drink and the Cubs-Cardinals game. But I had two reports to finish for my most important bread-and-butter client; best I swing by my office and get them done so I could enjoy the game.

Nothing warned me that my drive from Joliet was as relaxed as I was going to be for some time. When I tapped in the code at the entrance to my building, everything looked normal. The lock mechanism released with a wheeze like a dying goose. Nothing unusual about that. I had to use my shoulder to shove the door open. Also normal.

It wasn’t until I opened my own door that trouble hit me. I switched on the overhead lights. And saw every paper I owned on the floor. The file cabinets had been dumped, the drawers flung aside so that they perched at crazy angles. My ordnance maps dangled from the lips of their shelves.

“No,” I heard myself whisper. Who hated me so much they’d wreak this kind fury against me?

I shivered, cradling my arms. My office is a big barn with little rooms planted in it, little dolls house rooms. Lots of places for someone to hide. I backed into the hall and carefully set down my briefcase, as if it were a carton of eggs that needed protecting. I pulled my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and dialed 911. Phone in hand, I tiptoed around the partitions.

The invaders had fled, but they’d vented their rage everywhere. I sidled into the back, saw my day bed had been tossed, the copy machine disassembled. I skirted the upended drawers and went behind the partition where my desk stood; those drawers had been flung to the floor hard enough to crack the wood. The same violent hands had dismembered my reference manuals—pages of the Illinois Criminal Code were strewn like remains of a victory parade. The frames to my mother’s engraving of the Uffizi and my Nell Choate Jones print had been pried apart and splintered; the pictures lay under the shards of glass.

I squatted on my haunches and picked up the Uffizi, cradling it like a child. After a time, my frozen brain started to work. Don’t touch stuff, just in case an evidence team takes it seriously.

And what about Tessa, my lease-mate? I crossed to the studio where Tessa welds big metal chunks into space-age sculptures, but everything there was in order. She must have been here this afternoon – a faint sour-sharp smell of solder lingered in the air. I sat at her drafting table, hands sweaty, heart pounding, all those signs of fear and anger, and waited there for the cops.

When I heard the siren I went out front to meet them. A squad car pulled up, its strobes staining the twilit streets a ghostly blue. Two cops bounced out, a young woman and a middle-aged guy with a gut.

I stopped them at the entrance to show them the keypad. Someone who knew the combination had been here, or someone with a sophisticated bypass device. The guy with the gut made a note. He asked how many people knew the code.

“My lease-mate. A couple of people who work for me. I don’t know who Ms. Reynolds—my lease-mate—has given the combination.”

“What about the rear exit?” the woman asked.

I led them down the hall to the back door. It was self-locking, with no exterior keyhole or pad. The woman shone her flashlight around the concrete slab outside the door.

I saw a white band on the slab—one of those silicon bracelets that the kids wear these days to show their support of everything from breast cancer research to their college field hockey teams. I knelt to pick it up, but I knew before I looked at it what it would say: ONE. When you looked at it, you were supposed to want to work for a planet unified in love, fighting AIDS and poverty as ONE. My cousin Petra owned a bracelet like this. It was big on her, and when she was excited, it flew off her arm.

Petra. Petra here in this office while the tornado from hell whirled through it. My vision blurred and I found myself sprawling on the concrete slab.

The two cops got me back on my feet, back inside, and asked me what I’d found. “My cousin.” My mouth was dry, my voice a squawk. “My cousin, Petra. This is hers.”

Young, confident, beautiful Petra, she’d come to Chicago fresh out of college to work as an intern on Brian Krumas’s Senate campaign. For another moment my brain stayed frozen, then I remembered my video monitor. I have one because the front door is remote from my office and invisible from the hallway. My fingers trembled as I tried to boot up my computer. The modem had been yanked free from the port. The middle-aged cop stood over me while I found the wires and got my system hooked back together. I pushed the on button; the Apple gave its opening chord and I breathed a little prayer to the God I don’t believe in. St. Michael, patron of police and private eyes, get me my video files.

While the cops watched, I pulled up the images. My leasemate had come in at 11:13 and left again at 4:07.

Four-seventeen, while I was walking away from Johnny Merton, three people showed up, baseball caps pulled low over their heads, coat collars hiked well up, faces and sexes both unrecognizable. They were all roughly the same height; in their bulky coats, it was hard to tell if they were all the same girth. I thought the one on the left was the stockiest, the one in the middle the thinnest, but I couldn’t be sure. We could hear the buzzing as they rang the front door, and then one of them tapped in the door code.

“Who else knows that code?” the male cop demanded. “Who besides the people you mentioned?”

“I—my cousin knew it.” I could hardly get the words out. “I let her use my machine one night when she lost her Internet access.”

“Is she in this picture?” the woman asked.

I froze the image on the screen. A professional might be able to decode race or sex from these grainy pictures, but I couldn’t make them out. I shrugged helplessly.

I called Petra’s cellphone, but only got her voice mail. I tried the Krumas campaign, but they’d shut down for the night.

The cops sprang into action, calling codes in: 44; 273; 60: possible kidnapping, possible assault, possible aggravated burglary. The possibilities were endless and chilling. Squad and tac cars began pouring in while I made the hardest of all the phone calls: the one to my uncle Peter and his wife Rachel, to tell them their oldest child had disappeared.

Chapter One

Five minutes to three in the afternoon. Exactly sixty-one hours before it happened. The lawyer drove in and parked in the empty lot. There was an inch of new snow on the ground, so he spent a minute fumbling in the foot well until his overshoes were secure. Then he got out and turned his collar up and walked to the visitors' entrance. There was a bitter wind out of the north. It was thick with fat lazy flakes. There was a storm sixty miles away. The radio had been full of it.

The lawyer got in through the door and stamped the snow off his feet. There was no line. It was not a regular visiting day. There was nothing ahead of him except an empty room and an empty X-ray belt and a metal detector hoop and three prison guards standing around doing nothing. He nodded to them, even though he didn't know them. But he considered himself on their side, and they on his. Prison was a binary world. Either you were locked up, or you weren't. They weren't. He wasn't.

Yet.

He took a gray plastic bin off the top of a teetering stack and folded his overcoat into it. He took off his suit coat and folded it and laid it on top of the overcoat. It was hot in the prison. Cheaper to burn a little extra oil than to give the inmates two sets of clothes, one for the summer and one for the winter. He could hear their noise ahead of him, the clatter of metal and concrete and the random crazy yells and the screams and the low grumble of other disaffected voices, all muted by doglegged corridors and many closed doors.

He emptied his pants pockets of keys, and wallet, and cell phone, and coins, and nested those clean warm personal items on top of his suit coat. He picked up the gray plastic bin. Didn't carry it to the X-ray belt. Instead he hefted it across the room to a small window in a wall. He waited there and a woman in uniform took it and gave him a numbered ticket in exchange for it.

He braced himself in front of the metal detector hoop. He patted his pockets and glanced ahead, expectantly, as if waiting for an invitation. Learned behavior, from air travel. The guards let him stand there for a minute, a small, nervous man in his shirt sleeves, empty-handed. No briefcase. No notebook. Not even a pen. He was not there to advise. He was there to be advised. Not to talk, but to listen, and he sure as hell wasn't going to put what he heard anywhere near a piece of paper.

The guards beckoned him through. A green light and no beep, but still the first guard wanded him and the second patted him down. The third escorted him deeper into the complex, through doors designed never to be open unless the last and the next were closed, and around tight corners designed to slow a running man's progress, and past thick green glass windows with watchful faces behind.

The lobby had been institutional, with linoleum on the floor and mint green paint on the walls and fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. And the lobby had been connected to the outside, with gusts of cold air blowing in when the door was opened, and salt stains and puddles of snowmelt on the floor. The prison proper was different. It had no connection to the outside. No sky, no weather. No attempt at décor. It was all raw concrete, already rubbed greasy where sleeves and shoulders had touched it, still pale and dusty where they hadn't. Underfoot was grippy gray paint, like the floor of an auto enthusiast's garage. The lawyer's overshoes squeaked on it.

There were four interview rooms. Each was a windowless concrete cube divided exactly in half by a wall-to-wall desk-height counter with safety glass...

She didn't need to rush toxicology to know her patient had been drinking before he pulled the shotgun's trigger with his toe. The instant she'd opened him up, she detected the putrid, pungent smell of booze as it breaks down in the body. When she was a forensic pathology resident long years ago, she used to wonder if giving substance abusers a tour of the morgue might shock them into sobriety. If she showed them a head opened up like an egg cup, let them catch the stench of postmortem champagne, maybe they'd switch to Perrier. If only it worked that way.

She watched her deputy chief, Jack Fielding, lift the shimmering block of organs from the chest cavity of a university student robbed and shot at an ATM, and waited for his outburst. During this morning's staff conference, he'd made the incensed comment that the victim was the same age as his daughter, both of them track stars and pre- med. Nothing good happened when Fielding personalized a case.

"We not sharpening knives anymore?" he yelled.

The oscillating blade of a Stryker saw screamed, the morgue assistant opening a skull and yelling back, "Do I look busy?"

Fielding tossed the surgical knife back on his cart with a loud clatter. "How am I supposed to get anything fucking done around here?"

"Good God, somebody get him a Xanax or something." The morgue assistant pried off the skull cap with a chisel.

Scarpetta placed a lung on a scale, using a smartpen to jot down the weight on a smart notepad. There wasn't a ballpoint pen, clipboard, or paper form in sight. When she got upstairs, all she'd have to do is download what she wrote or sketched into her computer, but technology had no remedy for her fluent thoughts, and she still dictated them after she was done and her gloves were off. Hers was a modern medical examiner's office, upgraded with what she considered essential in a world she no longer recognized, where the public believed everything "forensic" it saw on TV, and violence wasn't a societal problem but a war.

She began sectioning the lung, making a mental note that it was typically formed with smooth, glistening visceral pleurae, and an atelectatic dusky red parenchyma. Minimal quantity of pink froth. Otherwise lacked discrete gross lesion, and the pulmonary vasculature was without note. She paused when her administrative assistant, Bryce, walked in, a look of disdain and avoidance on his youthful face. He wasn't squeamish about what went on in here, just offended for every reason one might be, and he snatched several paper towels from a dispenser. Covering his hand, he picked up the receiver of the black wall phone, where line one was lit up.

"Benton, you still with me?" he said into the phone. "She's right here holding a very big knife. I'm sure she told you today's specials? The Tufts student is the worst, her life worth two hundred bucks. The Bloods or the Crips, some gang piece of shit, you should see him on video surveillance. All over the news. Jack shouldn't be doing that case. Does anybody ask me? About to blow an aneurysm. And the suicide, yup. Comes home from Iraq without a scratch. He's fine. Have a happy holiday and a nice life."

Scarpetta pushed back her face shield. She pulled off her bloody gloves and dropped them in a bright red biohazard can. She scrubbed her hands in a deep steel sink.

"Bad weather inside and out," Bryce chatted to Benton, who wasn't fond of chatting. "A full house and Jack's irritable depression, did I mention that? Maybe we should do an intervention. Maybe a weekend getaway at that Harvard hospital of yours? We probably could qualify for a family plan. .. ?"

Scarpetta took the receiver from him, removed the paper towels, and dropped them into the trash.

"Stop picking on Jack," she said to Bryce.

"I think he's on steroids again, and that's why he's so cranky."

She turned her back to him and everything else.

"What's happened?" she said to Benton.

They had talked at dawn. For him to call again several hours later while she was in the autopsy suite didn't bode anything good.

"I'm afraid we've got a situation," he said.

It was the same way he'd phrased it last night when she'd just gotten home from the ATM homicide scene and found him putting on his coat, headed to Logan to catch the shuttle. NYPD had a situation and needed him immediately.

"Jaime Berger's asking if you can get here," he added.

Hearing her name always unnerved Scarpetta, gave her a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the New York prosecutor personally. Berger would always be linked to a past that Scarpetta preferred to forget.

Benton said, "The sooner the better. Maybe the one- o'clock shuttle?"

The wall clock said it was almost ten. She'd have to finish her case, shower, change, and she'd want to stop by the house first. Food, she thought. Homemade mozzarella, chickpea soup, meatballs, bread. What else? The ricotta with fresh basil that Benton loved on homemade pizza. She'd prepared all that and more yesterday, having no idea she was about to spend New Year's Eve alone. There would be nothing to eat in their New York apartment. When Benton was by himself, he usually got take- out.

"Come straight to Bellevue," he said. "You can leave your bags in my office. I have your crime scene case ready and waiting."

She could barely hear over the rhythmic rasping of a knife being sharpened in long, aggressive sweeps. The buzzer from the bay blared, and on the closed- circuit video screen on the countertop, a dark- sleeved arm emerged from the driver's window of a white van as attendants from a delivery service buzzed.

"Can someone please get that?" Scarpetta said at the top of her voice.

On the prison- ward floor of the modern Bellevue Hospital Center, the thin wire of Benton's headset connected him to his wife some hundred and fifty miles away.

He explained that late last night a man was admitted to the forensic psychiatric unit, making the point, "Berger wants you to examine his injuries."

"What's he been charged with?" Scarpetta asked.

In the background, he could hear the indistinguishable voices, the noise of the morgue—or what he wryly called her "deconstruction site."

"Nothing yet," he said. "There was a murder last night. An unusual one."

He tapped the down arrow on his keyboard, scrolling through what was on his computer screen.

"You mean there's no court order for the examination?" Scarpetta's voice moved at the speed of sound.

"Not yet. But he needs to be looked at now."

"He should have been looked at already. The minute he was admitted. If there was any trace evidence, by now it's likely been contaminated or lost."

Benton kept tapping the down arrow, re-reading what was on the screen, wondering how he was going to approach her about it. He could tell by her tone she didn't know, and he hoped like hell she didn't hear it from someone else first. Lucy Farinelli, her niece, had damn well better abide by his wish to let him handle it. Not that he was doing a good job so far.

Jaime Berger had seemed all business when she'd called him a few minutes earlier, and from that he'd inferred she wasn't aware of the trashy gossip on the Internet. Why he didn't say something to her while he'd had the chance, he wasn't sure. But he hadn't, and he should have. He should have been honest with Berger long before now. He should have explained everything to her almost half a year ago.

"His injuries are superficial," Benton said to Scarpetta. "He's in isolation, won't talk, won't cooperate unless you come. Berger doesn't want anyone coercing him into anything and decided the exam could wait until you got here. Since that's what he wants..."

"Since when is it about what the inmate wants?"

"PR, political reasons, and he's not an inmate, not that anybody on the ward's considered an inmate once they've been admitted. They're patients." His nervous ramblings didn't sound like him as he heard himself talk. "As I've said, he's not been charged with any crime. There's no warrant. There's nothing. He's basically a civil admission. We can't make him stay the minimum seventy- two hours because he didn't sign a consent form, and as I said, he's not been charged with a crime, at least not yet. Maybe that will change after you've seen him. But at this moment, he can leave whenever he wants."

"You're expecting me to find something that will give the police probable cause to charge him with murder? And what do you mean he didn't sign. ..? Back up. This patient signed himself into a prison ward with the proviso he can walk out the door whenever he pleases?"

"I'll explain more when I see you. I'm not expecting you to find anything. No expectations, Kay. I'm just asking you to come because it's a very complicated situation. And Berger really wants you here."

"Even though he might be gone by the time I get there."

He detected the question she wasn't going to ask. He wasn't acting like the cool, unflappable forensic psychologist she had known for twenty years, but she wasn't going to point that out. She was in the morgue and she wasn't alone. She wasn't going to ask him what the hell was wrong with him.

Benton said, "He definitely won't leave before you get here."

"I don't understand why he's there." She wasn't going to let that go.

"We're not entirely sure. But in a nutshell? When the cops arrived at the scene, he insisted on being transported to Bellevue... ."

"His name?"

"Oscar Bane. He said the only person he'd allow to conduct the psychological evaluation was me. So I was called, and as you know, I left immediately for New York. He's afraid of doctors. Gets panic attacks."

"How did he know who you are?"

"Because he knows who you are."

"He knows who I am?"

"The cops have his clothes, but he says if they want any evidence collected from him physically—and there's no warrant, as I keep emphasizing—it will have to be you who does it. We hoped he'd calm down, agree to let a local ME take care of him. Never going to happen. He's more adamant than ever. Says he's terrified of doctors. Has odynephobia, dishabiliophobia."

"He's afraid of pain and taking his clothes off?"

"And caligynephobia. Fear of beautiful women."

"I see. So that's why he'd feel safe with me."

"That part was supposed to be funny. He thinks you're beautiful, and he's definitely not afraid of you. I'm the one who should be afraid."

That was the truth of the matter. Benton didn't want her here. He didn't even want her in New York right now.

"Let me make sure I understand. Jaime Berger wants me to fly there in a snowstorm, examine a patient on a prison ward who hasn't been charged with a crime—"

"If you can get out of Boston, the weather's fine here. Just cold." Benton looked out his window and saw nothing but gray.

"Let me finish up with my Army Reservist sergeant who was a casualty in Iraq but didn't know it until he got home. And I'll see you mid- afternoon," she said.

"Fly safe. I love you."

Benton hung up, started tapping the down arrow again, then the up arrow, reading and re- reading, as though if he read the anonymous gossip column often enough, it wouldn't seem so offensive, so ugly, so hateful. "Sticks and stones," Scarpetta always said. Maybe that was true in grammar school, but not in their adult lives. Words could hurt. They could hurt badly. What kind of monster would write something like this? How did the monster find out?

He reached for the phone.

Scarpetta paid scant attention to Bryce as he drove her to Logan International Airport. He'd been talking nonstop about one thing or another ever since picking her up at her house.

Mainly, he'd been complaining about Dr. Jack Fielding, reminding her yet again that returning to the past was like a dog returning to its own vomit. Or Lot's wife looking back and turning into a pillar of salt. Bryce's biblical analogies were endless and irritating and had nothing to do with his religious beliefs, assuming he had any, but were leftover pearls from a college term paper he'd done on the Bible as literature.

Her administrative assistant's point was you don't hire people from your past. Fielding was from Scarpetta's past. He'd had his problems, but then who hadn't? When she had accepted the position up here and had started looking for a deputy chief, she wondered what Fielding was doing, tracked him down, and found out he wasn't doing much.

Benton's input had been unusually toothless, maybe even patronizing, which made more sense to her now. He'd said she was looking for stability, and often people move backward instead of forward when they are overwhelmed by change. Feeling the desire to hire someone she'd known since the early days of her career was understandable, Benton had said. But the danger in looking back was that we saw only what we wanted to see, he'd added. We saw what made us feel safe.

What Benton had chosen to avoid is why she didn't feel safe to begin with. He hadn't wanted to get within range of how she really felt about her domestic life with him, which was as chaotic and dissonant as it had ever been. Since their relationship began with an adulterous affair more than fifteen years ago, they'd never lived in the same place, didn't know the meaning of day-to-day togetherness, until last summer. Theirs had been a very simple ceremony in the garden behind her carriage house in Charleston, South Carolina, where she'd just set up a private practice that she then was forced to close.

Afterward, they'd moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, to be near his psychiatric hospital, McLean, and her new headquarters in Watertown, where she'd accepted the position of chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth's Northeastern District. Because of their proximity to New York, she thought it a fine idea for them to accept John Jay College of Criminal Justice's invitation to serve as visiting lecturers there, which included offering pro bono consultation for the NYPD, the New York Medical Examiner's office, and forensic psychiatric units such as the one at Bellevue.

"... I know it's not the sort of thing you'd look at or maybe even be a big deal to you, but at the risk of pissing you off, I'm going to point it out." Bryce's voice penetrated her preoccupations.

She said, "What big deal?"

"Well, hello? Don't mind me. I was just talking to myself."

"I'm sorry. Rewind the tape."

"I didn't say anything after staff meeting because I didn't want to distract you from all the shit going on this morning. Thought I'd wait until you were done and we could have a little heart-to-heart behind your closed door. And since nobody's said anything to me, I don't think they saw it. Which is good, right? As if Jack isn't pissy enough this morning. Of course, he's always pissy, which is why he has eczema and alopecia. And by the way, did you see the crusty lesion behind his right ear? Home for the holidays. Does wonders for the nerves."

"How much coffee have you had today?"

"Why is it always me? Kill the messenger. You zone out until what I'm trying to convey reaches critical mass, and then kaboom, and I'm the bad guy, and bye- bye messenger. If you're going to be in New York more than a night, please let me know a-sap so I can get coverage. Should I set up some sessions with that trainer you like so much? What's his name?"

Bryce thought, touching a fi nger to his lips.

"Kit," he answered himself. "Maybe one of these days when you need me as your boy Friday in New York, he can have a go at me. Love handles."

He pinched his waist.

"Although I hear liposuction's the only thing that works once you turn thirty," he said. "Truth serum time?"

He glanced over at her, his hands gesturing as if they were something alive and not part of him.

"I did look him up on the Internet," he confessed. "I'm surprised Benton lets him anywhere near you. Reminds me of, of what's-his-name on Queer as Folk? The football star? Drove a Hummer and quite the homophobe until he hooked up with Emmett, who everyone says looks just like me, or the other way around, since he's the one who's famous. Well, you probably don't watch it."

Scarpetta said, "Kill the messenger because of what? And please keep at least one hand on the wheel since we're driving in a blizzard. How many shots did you get in your Starbucks this morning? I saw two Venti cups on your desk. Hopefully not both of them from this morning. Remember our talk about caffeine? That it's a drug, and therefore addictive?"

"You're the whole damn thing," Bryce went on. "Which I've never seen before. It's really weird. Usually it's not just one famous person, you know? Because whoever the columnist is, he roams around the city like some undercover asshole, and shits on a lot of celebs at once. The other week, it was Bloomberg, and, oh, what's her name? That model always getting arrested for throwing things at people? Well, this time she was what got thrown—out of Elaine's for saying something lewd to Charlie Rose. No, wait a minute. Barbara Walters? No. I'm crossing over into something I saw on The View. Maybe what's-her-name the model went after that singer from American Idol. No, he was on Ellen, not in Elaine's. And not Clay Aiken or Kelly Clarkson. Who's the other one? TiVo's simply killing me. It's like the remote surfs through channels when you're not touching anything. You ever have that happen?"

Snow was like a swarm of white gnats hitting the windshield, the wipers hypnotically useless. Traffic was slow but steady, Logan just a few minutes out.

"Bryce?" Scarpetta said in the tone she used when she was warning him to shut up and answer her question. "What big deal?"

"That disgusting online gossip column. Gotham Gotcha."

She'd seen ads for it on New York City buses and taxicab tops, the anonymous columnist notoriously vicious. The guessing game of who was behind it ranged from a nobody to a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was having great fun making mean-spirited mischief and money.

" Nas-ty," Bryce said. "Now, I know it's supposed to be nasty, but this is nasty below the belt. Not that I read such tripe. But for obvious reasons, I have you as a Google alert. There's a photograph, which is the worst part. It's not flattering."

Today was the day Olivia Dupree was going to meet the only man on the planet who saw life the way she did—as one long series of disappointments, as a perilous journey best navigated entirely solo—for the very first time, and she didn't have a thing to wear.

Not that what she wore really mattered. She wasn't that sort of fan. Not only didn't she think he would care what she looked like, but she would also be extremely disappointed if he did.

And yet she'd given in to the inner idiotic teenager that had never been her and stood on her bed, so she could gauge her appearance in the big mirror that was part of her dresser. She didn't own a full-length mirror. She'd never thought she needed one and still held that opinion. Her ordinary style was pretty basic. For work she wore skinny, knee-length pencil skirts with matching blazers when it was cool, and sensible pumps with two-inch heels. She kept her dark hair in a tight bun and applied her makeup in the same minimalist fashion every weekday. College English students didn't really care what their professor looked like, after all. And she wasn't out to capture the attention of anyone who might.

On weekends, she traded the suits for jeans, the bun for a ponytail and the makeup for sunscreen.

Now she needed something in between. Something relaxed but attractive. Not seductive, just attractive. She was not a doe-eyed, adoring fan. But she'd never met Aaron Westhaven before, and she wanted to make a good impression.

Nothing more.

Freddy, her very best friend in the entire world—and the only specimen of the male gender, canine or otherwise, she trusted with her heart—tipped his massive head from one side to the other as he watched her standing somewhat unsteadily on the mattress. Standing was not what the bed was for, he seemed to be thinking.

She glanced down at him. "It's okay, boy. I'll get down momentarily. And standing on the bed is still verboten when it comes to you, okay?"

He heaved a giant sigh and lowered his two-hundred-pound, brindle-patterned bulk to the floor. He was only average size for an adult male English mastiff, but even she had trouble believing how big he was, and she'd had him for three years.

She hoped Mr. Westhaven didn't have an aversion to dogs. He hadn't written dogs into any of his novels, so she couldn't be sure, but she suspected he would love Freddy. Because anyone with a heart would love Freddy, and Westhaven certainly had a heart.

She felt as if she knew him well. The reclusive author's heartbreakingly tragic novels lined her shelves and spoke to her soul. They were her own guilty little secret. But they so reflected the way she felt about life and love. You really couldn't depend on anyone but yourself. He seemed to understand that. God knew she did.

And now she was about to meet him—right here in Shadow Falls, Vermont.

She glanced at the combination she now wore, a pair of dressy black trousers and a lavender button-down blouse with a black blazer over it. Too stiff. She unbuttoned the blazer and thought she still looked too formal. Then she took it off and thought she looked too casual.

Frustrated, she threw the blazer down by her feet. Big mistake. Freddy saw that as an invitation, sprang upright and bounded onto the bed with a giant "woof" that reverberated through her chest. The mattress sank, the box springs squeaking in protest.

"I couldn't see anything from the waist down," she explained, as she tried to keep her balance. He bounced in response to her...

Chance alone brought her into his orbit. Later he would think that had he not looked down from the scaffolding at that precise moment, had he taken Tess directly home and not to the wood that afternoon, she might not have come into his life. But that idea comprised the very substance of what he was suppose to think, which was a realisation he would only come to once it was far too late.

The time was midafternoon, and the day was hot. June generally prompted torrents of rain, mocking anyone’s hope for summer. But this year, the weather was setting itself up to be different. Days of sun in a cloudless sky made the promise of a July and an August during which the ground would bake, and the vast lawns within the Perambulation would brown over, sending the New Forest ponies deep within the woodlands to forage.

He was high up on the scaffolding, getting ready to climb to the peak of the roof where he’d begun to apply the straw. Far more pliable than the reeds that comprised the rest of the materials, the straw could be bent to form the ridge. Some people thought of this as the “pretty bit” on a thatched roof, the scalloped pattern crisscrossed with spars in a decorative fashion. But he thought of it as what it was: that which protected the top layer of reeds from weather and avian damage.

He’d got to the knuckle. He was feeling impatient. They’d been working on the enormous project for three months, and he’d promised to begin another in two weeks’ time. The finishing work still needed doing, and he could not hand off that part of the job to his apprentice. Cliff Coward was not ready to use the leggett on the thatch. That work was crucial to the overall look of the roof, and it required both skill and a properly honed eye. But Cliff could hardly be trusted to do this level of work when so far he hadn’t managed to stay on task with even the simplest job, like the one he was meant to be doing just now, which was hauling another two bundles of straw up to the ridge as he’d been instructed. And why had he not managed this most mundane of tasks?

Seeking an answer to that question was what altered Gordon Jossie’s life. He turned from the ridge, calling sharply, “Cliff! What the bloody hell’s happened to you?” and he saw below him that his apprentice was no longer standing by the bundles of straw where he was supposed to be, anticipating the needs of the master thatcher above him. Rather he’d gone over to Gordon’s dusty pickup some yards away. There Tess sat at attention, happily wagging her bush-like tail while a woman—a stranger and clearly a visitor to the gardens if the map she held and the clothing she wore were anything to go by—patted her golden head.

“Oy! Cliff!” Gordon Jossie shouted. Both the apprentice and the woman looked up.

Gordon couldn’t see her face clearly because of her hat, which was broad brimmed and fashioned from straw with a fuchsia scarf tied round it as a band. This same colour was in her dress as well, and the dress was summery, showing off tanned arms and long tanned legs. She wore a gold bracelet round her wrist and sandals on her feet, and she carried a straw handbag tucked under her arm, its strap looped over her shoulder.

Cliff called out, “Sorry! I was helping this lady,” as the woman called, “I’ve got myself completely lost,” with a laugh. She went on with, “I’m awfully sorry. He offered…” She gestured with a map she was holding, as if to explain what was patently obvious: She’d somehow wandered from the public gardens to the administrative building, which Gordon was reroofing. “I’ve never actually seen someone thatch a roof before,” she added, perhaps in an effort to be friendly.

Gordon, however, wasn’t feeling friendly. He was feeling sharp, all edges and most of them needing to be smoothed. He had no time for tourists.

“She’s trying to get to Monet’s pond,” Cliff called out.

“And I’m trying to get a bloody ridge put onto this roof,” was Gordon’s reply, although he made it in an undertone. He gestured northwest. “There’s a path up by the fountain. The nymphs and fauns fountain. You’re meant to turn left there. You turned right.”

“Did I?” the woman called back. “Well…that’s typical, I s’pose.” She stood there for a moment, as if anticipating further conversation. She was wearing dark glasses and it came to Gordon that the entire effect of her was as if she was a celebrity, a Marilyn Monroe type because she was shapely like Marilyn Monroe, not like the pin-thin girls one generally saw. Indeed, he actually thought she might be a celebrity. She rather dressed like one, and her expectation that a man would be willing to stop what he was doing and eagerly converse with her suggested it as well. He replied briefly to the woman with, “You should find your way easy enough now.”

“Were that only the truth,” she said. She added, rather ridiculously, he thought, “There won’t be any…well, any horses up there, will there?”

He thought, What the hell…? and she added, “It’s only…I’m actually rather afraid of horses.”

“Ponies won’t hurt you,” he replied. “They’ll keep their distance ’less you try to feed them.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t that.” She waited for a moment as if expecting him to say more, which he was not inclined to do. Finally she said, “Anyway…thank you,” and that was end of her.

She set off on the route that Gordon had indicated, and she removed her hat as she went and swung it from her fingertips. Her hair was blonde, cut like a cap round her head, and when she shook it, it fell neatly back into place with a shimmer, as if knowing what it was supposed to do. Gordon wasn’t immune to women, so he could see she had a graceful walk. But he felt no stirring in his groin or in his heart, and he was glad of this. Untouched by women was how he liked it.

Cliff joined him on the scaffolding, two bundles of straw on his back. He said, “Tess quite liked her,” as if in explanation of something or perhaps in the woman’s defence, and he added, “Could be time for another go, mate,” as Gordon watched the woman gain distance from them.

But Gordon wasn’t watching her out of fascination or attraction. He was watching to see if she made the correct turn at the fountain of nymphs and fauns. She did not. He shook his head. Hopeless, he thought. She’d be in the cow pasture before she knew it, but he fully expected she would also be able to find someone else to help her there.

From the book

On Monday morning, Olivia Morrow sat quietly across the desk from her longtime friend Clay Hadley, absorbing the death sentence he had just pronounced.

For an instant, she looked away from the compassion she saw in his eyes and glanced out the window of his twenty-fourth-floor office on East Seventy-second Street in Manhattan. In the distance she could see a helicopter making its slow journey over the East River on this chilly October morning.

My journey is ending, she thought, then realized that Clay was expecting a response from her.

"Two weeks," she said. It was not a question. She glanced at the antique clock on the bookcase behind Clay's desk. It was ten minutes past nine. The first day of the two weeks--at least it's the start of the day, she thought, glad that she had asked for an early appointment.

He was answering her. "Three at the most. I'm sorry, Olivia. I was hoping . . ."

"Don't be sorry," Olivia interrupted briskly. "I'm eighty-two years old. Even though my generation lives so much longer than the previous ones, my friends have been dropping like flies lately. Our problem is that we worry we'll live too long and end up in a nursing home, or become a terrible burden to everyone. To know I have a very short time left, but will still be able to think clearly and walk around unassisted until the very end is an immeasurable gift." Her voice trailed off.

Clay Hadley's eyes narrowed. He understood the troubled expression that had erased the serenity from Olivia's face. Before she spoke, he knew what she would say. "Clay, only you and I know."

He nodded.

"Do we have the right to continue to hide the truth?" she asked, looking at him intently. "Mother thought she did. She intended to take it to her grave, but at the very end when only you and I were there, she felt compelled to tell us. It became for her a matter of conscience. And with all the enormous good Catherine did in her life as a nun, her reputation has always been compromised by the insinuation that all those years ago, just before she entered the convent, she may have had a consensual liaison with a lover."

Hadley studied Olivia Morrow's face. Even the usual signs of age, the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the slight tremor of her neck, the way she leaned forward to catch everything he said, did not detract from her finely chiseled features. His father had been her mother's cardiologist, and he had taken over when his father retired. Now in his early fifties, he could not remember a time when the Morrow family had not been part of his life. As a child he had been in awe of Olivia, recognizing even then that she was always beautifully dressed. Later he realized that at that time she had still been working as a salesgirl at B. Altman's, the famous Fifth Avenue department store, and that her style was achieved by buying her clothes at giveaway end-of-the-season sales. Never married, she had retired as an executive and board member of Altman's years ago.

He had met her older cousin Catherine only a few times, and by then she was already a legend, the nun who had started seven hospitals for handicapped children--research hospitals dedicated to finding ways to cure or alleviate the suffering of their damaged bodies or minds.

"Do you know that many people are calling the healing of a child with brain cancer a miracle and attributing it to Catherine's intercession?" Olivia asked. "She's being considered as a candidate for beatification."

Clay Hadley felt his mouth go dry. "No, I hadn't heard." Not a Catholic,...

Chapter One

Plain of Angels, Idaho

She was the chosen one.

For months, he had been studying the girl, ever since she and her family had moved into the compound. Her father was George Sheldon, a mediocre carpenter who worked with the construction crew. Her mother, a bland and forgettable woman, was assigned to the communal bakery. Both had been unemployed and desperate when they'd first wandered into his church in Idaho Falls, seeking solace and salvation. Jeremiah had looked into their eyes, and he saw what he needed to see: lost souls in search of an anchor, any anchor.

They had been ripe for the harvest.

Now the Sheldons and their daughter, Katie, lived in Cottage C, in the newly built Calvary cluster. Every Sabbath, they sat in their assigned pew in the fourteenth row. In their front yard they'd planted hollyhocks and sunflowers, the same cheery plants that adorned all the other front gardens. In so many ways, they blended in with the other sixty-four families in The Gathering, families who labored together, worshiped together, and, every Sabbath evening, broke bread together.

But in one important way, the Sheldons were unique. They had an extraordinarily beautiful daughter. The daughter whom he could not stop staring at.

From his window, Jeremiah could see her in the school yard. It was noon recess, and students milled about outside, enjoying the warm September day, the boys in their white shirts and black pants, the girls in their long pastel dresses. They all looked healthy and sun-kissed, as children ought to look. Even among those swan-like girls, Katie Sheldon stood out, with her irrepressible curls and her bell-like laughter. How quickly girls change, he thought. In a single year, she had transformed from a child into a willowy young woman. Her bright eyes, gleaming hair, and rosy cheeks were all signs of fertility.

She stood among a trio of girls in the shade of a bur oak tree. Their heads were bent together like the Three Graces whispering secrets. Around them swirled the energy of the school yard, where students chattered and played hopscotch and kicked around a soccer ball.

Suddenly he noticed a boy crossing toward the three girls, and he frowned. The boy was about fifteen, with a thatch of blond hair and long legs that had already outgrown his trousers. Halfway across the yard, the boy paused, as though gathering up the courage to continue. Then his head lifted and he walked directly toward the girls. Toward Katie.

Jeremiah pressed closer to the window.

As the boy approached, Katie looked up and smiled. It was a sweet and innocent smile, directed at a classmate who almost certainly had only one thing on his mind. Oh yes, Jeremiah could guess what was in that boy's head. Sin. Filth. They were speaking now, Katie and the boy, as the other two girls knowingly slipped away. He could not hear their conversation through the noise of the school yard, but he saw the attentive tilt of Katie's head, the coquettish way she flicked her hair off her shoulder. He saw the boy lean in, as though sniffing and savoring her scent. Was that the McKinnon brat? Adam or Alan or something. There were so many families now living in the compound, and so many children, that he could not remember all their names. He glared down at the two of them, gripping the window frame so tightly that his nails dug into the paint.

He pivoted and walked out of his office, thumping down the stairs. With every step, his jaw clenched tighter and acid burned a hole in his stomach. He banged out of the...

Already the flies were swarming. Four hours on the hot pavement of South Boston had baked the pulverized flesh, releasing the chemical equivalent of a dinner bell, and the air was alive with buzzing flies. Though what remained of the torso was now covered with a sheet, there was still much exposed tissue for scavengers to feast on. Bits of gray matter and other unidentifiable parts were dispersed in a radius of thirty feet along the street. A skull fragment had landed in a second-story flower box, and clumps of tissue adhered to parked cars.Detective Jane Rizzoli had always possessed a strong stomach,
but even she had to pause, eyes closed, fists clenched, angry
at herself for this moment of weakness. Don't lose it. Don't
lose it. She was the only female detective in the Boston P.D.
homicide unit, and she knew that the pitiless spotlight was always
trained on her. Every mistake, every triumph, would be
noted by all. Her partner, Barry Frost, had already tossed up his
breakfast in humiliatingly public view, and he was now sitting
with his head on his knees in their air-conditioned vehicle, waiting
for his stomach to settle. She could not afford to fall victim
to nausea. She was the most visible law enforcement officer on
the scene, and from the other side of the police tape the public
stood watching, registering every move she made, every detail of
her appearance. She knew she looked younger than her age of
thirty-four, and she was self-conscious about maintaining an air
of authority. What she lacked in height she compensated for
with her direct gaze, her squared shoulders. She had learned the
art of dominating a scene, if only through sheer intensity.

But this heat was sapping her resolve. She had started off
dressed in her usual blazer and slacks and with her hair neatly
combed. Now the blazer was off, her blouse was wrinkled, and
the humidity had frizzed her dark hair into unruly coils. She felt
assaulted on all fronts by the smells, the flies, and the piercing
sunlight. There was too much to focus on all at once. And all
those eyes were watching her.

Loud voices drew her attention. A man in a dress shirt and
tie was trying to argue his way past a patrolman.

"Look, I gotta get to a sales conference, okay? I'm an hour
late as it is. But you've got your goddamn police tape wrapped
around my car, and now you're saying I can't drive it? It's my
own friggin' car!"

"It's a crime scene, sir."

"It's an accident!"

"We haven't determined that yet."

"Does it take you guys all day to figure it out? Why don't
you listen to us? The whole neighborhood heard it happen!"

Rizzoli approached the man, whose face was glazed with
sweat. It was eleven-thirty and the sun, near its zenith, shone
down like a glaring eye.

"What, exactly, did you hear, sir?" she asked.

He snorted. "Same thing everyone else did."

"A loud bang."

"Yeah. Around seven-thirty. I was just getting outta the
shower. Looked out my window, and there he was, lying on the
sidewalk. You can see it's a bad corner. Asshole drivers come flying
around it like bats outta hell. Must've been a truck hit him."

"Did you see a...

Chapter One

Teddy Daniel's father had been a fisherman. He lost his boat to the bank in '31 when Teddy was eleven, spent the rest of his life hiring onto other boats when they had the work, unloading freight along the docks when they didn't, going long stretches when he was back at the house by ten in the morning, sitting in an armchair, staring at his hands, whispering to himself occasionally, his eyes gone wide and dark.

He'd taken Teddy out to the islands when Teddy was still a small boy, too young to be much help on the boat. All he'd been able to do was untangle the lines and tie off the hooks. He'd cut himself a few times, and the blood dotted his fingertips and smeared his palms.

They'd left in the dark, and when the sun appeared, it was a cold ivory that pushed up from the edge of the sea, and the islands appeared out of the fading dusk, huddled together, as if they'd been caught at something.

Teddy saw small, pastel-colored shacks lining the beach of one, a crumbling limestone estate on another. His father pointed out the prison on Deer Island and the stately fort on Georges. On Thompson, the high trees were filled with birds, and their chatter sounded like squalls of hail and glass.

Out past them all, the one they called Shutter lay like something tossed from a Spanish galleon. Back then, in the spring of '28, it had been left to itself in a riot of its own vegetation, and the fort that stretched along its highest point was strangled in vines and topped with great clouds of moss.

"Why Shutter?" Teddy asked.

His father shrugged. "You with the questions. Always the questions."

"Yeah, but why?"

"Some places just get a name and it sticks. Pirates probably."

"Pirates?" Teddy liked the sound of that. He could see them -- big men with eye patches and tall boots, gleaming swords.

His father said, "This is where they hid in the old days." His arm swept the horizon. "These islands. Hid themselves. Hid their gold."

Teddy imagined chests of it, the coins spilling down the sides.

Later he got sick, repeatedly and violently, pitching black ropes of it over the side of his father's boat and into the sea.

His father was surprised because Teddy hadn't begun to vomit until hours into the trip when the ocean was flat and glistening with its own quiet. His father said, "It's okay. It's your first time. Nothing to be ashamed of."

Teddy nodded, wiped his mouth with a cloth his father gave him.

His father said, "Sometimes there's motion, and you can't even feel it until it climbs up inside of you."

Another nod, Teddy unable to tell his father that it wasn't motion that had turned his stomach.

It was all that water. Stretched out around them until it was all that was left of the world. How Teddy believed that it could swallow the sky. Until that moment, he'd never known they were this alone.

He looked up at his father, his eyes leaking and red, and his father said, "You'll be okay," and Teddy tried to smile.

His father went out on a Boston whaler in the summer of '38 and never came back. The next spring, pieces of the boat washed up on Nantasket Beach in the town of Hull, where Teddy grew up. A strip of keel, a hot plate with the captain's name etched in the base, cans of tomato and potato soup, a couple of lobster traps, gap-holed and misshapen.

Prologue

It had been sixteen years since I'd killed anyone.  But I was going to kill someone tonight.  

It had also been sixteen years since I'd taken the Thunderbird out of the garage, where I kept it under lock and key.  Garage, hell, it was more like a crypt.  I'd thought the killer inside me would die, given time.  So I'd buried him in my subconscious, and I'd buried his car in my garage, even covered it up with a death-shroud-tarp.  I'd covered up the trophy wall, too.  I'd told myself never to set foot inside that garage again. 

But I had. 

Every now and then, his voice would get to me, and I'd go in, start the T-bird up, let it run, listen to it purr, and feel that old thrill I used to feel when we had been on our way to take another victim.  Sometimes, I would even slide the phony, pegboard wall aside, to look at the cinderblock wall it covered.  To look at all their faces.  So pretty.  Always smiling.  Always young.

I'd taken the T-bird out tonight.  And the kit, I'd brought the kit along as well, though I had no intention of using it.  I nearly always had the kit at hand.  It was a way of testing myself, I think.  A way of making sure I was the one in charge, the one in control.  That I could resist the urges of the beast within. 

I was going to kill the rookie cop, yeah.  But it would be a simple kill, just a bullet to the back of the head, and a scene set to look like a home invasion gone bad.  It wasn't the nemesis within me committing this crime.  It was me, it was all me this time.  And I had no choice.

But my alter ego was with me, coming along for the ride, getting a hell of a thrill out of the whole thing.  He loved killing.  He loved it way more than I did.  And that was saying something, because I'd come to relish it, myself.  There was no other rush quite as potent.

Still, this wasn't going to be like the others.  This wasn't about the rush, this was about necessity.

Getting inside the house was easy.  It would've been easy even for a virgin without any kills under his belt.  For me, it was child's play.  The small brick house's door wasn't locked.  There was no security system.  Every light in the place was turned off.  A cop oughtta know better.  Even a rookie like him.

There had been a party earlier in the evening, but the guests had cleared out, which made my job a lot easier.  The doorknob turned easily in my hand, and I stepped inside, into inky darkness.  I paused there, just inside the door,  giving my eyes time to adjust.  It was darker inside than out.  A different kind of darkness.  Heavier.  Denser. 

Still, I managed to see a little.  And I could tell what I would have been seeing, had there been any light, just by the smells permeating the place and assaulting my sensitive olfactory receptors.  Overflowing ashtrays.  Half-filled beer bottles, some of which had been used as ashtrays, so the sour beer and wet tobacco mingled in the air, nearly making me gag on them.  Stale potato chips and souring dip melted together in plastic recyclable bowls, adding to the pungency. 

My senses were always heightened when I was getting ready to kill.  They were heightened to hell and gone tonight, maybe because it had been so long.  I was shivering with it, feeling everything.  Even the rub of the black clothing against my skin was arousing to me.

I moved carefully, slowly, taking my time and knowing I had plenty.  All I wanted.  The rookie wasn't going to wake up.  So I took my time, enjoying every second of it.  Walking soundlessly through his darkened home, I felt, I thought, like a hunter must feel when stalking prey through a dense jungle.  But not just any prey.  I'm talking an elephant or a lion.  Something that could kill you just as easily as you could kill it.  Something dangerous.

Though you might disagree with me, given the nature of my victims, I've never believed there is any animal more dangerous than a human being.  I never will.  It's the intelligence.  It's the mind that makes it so.  Be it a young, beautiful woman, or tonight's prey—a young man in his prime.  A cop.

I made my way to the bedroom, measuring every step I took.  It didn't feel as if it had been as many years as it had—sixteen since my first time.   Her name was Sarah, that first one.  I remembered every detail of her face, and of her death.  I was as sharp and as tight tonight as if I'd killed only last week.   Or last night.  Maybe the years had mellowed my nerves and honed my skills.  I wasn't even shaking or sweating the way I usually did when I got into the same room with the evening's chosen one.

Silencing my thoughts, I listened, and heard slow, steady breathing from beneath a mound of blankets on the bed.  My heart pumped a little faster.  The compulsion came to life within me, like a fire in my blood.  I felt that dark, hungry twin, alive inside me.  Oh, I'd kept him silent for a long while—trapped in some kind of induced coma—until now.  Now he was wide awake.  I closed my eyes and reminded myself—and him—that this was going to be different.  We were not going to start up again.  Not like before. It would be just this once.  It was necessary.

We had no choice, really.  He knew, you see.  Or at least, he suspected.

Gently, we pulled the covers back.

And the dark twin within my soul roared in delight, even while I shook my head in denial.  For the person in the bed was not the man I had come here to kill. 

A beautiful young woman lay there, instead.  She was sound asleep and reeking of beer, but still, beautiful.   In the darkness, her skin appeared pale and flawless.  Her hair was long, straight and sleek.  Just the way I liked it.  It looked to be mink brown. 

It had to be, my newly awakened twin whispered to me.  That's your favorite shade, isn't it?  She's here for us.  I knew she would be.  So did you.  Come on, don't deny it, you knew.

What I knew, I reminded myself, was that the voice, the twin, was not real.  It was nothing more than a part of my mind, a twisted part, the part I'd managed to ignore all this time.  Though I'd never silenced him entirely.  Even while he'd slept—I heard him in my dreams.  Maybe he only slept while I was awake, and vice versa.  I wished he would shut up now, though, because this was not what I wanted.  Not now. 

You knew she would be here, he pressed.  Sooner or later, she had to be.  That's why you used the T-bird tonight.  It's why you brought the kit in with you.

But he was wrong.  I carried the kit as reminder--a testament to the power of my will and my ability to control the impulse.  To control him.

Bullshit.  You brought it for this.  You brought it in hopes of finding this very moment—this moment we both knew would come. It's a gift!  You've been waiting sixteen years for this!  Take it out. Come on, take it out.  You know you want to.

No.

Yes.  And you know you will.  We will.  Why fight what we are?

My hands trembling, I slid the backpack off my shoulders, and reaching inside, pulled out the leather bag.  The one that hadn't seen use in the sixteen years since I'd taken my final victim, and framed another man for the crime.  It was about the size of a shaving kit, with a zipper on three sides.  I felt alive again as I slowly unzipped it, careful not to make too much noise and yet exhilarated at the risk that I would be heard.  I leaned over her.  I felt passion I hadn't felt in a decade and a half.  My heartbeat pounded in my ears and my skin heated and my hands tingled.  It seemed as if my other half melded with me as I crept to the head of the bed, so I stood between her head and the wall behind me.  So I could get her from behind, and watch her face in the mirror that topped the dresser on the opposite side of the room.

I took the black silk stocking from the kit, and slid it carefully beneath her neck, all without disturbing her drunken sleep.  Her skin was warm against my gloved fingertips.  I heard the twin inside me groan in delicious anticipation as we pulled the stocking into position.  And then we began to pull it tight.  And then tighter.  And still tighter.

She came awake fast.  Her eyes flew wide and her hands rose to clutch at her throat.  I pulled the stocking still tighter, lifting her upper body off the bed as I did, so that she, too, could see the entire game play out in the mirror. 

As I'd hoped, the sight enhanced her terror.  Seeing me there, behind her, all in black, big and powerful, steadily choking the life out of her.  She knew there was no hope.  She thrashed in the bed, mouth opening wide, face turning red.  A rush, not unlike the one produced by a hit of Ecstasy, only much much better, washed through my body like a warm, vibrant, all-encompassing wave as we slowly, steadily squeezed the life out of her.   She wasn't so pretty anymore, with her tongue swollen and filling the space between her parted lips. 

When her eyes rolled back in her head, I let go of the stocking entirely, and turned to the case again.  I took out the two custom made shot-glasses, with the artwork on them that so seemed to reflect the predator inside me.  The crimes we committed together.  I took out the copper flask, as well, and I poured both shot glasses full of whiskey. 

After a moment, she started to rouse.  Her eyelids moved back and forth rapidly, before they opened, and then widened as she realized I was still there.  She opened her mouth to speak, and I gripped her chin with one hand, forcing her lips open.  I poured her shot of whiskey into her throat.  She couldn't swallow—she began to choke.  Without letting a second tick past, I dropped the glass, and grabbed the black stocking again, and this time I pulled it tighter, jerking it harder, twisting it with all my might, and easily crushing her throat with that soft bit of black silk. 

I heard the gurgling as she drowned in the whiskey.  I saw the foamy spit running over her lower lip and her chin.  Her eyes bulged as if they would pop, tears running from the outer corners.  Her entire body jerked and spasmed. A single, purple vein in her forehead expanded and pulsed beneath her blue-tinted skin.

And then it stopped pulsing.

There was a palpable change when they died.  I always knew the very moment when it happened.  There was no more awareness on their part, no more struggle or shock or fear.  There was just a sudden absence of all of it.  An absence of . . . of everything, really.  And with it, came a rush of release within me that made an ordinary orgasm pale in comparison.  There was nothing like this feeling.  Nothing.

As life fled the girl's body, as I felt it flee, the sensation continued trembling through me.  It lit me up.  I felt it in every nerve ending, in every deliciously sensitized inch of my skin, in the quivering of my stomach and the aftershocks convulsing my muscles.  I eased the pressure on the silk stocking, my head tipping back, my eyes falling closed as I sighed and shuddered in delectable bliss. 

Then, slowly, cell by cell, my brain came back online, like a computer being rebooted.  The lights came on in order.  The hard drive began to whir.  The pleasure ebbed into a warm glow that filled my body and would last, I knew, for days.  But the delight receded enough to allow rationality and practical considerations renewed access to the forefront of my mind.

I hadn't accomplished what I had set out to do tonight.  Not precisely.  But I could still achieve the ends I'd intended to achieve.  I'd just need to take a slightly different, and perhaps more torturous path, to get to the same destination.   I could still do it.  I knew how.

And besides, this way was so much better.

"You're right," I told my twin, alive and wide awake inside me now.  "It was.  God, it was.  It's been so long."

Sixteen years too long.

I nodded.  Then quickly stopped myself.  "It won't happen again, though.  As good as it was, I can't let it happen again.  I won't.

Oh, who the hell are you kidding?  You're back, my friend.  You're back, and you're glad to be.  You've missed this.  You know you have.

Ignoring the one who, in that moment, felt like my oldest and dearest friend—and the only one who ever had or ever would understand me--I released the stocking that had seen so many throats before, slid it from around her neck, and returned it to the case.  I had other work to do this night, to make this go the way I needed it to go.  But first, there was one more thing. 

I picked up the second shot glass from where I'd set it on the nightstand, put it to my lips, and tipped it up, swallowing my celebratory drink. 

My nightcap.

It was tradition, after all.