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...

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

—King James Bible, Matthew 7:15

"This guy is dangerous?" Rachel Jessop studied the glossy black-and-white photograph her manager slid across the table.

Nate Ferrentino's leather chair squeaked as he leaned back and locked his hands behind his head. "He doesn't look dangerous to you?" One eyebrow arched, telling her he found her reaction amusing, but she couldn't begin to guess why, and she'd worked with him long enough to know he wouldn't explain even if she asked. With short dark hair and green, gold-flecked eyes, he had the face of a sensitive man who'd become cynical and the body of a soldier. Nate was a tempting physical specimen. But he wasn't one to reveal much about his thoughts.

Rachel wished that was all she knew about her boss. When she'd first started working at Department 6 eight months ago, she'd been so convinced she'd met the one man she could love with all her heart, she'd made a humiliating miscalculation. The embarrassment of that incident still burned so intensely she could barely look at him.

Ignoring the way his T-shirt stretched over his clearly defined pecs, she kept her focus on Ethan Wycliff, the man in the picture. Wiry and with the appearance of some height, Ethan had polish to spare—high cheekbones, black hair, black eyes and a beguiling smile. "He's too pretty to seem dangerous. He could be on billboards, modeling suits for Armani. What's he done?"

Except for possibly height, Nate was Ethan's opposite. Although he wasn't overweight by any stretch of the imagination, slender wasn't an adjective that came to mind. Pretty and polished didn't fit, either. He was handsome, but not in the classic sense of movie stars and models. His forehead was a bit too wide, his jaw too square. And he had too many scars—both from when he was a navy SEAL and from working for Department 6 after he'd left the military.

"Depends on who you talk to," he said. "There's a chance that none of it's illegal, but the secrecy surrounding him and his group is making some important people nervous."

Rachel shoved the picture back in Nate's direction, but he didn't move to reclaim it. He let Ethan Wycliff's image remain on the table, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling of the small conference room—one of several in the L.A. office. Unlike other security contractors, Department 6 rarely handled military operations. They specialized in undercover work, generally inside the U.S.

"What's he suspected of doing?" she asked. "Laundering money? Smuggling drugs? Working in the sex-slave trade?"

"He's the leader of a religious cult about two hundred members strong."

That was the last thing she'd expected Nate to say. Judging by Ethan's elegant business suit, he had taste. He wasn't sporting a scraggly beard, wasn't beggarly or odd-looking in any way. Neither did he appear smarmy like some televangelists she'd seen. Not in the photograph, anyway. "What kind of religious cult?"

"A Christian cult. Sort of. It seems to be a compilation of whatever Ethan wants it to be. He and his followers call their organization the Church of the Covenant. One thing they believe is that the world is coming to an end very soon. Only those who are properly branded—"

"You mean, tattooed?" she cut in.

"No, I mean, branded—and baptized and living within the gates of their little commune—will rule with God."

"That's not particularly...

Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title!

Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title!

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...

Excerpt from "The Surgeon"

PROLOGUE

Today they will find her body.

I know how it will happen. I can picture, quite vividly, the sequence of events that will lead to the discovery. By nine o'clock, those snooty ladies at the Kendall and Lord Travel Agency will be sitting at their desks, their elegantly manicured fingers tapping at computer keyboards, booking a Mediterranean cruise for Mrs. Smith, a ski vacation at Klosters for Mr. Jones. And for Mr. and Mrs. Brown, something different this year, something exotic, perhaps Chiang Mai or Madagascar, but nothing too rugged; oh no, adventure must, above all, be comfortable. That is the motto at Kendall and Lord: "Comfortable adventures." It is a busy agency, and the phone rings often.
It will not take long for the ladies to notice that Diana is not at her desk.

One of them will call Diana's Back Bay residence, but the phone will ring, unanswered. Maybe Diana is in the shower and can't hear it. Or she has already left for work but is running late. A dozen perfectly benign possibilities will run through the caller's mind. But as the day wears on, and repeated calls go unanswered, other, more disturbing possibilities, will come to mind.

I expect it's the building superintendent who will let Diana's coworker into the apartment. I see him nervously rattling his keys as he says, "You're her friend, right? You sure she won't mind? 'cause I'm gonna have to tell her I let you in."

They walk into the apartment, and the coworker calls out: "Diana? Are you home?" They start up the hall, past the elegantly framed travel posters, the superintendent right behind her, watching that she doesn't steal anything.

Then he looks through the doorway, into the bedroom. He sees Diana Sterling, and he is no longer worried about something as inconsequential as theft. He wants only to get out of that apartment before he throws up.

I would like to be there when the police arrive, but I am not stupid. I know they will study every car that creeps by, every face that stares from the gathering of spectators on the street. They know my urge to return is strong. Even now, as I sit in Starbuck's, watching the day brighten outside the window, I feel that room calling me back. But I am like Ulysses, safely lashed to my ship's mast, yearning for the sirens' song. I will not dash myself against the rocks. I will not make that mistake.

Instead I sit and drink my coffee while outside, the city of Boston comes awake. I stir three teaspoons of sugar into my cup; I like my coffee sweet. I like everything to be just so. To be perfect.

A siren screams in the distance, calling to me. I feel like Ulysses straining against the ropes, but they hold fast.

Today they will find her body.

Today they will know we are back.

_____________________________________

CHAPTER ONE
One year later

Detective Thomas Moore disliked the smell of latex, and as he snapped on the gloves, releasing a puff of talcum, he felt the usual twinge of anticipatory nausea. The odor was linked to the most unpleasant aspects of his job, and like one of Pavlov's dogs, trained to salivate on cue, he'd come to associate that rubbery scent with the inevitable accompaniment of blood and body fluids. An olfactory warning to brace himself.

And so he did, as he stood outside the autopsy room. He had walked in straight from the heat, and already sweat was chilling on his skin. It was July twelfth, a humid and hazy Friday afternoon. Across the city of Boston, air conditioners rattled and dripped, and tempers were flaring. On the Tobin Bridge, cars would already be backed up, fleeing north to the cool forests of Maine. But Moore would not be among them. He had been called back from his vacation, to view a horror he had no wish to confront.

He was already garbed in a surgical gown, which he'd pulled from the morgue linen cart. Now he put on a paper cap to catch stray hairs, and pulled paper booties over his shoes, because he had seen what sometimes spilled from the table onto the floor. The blood, the clumps of tissue. He was by no means a tidy man, but he had no wish to bring any trace of the autopsy room home on his shoes. He paused for a few seconds outside the door and took a deep breath. Then, resigning himself to the ordeal, he pushed into the room. The draped corpse lay on the table -- a woman, by the shape of it. Moore avoided looking too long at the victim and focused instead on the living people in the room. Dr. Ashford Tierney, the medical examiner, and a morgue attendant were assembling instruments on a tray. Across the table from Moore stood Jane Rizzoli, also from the Boston Homicide Unit. Thirty-three years old, Rizzoli was a small and square-jawed woman. Her untameable curls were hidden beneath the paper O.R. cap, and without her black hair to soften her features, her face seemed to be all hard angles, her dark eyes probing and intense. She had transferred to Homicide from Vice and Narcotics six months ago. She was the only woman in the Homicide unit, and already there had been problems between her and another detective, charges of sexual harrassment, countercharges of unrelenting bitchiness. Moore was not sure he liked Rizzoli, or she him. So far they had kept their interactions strictly business, and he thought she preferred it that way.

Standing beside Rizzoli was her partner Barry Frost, a relentlessly cheerful cop whose bland and beardless face made him seem much younger than his 30 years. Frost had worked with Rizzoli for two months now without complaint, the only man in the unit placid enough to endure her foul moods.

As Moore approached the table, Rizzoli said, "We wondered when you'd show up."

"I was on the Maine Turnpike when you beeped me."

"We've been waiting here since five."

"And I'm just starting the internal exam," Dr. Tierney said. "So I'd say Detective Moore got here right on time." One man coming to the defense of another. He slammed the cabinet door shut, setting off a reverberating clang. It was one of the rare occasions he allowed his irritation to show. Dr. Tierney was a native Georgian, a courtly gentleman who believed ladies should behave like ladies. He did not enjoy working with the prickly Jane Rizzoli.

The morgue attendant wheeled a tray of instruments to the table, and his gaze briefly met Moore's with a look of, Can you believe this bitch?

"Sorry about your fishing trip," Tierney said to Moore. "It looks like your vacation's cancelled."

"You're sure it's our boy again?"

In answer, Tierney reached for the drape and pulled it back, revealing the corpse. "Her name is Elena Ortiz."

Though Moore had been braced for this sight, his first glimpse of the victim had the impact of a physical blow. The woman's black hair, matted stiff with blood, stuck out like porcupine quills from a face the color of blue-veined marble. Her lips were parted, as though frozen in mid-utterance. The blood had already been washed off the body, and her wounds gaped in purplish rents on the gray canvas of skin. There were two visible wounds. One was a deep slash across the throat, extending from beneath the left ear, transecting the left carotid artery, and laying open the laryngeal cartilage. The coup de grace. The second slash was low on the abdomen. This wound had not been meant to kill; it had served an entirely different purpose.

Moore swallowed hard. "I see why you called me back from vacation."

"I'm the lead on this one," said Rizzoli.

He heard the note of warning in her statement; she was protecting her turf. He understood where it came from, how the constant taunts and skepticism that women cops faced could make them quick to take offense. In truth he had no wish to challenge her. They would have to work together on this, and it was too early in the game to be battling for dominance. He was careful to maintain a respectful tone. "Could you fill me in on the circumstances?"

Rizzoli gave a curt nod. "The victim was found at nine this morning, in her apartment on Worcester Street, in the South End. She usually gets to work around six a.m. at Celebration Florists, a few blocks from her residence. It's a family business, owned by her parents. When she didn't show up, they got worried. Her brother went to check on her. He found her in the bedroom. Dr. Tierney estimates the time of death was somewhere between midnight and four a.m. this morning. According to the family, she had no current boyfriend, and no one in her apartment building recalls seeing any male visitors. She's just a hard- working Catholic girl."

Moore looked at the victims' wrists. "She was immobilized."

"Yes. Duct tape on the wrists and ankles. She was found nude. Wearing only a few items of jewelry."

"What jewelry?"

"A necklace. A ring. Ear studs. The jewelry box in the bedroom was untouched. Robbery was not the motive."

Moore looked at the horizontal band of bruising across the victim's hips. "The torso was immobilized as well."

"Duct tape across the waist and the upper thighs. And across her mouth."

Moore released a deep breath. "Jesus." Staring at Elena Ortiz, Moore had a disorienting flash of another young woman. Another corpse -- a blond, with meat-red slashes across her throat and abdomen.

"Diana Sterling," he murmured.

"I've already pulled Sterling's autopsy report," said Tierney. "In case you need to review it."

But Moore did not; the Sterling case, on which he had been lead detective, had never strayed far from his mind.

A year ago, thirty-year-old Diana Sterling, an employee at the Kendall and Lord Travel Agency, had been discovered nude and strapped to her bed with duct tape. Her throat and lower abdomen were slashed. The murder remained unsolved.

Dr. Tierney directed the exam light onto Elena Ortiz's abdomen. The blood had been rinsed off earlier, and the edges of the incision were a pale pink.

"Trace evidence?" asked Moore.

"We picked off a few fibers before we washed her off. And there was a strand of hair, adhering to the wound margin."

Moore looked up with sudden interest. "The victim's?"

"Much shorter. A light brown."

Elena Ortiz's hair was black.

Rizzoli said, "We've already requested hair samples from everyone who came into contact with the body."

Tierney directed their attention to the wound. "What we have here is a transverse cut. Surgeons call this a Maylard incision. The abdominal wall was incised layer by layer. First the skin, then the superficial fascia, then the muscle, and finally the pelvic peritoneum."

"Like Sterling," said Moore.

"Yes. Like Sterling. But there are differences."

"What differences?"

"On Diana Sterling, there were a few jags in the incision, indicating hesitation, or uncertainty. You don't see that here. Notice how cleanly this skin has been incised? There are no jags at all. He did this with absolute confidence." Tierney's gaze met Moore's. "Our unsub is learning. He's improved his technique."
"If it's the same unknown subject," Rizzoli said.

"There are other similarities. See the squared-off margin at this end of the wound? It indicates the track moves from right to left. Like Sterling. The blade used in this wound is single-edged, nonserrated. Like the blade used on Sterling."

"A scalpel?"

"It's consistent with a scalpel. The clean incision tells me there was no twisting of the blade. The victim was either unconscious, or so tightly restrained she couldn't move, couldn't struggle. She couldn't cause the blade to divert from its linear path."

Barry Frost looked like he wanted to throw up. "Aw, jeez. Please tell me she was already dead when he did this."

"I'm afraid this is not a postmortem wound." Only Tierney's green eyes showed above the surgical mask, and they were angry.

"There was antemortem bleeding?" asked Moore.

"Pooling in the pelvic cavity. Which means her heart was still pumping. She was still alive when this ... procedure was done."

Moore looked at the wrists, encircled by bruises. There were similar bruises around both ankles, and a band of petechiae -- pinpoint skin hemorrhages -- stretched across her hips. Elena Ortiz had struggled against her bonds.

"There's other evidence she was alive during the cutting," said Tierney. "Put your hand inside the wound, Thomas. I think you know what you're going to find."

Reluctantly, Moore inserted his gloved hand into the wound. The flesh was cool, chilled from several hours of refrigeration. It reminded him of how it felt to thrust his hand into a turkey carcass and root around for the package of giblets. He reached in up to his wrist, his fingers exploring the margins of the wound. It was an intimate violation, this burrowing into the most private part of a woman's anatomy. He avoided looking at Elena Ortiz's face. It was the only way he could regard her mortal remains with detachment, the only way he could focus on the cold mechanics of what had been done to her body.

"The uterus is missing." Moore looked at Tierney.

The M.E. nodded. "It's been removed."

Moore withdrew his hand from the body and stared down at the wound, gaping like an open mouth. Now Rizzoli thrust her gloved hand in, her short fingers straining to explore the cavity.

"Nothing else was removed?" she asked.

"Just the uterus," said Tierney. "He left the bladder and bowel intact."

"What's this thing I'm feeling here? This hard little knot, on the left side," she said.

"It's suture. He used it to tie off blood vessels."

Rizzoli looked up, startled. "This is a surgical knot?"

"Two-oh plain catgut," ventured Moore, looking at Tierney for confirmation.

Tierney nodded. "The same suture we found in Diana Sterling."

"Two-oh catgut?" asked Frost in a weak voice. He had retreated from the table and now stood in a corner of the room, ready to bolt for the sink. "Is that like a -- a brand name or something?"

"Not a brand name," said Tierney. "Catgut is a type of surgical thread made from the intestines of cows or sheep."

"So why do they call it catgut?" asked Rizzoli.

"It goes back to the Middle Ages, when gut strings were used on musical instruments. The musicians referred to their instruments as their kit, and the strings were called kitgut. The word eventually became catgut. In surgery, this sort of suture is used to sew together deep layers of connective tissue. The body eventually breaks down the suture material and absorbs it."

"And where would he get this catgut suture?" Rizzoli looked at Moore. "Did you trace a source for it on Sterling?"

"It's almost impossible to identify a specific source," said Moore. "Catgut suture's manufactured by a dozen different companies, most of them in Asia or India. It's still used in a number of foreign hospitals."

"Only foreign hospitals?"

Tierney said, "There are now better alternatives. Catgut doesn't have the strength or durability of synthetic sutures. I doubt many surgeons in the U.S. are currently using it."

"Why would our unsub use it at all?"

"To maintain his visual field. To control the bleeding long enough so he can see what he's doing. Our unsub is a very neat man."

Rizzoli pulled her hand from the wound. In her gloved palm was cupped a tiny clot of blood, like a bright red bead. "How skillful is he? Are we dealing with a doctor? Or a butcher?"

"Clearly he has anatomical knowledge," said Tierney. "I have no doubt he's done this before."

Moore took a step backwards from the table, recoiling from the thought of what Elena Ortiz must have suffered, yet unable to keep the images at bay. The aftermath lay right in front of him, staring with open eyes.

He turned, startled, as instruments clattered onto the metal tray. The morgue attendant had pushed the tray next to Dr. Tierney, in preparation for the Y incision. Now the attendant leaned forward and stared into the abdominal wound.

"So what happens to it?" he asked. "Once he whacks out the uterus, what does he do with it?"

"We don't know," said Tierney. "The organs have never been found."

All content copyright 2007 tess gerritsen. all rights reserved.

Before him, frond coral waved in a slow and majestic dance, and a small ray emerged from the sand by the reef, weaving in a swift escape, aware that a large presence, possibly predatory, was near.

Sean O'Hara shot back up to the surface, pleased with his quick inspection of Pirate Cut, a shallow reef where divers and snorkelers alike came to enjoy the simple beauty of nature. It was throughout history a place where many a ship had met her doom, crushed by the merciless winds of a storm. Now only scattered remnants of that history remained; salvage divers of old had done their work along with the sea, salt and the constant shift of sands and tides and weather that remained just as turbulent through the centuries.

It was still, he decided, a great place to film.

He hadn't opted for scuba gear that day—it had been just a quick trip, thirty minutes out and thirty back in, early morning, just to report to his partner, David Beckett, so they could talk about their ever-changing script and their plans for their documentary film.

Because Sean was an expert diver, he seldom went diving alone. Good friends—some of the best and most experienced divers in the world—had died needlessly by diving alone. But a free dive on a calm day hadn't seemed much of a risk, and he was pleased that he had taken off early in the morning. Most of the dive boats headed out by nine, but few of them came to Pirate Cut as a first dive, and it wouldn't get busy until later in the day.

And out in the boat, he wasn't exactly alone.

Bartholomew was with him.

Climbing up the dive ladder at the rear of his boat, Conch Fritter, he tossed his f lippers up and hauled himself on board. His cell phone sat on his towel, and the message light was blinking. Caller ID showed him that he'd been called from O'Hara's, his uncle's bar.

"I thought about answering it, but refrained."

Sean turned at the sound of the voice. Bartholomew was seated at the helm of the dive boat, feet in buckle shoes up on the wheel, a National Geographic magazine in his hands.

Bartholomew was getting damned good at holding things.

"Thank you for refraining. And tell me again, why the hell are you with me? You hate the water," Sean said, irritated. He pushed buttons on his phone to receive his messages, staring at Bartholomew.

"Love boats, though," Bartholomew said.

Sean groaned inwardly. It was amazing—once he hadn't believed in Bartholomew. Actually, he'd thought the ghost might have been one of his sister Katie's imaginary friends. He realized he either had to accept that she was crazy or that there was a ghost. At that time, Sean couldn't see or hear Bartholomew.

But that had been a while ago now. While solving the Effigy Murders—as the press wound up calling them— he'd ended up with his head in a bandage and stitches in his scalp.

It was the day the damned stitches had come out that he'd first seen the ghost—as clearly as if he had physical substance—sitting in a chair next to the hospital bed.

Sean listened to his messages. The first, from David Beckett, asking him what time he wanted to go out. Sean grinned. David was in love—and sleeping late. Sean was glad, since it seemed that his old friend was in love with his sister, Katie, and she was in love with him. They'd both seen some tough times, and Sean was happy for them.

The next message was from his uncle just asking him to call back.

He did so. Still, he didn't learn much. His uncle just wanted him to come to the bar. Sean told him it...

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...

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.

Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title!

Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title!

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,...

Present Day

Moira O'Donnell woke up with blood on her hands.

Her heart raced as she sat upright in the strange bed, staring at the dark-red blood drip, drip, dripping onto the white sheets, disappearing as each thick drop spread. She swallowed the scream that fought to escape.

She blinked and the blood was gone. The panicked rage faded. She almost--almost, but not quite--forgot the feeling of her hand clenching the heavy, balanced dagger. Almost forgot the sickening sound of the blade slicing through tendons, hitting bone, cutting out an invisible soul and throwing it to demons that tore it to shreds, feeding.

It's not real. It's not real. It's not real.

She repeated the mantra, reminding herself that it was only a nightmare, that she'd certainly never killed a person.

The fear from the dream stayed; it always did. Moira lived with fear day in and day out, sometimes buried so deep she almost could believe it was gone. When she lied to herself.

As the nightmare faded, her vision blurred. The dim early-morning light coming from the edges of the closed blinds looked cloudy and surreal, like her nightmare. She felt a vision coming on . . . but that wasn't possible. She'd never been fully awake for a vision before; they'd always hit her in the moment of unease immediately following a nightmare, before she could claw her way back to consciousness.

She was awake--knew she was awake--but everything around her was foggy, while her mind started a movie she didn't want to see. Moira's gut reaction was to stop the onslaught of images, but she couldn't even if she'd tried. In a rush, her mind flooded with thoughts not her own, sights she'd never witnessed, feelings she'd never had. No vision had ever been anything like this. Not this physical sense of evil seeping into every pore, filling her until she wanted to scream.

She flew across the continent and back, tired. Bored. Frustrated. There were many places she could stay, but none of them appealed to her. It was all too easy. The desires of the body were weak, and she was anything but weak. She wanted freedom, but wasn't free. She wanted vengeance, and she could have it--have everything--when she was free.

Freedom! Her time was now. She grew stronger with each passing day.

Yet, her spirit was caught by something stronger than she. She resisted, angry. But she was tied to the earth, and the harder she fought, the weaker she became. Spinning, spinning, spinning out of control, shrinking . . .

A weak, dark-haired woman sat in the circle, waiting for her. She fought the entrapment, but she'd been in the astral plane, and her anchor had called her back.

Someone trapped her! She stretched and fought and vowed revenge on her captor. The mind that shared this body was foolish. She suppressed it. Brutally, without remorse.

Moira screamed as pain filled her head. For a split second, she thought she was possessed. She tasted the hot sulphur on her tongue, felt an evil presence under her skin; then it was gone. The vision, the pain, everything. Everything but the fear.

Her body shook violently. From the corner of her eye she saw movement--something was in her room. She jumped out of bed, knife in hand without even thinking about reaching under her pillow for her weapon. She held it in front of her to ward off dark magic or a demon, making quick, confident strides toward the enemy.

"Moira!"

Rafe. She swallowed, blinked, tried...

From the book

CHAPTER
1

THE ROOM I had rented in an old part of Natchez seemed more reflective of New Orleans than a river town in Mississippi. The ventilated storm shutters were slatted with a pink glow, as soft and filtered and cool in color as the spring sunrise can be in the Garden District, the courtyard outside touched with mist off the river, the pastel walls deep in shadow and stained with lichen above the flower beds, the brick walkways smelling of damp stone and the wild spearmint that grew in green clusters between the bricks. I could see the shadows of banana trees moving on the window screens, the humidity condensing and threading along the fronds like veins in living tissue. I could hear a ship's horn blowing somewhere out on the river, a long hooting sound that was absorbed and muted inside the mist, thwarting its own purpose. A wood-bladed fan revolved slowly above my bed, the incandescence of the lightbulbs attached to it reduced to a dim yellow smudge inside frosted-glass shades that were fluted to resemble flowers. The wood floor and the garish wallpaper and the rain spots on the ceiling belonged to another era, one that was outside of time and unheedful of the demands of commerce. Perhaps as a reminder of that fact, the only clock in the room was a round windup mechanism that possessed neither a glass cover nor hands on its face.

There are moments in the Deep South when one wonders if he has not wakened to a sunrise in the spring of 1862. And in that moment, maybe one realizes with a guilty pang that he would not find such an event entirely unwelcome.

At midmorning, inside a pine-wooded depression not far from the Mississippi, I found the man I was looking for. His name was Jimmy Darl Thigpin, and the diminutive or boylike image his name suggested, as with many southern names, was egregiously misleading. He was a gunbull of the old school, the kind of man who was neither good nor bad, in the way that a firearm is neither good nor bad. He was the kind of man whom you treat with discretion and whose private frame of reference you do not probe. In some ways, Jimmy Darl Thigpin was the lawman all of us fear we might one day become.

He sat atop a quarter horse that was at least sixteen hands high, his back erect, a cut-down double-barrel twelve-gauge propped on his thigh, the saddle creaking under his weight. He wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt to protect his arms from mosquitoes, and a beat-up, tall-crown cowboy hat in the apparent belief that he could prevent a return of the skin cancer that had shriveled one side of his face. To my knowledge, in various stages of his forty-year career, he had killed five men, some inside the prison system, some outside, one in an argument over a woman in a bar.

His charges were all black men, each wearing big-stripe green-and-white convict jumpers and baggy pants, some wearing leather-cuffed ankle restraints. They were felling trees, chopping off the limbs for burning, stacking the trunks on a flatbed truck, the heat from the fire so intense it gave off no smoke.

When he saw me park on the road, he dismounted and broke open the breech of his shotgun, cradling it over his left forearm, exposing the two shells in the chambers, effectively disarming his weapon. But in spite of his show of deference for my safety, there was no pleasure in his expression when he shook hands, and his eyes never left his charges.

"We appreciate your calling us, Cap," I said. "It looks like you're still running a tight ship."

Then I thought about what I had just said. There are instances when the exigencies of...

Chapter One

Three of them, hard men carrying nylon bags, wearing work jackets, Carhartts and Levis, all of them with facial hair. They walked across the parking structure to the steel security door, heads swiveling, checking the corners and the overheads, steam flowing from their mouths, into the icy air, one of the men on a cell phone.

As they got to the door, it popped open, and a fourth man, who'd been on the other end of the cell-phone call, let them through. The fourth man was tall and thin, dark-complected, with a black brush mustache. He wore a knee-length black raincoat that he'd bought at a Goodwill store two days earlier, and black pants. He scanned the parking structure, saw nothing moving, pulled the door shut, made sure of the lock.

"This way," he snapped. "Yalla."

Inside, they moved fast, reducing their exposure, should someone unexpectedly come along. No one should, at the ass-end of the hospital, at fifteen minutes after five o'clock on a bitterly cold winter morning. They threaded through a maze of service corridors until the tall man said, "Here."

Here was a storage closet. He opened it with a key. Inside, a pile of blue, double-extra-large orderly uniforms sat on a medical cart.

The hard men dumped their coats on the floor, and pulled the uniforms over their street clothes. Not a big disguise, but they weren't meant to be seen close-up — just enough to slip past a video camera. One of them, the biggest one, hopped up on the cart, lay down and said, "Look, I'm dead," and laughed at his joke. The tall man could smell the bourbon on the joker's breath.

"Shut the fuck up," said one of the others, but not in an unkindly way.

The tall man said, "Don't be stupid," and there was nothing kind in his voice. When they were ready, they looked at each other and the tall man pulled a white cotton blanket over the man on the cart, and one of the men said, "Let's do it."

"Check yourself..."

"We don't hurt anyone," the tall man said. The sentiment reflected not compassion, but calculation: robbery got X amount of attention, injuries got X-cubed.

"Yeah, yeah..." One of the men pulled a semi-automatic pistol from his belt, a heavy, blued, no-bullshit Beretta, stolen from the Army National Guard in Milwaukee, checked it, stuck it back in his belt. He said, "Okay? Everybody got his mask? Okay. Let's go."

They stuffed the ski masks into their belts and two hard men pushed the cart into the corridor. The tall man led them further through the narrow tiled hallways, then said, "Here's the camera."

The two men pushing the cart turned sideways, as the tall man told them to, and pushed the cart through a cross-corridor. A security camera peered down the hall at them. If a guard happened to be looking at the monitor at that moment, he would have seen only the backs of two orderlies, and a lump on the cart. The tall man in the raincoat scrambled along, on his hands and knees, on the far side of the cart.

The big man on the cart, looking at the ceiling tiles go by, giggled, "It's like ridin' the tilt-a-whirl."

When they were out of the camera's sight-line, the tall man stood up and led them deeper into the hospital — the three outsiders would never have found the way, by themselves. After two minutes, the tall man handed one of the outsiders a key, indicated a yellow steel door, with no identification.

"This is it?" The leader of the three was skeptical — the door looked like nothing.

"Yes," said the tall man. "This is the side door. When you go in, you'll be right among them. One or two. The front door and service window is closed until six. I'll be around the corner until you call, watching."

He'd be around the corner where he could slip out of sight, if something went wrong.

The other man nodded, asked, "Everybody ready?" The other two muttered, "Yeah," tense now, pulled on the masks, took their pistols out. The leader put the key in the lock and yanked open the door.

***

Weather Karkinnen had taken a half-pill at nine o'clock, knowing that she wouldn't sleep without it. Too much to do, too much to think about. The procedure had been researched, rehearsed, debated, and undoubtedly prayed over. Now the time had come.

Sleep came hard. She kept imagining that first moment, the first cut, the commitment, the parting of the flesh beneath the edge of her scalpel, on a nearly circular path between the skulls of the two babies — but sometime before nine-thirty, she slipped away.

She didn't feel her husband come to bed, at one o'clock in the morning. He took care not to disturb her, undressing in the dark, lying as unmoving as he could, listening to her breathing, until he, too, slipped away.

***

And then her eyes opened.

Pop.

Dark, not quite silent — the furnace running in the winter night. She lifted her head to the clock. Four-thirty. She'd been asleep for seven hours. Eight would have been the theoretical ideal, but she never slept eight. She closed her eyes again, organizing herself, stepping through the upcoming day. At twenty minutes to five, she got out of bed, stretched, and headed to the en-suite bathroom, checking herself: she felt sharp. Excellent. She brushed her teeth, showered, washed and dried her short-cut blond hair.

She'd laid out her clothes the night before. She walked across the bedroom barefoot, in the light of the two digital clocks, picked them up: a thick black-silk jersey and grey wool slacks, and dressy, black-leather square-toed shoes. She would have preferred to wear soft-soled cross-training shoes, like the nurses did, but surgeons didn't dress like nurses. She'd never even told anyone about the gel inner-soles.

She carried her clothes back to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light again, and dressed. When she was ready, she looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad.

Weather might have wished to have been a little taller, for the authority given by height; she might have wished for a chiseled nose. But her husband pointed out that she'd never had a problem giving orders, or having them followed; and that he thought her nose, which she saw as lumpy, was devastatingly attractive, and that any number of men had chased after her, nose and all...

So, not bad.

She grinned at herself, turned to make sure the slacks didn't make her ass look fat — they didn't — switched off the light, opened the bathroom door and tiptoed across the bedroom. Her husband said, in the dark, "Good luck, babe."

"I didn't know you were awake."

"I'm probably more nervous than you are," he said.

She went back to the bed and kissed him on the forehead. "Go back to sleep."

Downstairs in the kitchen, she had two pieces of toast, a cup of instant coffee and a yogurt, got her bag, went out to the car, backed out of the garage, and headed downtown, on the snowy streets, across the river to the Minnesota Medical Research Center. She might be first in, she thought, but maybe not: there were forty people on the surgical team. Somebody had to be more nervous than she was.

***

At the hospital, the yellow door popped open and the three big men swarmed through.

Two people were working in the pharmacy — a short, slender man older man, who might once in the 60s have been a dancer, but no longer had the muscle tone. He wore a skuzzy beard on his cheeks, a soul patch under his lower lip. First thing, when he came to work, he tied a paper surgeon's cap on his head, for the rush he got when people looked at him in the cafeteria. The other person was a busy, intent, heavy-set woman in a nurse's uniform, who did the end-of-shift inventory, making sure it was all there, the stacks and rows and lockers full of drugs.

Some of it, put on the street, was worthless. Nobody pays street prices to cure the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Most of it, put on the street — on more than one street, actually; there was the old-age street, the uninsured street, the junkie street — was worth a lot. Half-million dollars? A million? Maybe.

The three hard men burst through the door and were on top of the two pharmacy workers in a half-second. The woman had enough time to whimper, "Don't," before one of the men pushed her to the floor, gun in her face, so close she could smell the oil on it, and said, "Shutta fuck up. Shut up." Soul-patch huddled into a corner with his hands up, then sank to his butt.

The leader of the three waved a pistol at the two on the floor and said, "Flat on the floor. Roll over, put your hands behind your back. We don't want to hurt you."

The two did, and another of the men hurriedly taped their hands behind them with grey duct tape, and then bound their feet together. That done, he tore off short strips of tape and pasted them over the victims' eyes, and then their mouths.

He stood up: "Okay."

The leader pushed the door open again and signaled with a fingertip. The tall man stepped in from the hallway, said, "These," and pointed at a series of locked, glass-doored cupboards. And, "Over here..."

A row of metal-covered lockers. The leader of the big men went to the man on the floor, who looked more ineffectual than the woman, and ripped the tape from his mouth.

"Where are the keys?" For one second, the man on the floor seemed inclined to prevaricate, so the big man dropped to his knees and said, "If you don't tell me this minute, I will break your fuckin' skull as an example. Then you will be dead, and I will ask the fat chick."

"In the drawer under the telephone," soul-patch said.

"Good answer."

As the big man retaped soul-patch's mouth, the tall man got the keys and began popping open the lockers. All kinds of good stuff here, every opiate and man-made opiate except heroin; lots of hot-rock stimulants, worth a fortune with the big-name labels.

"Got enough Viagra to stock a whore-house," one of the men grunted.

Another one: "Take this Tamiflu shit?"

"Fifty bucks a box in California... Take it."

Five minutes of fast work, the tall man pointing them at the good stuff, sorting out the bad.

***

Then the old guy on the floor made a peculiar wiggle.

One of the hold-up men happened to see it, frowned, then went over, half-rolled him. The old guy's hands were loose — he'd pulled one out of the tape, had had a cell phone in a belt clip under his sweater, had worked it loose, and had been trying to make a call. The big man grunted and looked at the face of the phone. One number had been pressed successfully: a nine.

"Sonofabitch was trying to call 911," he said, holding up the phone to the others. The old man tried to roll away, but the man who'd taken the phone punted him in the back once, twice, three times, kicking hard with steel-toed work boots.

"Sonofabitch... sonofabitch." The boot hit with the sound of a meat hammer striking a steak.

"Let him be," the leader said after the third kick.

But the old man had rolled back toward his tormenter and grasped him by the ankle, and the guy tried to shake him loose and the old man moaned something against the tape and held on, his fingernails raking the big guy's calf.

"Let go of me, you old fuck." The guy shook him off his leg, and kicked him again, hard, in the chest.

The leader said, "Quit screwing around. Tape him up again and let's get this stuff out of here."

***

The old man, his hands taped again, was still groaning as they loaded the bags. That done, they went to the door, glanced down the hallway. All clear. The bags went under the blanket on the cart, and the three big men pushed the cart past the security-camera intersection, back through the rabbit-warren to the utility closet, replaced the orderly uniforms with their winter coats, picked up the bags.

The leader said, "Gotta move, now. Gotta move. Don't know how much time we got."

Another of the men said, "Shooter — dropped your glove."

"Ah, man, don't need that." He picked it up, and the tall man led them out, his heart thumping against his rib cage. Almost out. When they could see the security door, he stopped, and they went on and out. The tall man watched until the door re-latched, turned, and headed back into the complex.

***

There were no cameras looking at the security door, or between the door and their van. The hard men hustled through the cold, threw the nylon bags in the back, and one of them climbed in with them, behind tinted windows, while the leader took the wheel and the big man climbed in the passenger seat.

"God damn, we did it," said the passenger. He felt under his seat, found a paper bag with bottle of bourbon in it. He was unscrewing the top as they rolled down the ramp; an Audi A5 convertible, moving too fast, swept across the front of the van and caught the passenger, mouth open, who squinted against the light. For just a moment, he was face to face with a blond woman, who then swung past them into the garage.

"Goddamnit!"

The leader braked, and looked back, but the A5 had already turned up the next level on the ramp. He thought they might turn around and find the woman... but then what? Kill her?

"She see you guys?" asked the man in the back, who'd seen only the flash of the woman's face.

The guy with the bottle said, "She was looking right at me. Goddamnit."

"Nothing to do," the leader said. "Nothing to do. Get out of sight. Shit, it was only one second...."

And they went on.

***

Weather had seen the man with the bottle, but paid no attention. Too much going through her head. She went on to the physicians' parking, got a spot close to the door, parked, and hurried inside.

***

The tall man got back to the utility closet, pulled off the raincoat and pants, which he'd used to conceal his physician's scrubs: if they'd been seen in the hallway, the three big men with a doc, somebody would have remembered. He gathered up the scrubs abandoned by the big men, stuffed them in a gym bag, along with the raincoat and pants, took a moment to catch his breath, to neaten up.

Listened, heard nothing. Turned off the closet light, peeked into the empty hallway, then strode off, a circuitous route, avoiding cameras, to an elevator. Pushed the button, waited impatiently.

When the door opened, he found a short, attractive blond woman inside, who nodded at him. He nodded back, poked "1," and they started down, standing a polite distance apart, with just the trifle of awkwardness of a single man and a single woman, unacquainted, in an elevator.

The woman said, after a few seconds, "Still hard to come to work in the dark."

"Can't wait for summer," the tall man said. They got to "2," and she stepped off and said, "Summer always comes," and she was gone.

***

Weather thought, as she walked away from the elevator, No point looking at the kids. They'd be asleep in the temporary ICU they'd set up down the hall from the operating room. She went instead to the locker room, and traded her street clothes for surgical scrubs. Another woman came in, and Weather nodded to her and the other woman asked, "Couldn't sleep?"

"Got a few hours," Weather said. "Are we the only two here?"

The woman, a radiologist named Regan, laughed: "No. John's got the doll on the table and he's talking about making some changes to the table, for God's sakes. Rick's here, he's messing with his saws. Gabriel was down in the ICU, he just got here, he's complaining about the cold. A bunch of nurses..."

"Nerves," Weather said. "See you down there."

She was cool in her scrubs, but comfortably so: she'd been doing this for nearly fifteen years, and the smell of a hospital, the alcohol, the cleaners, even the odor of burning blood, smelled like fresh air to her...

No point at looking at the kids, but she'd do it anyway. There were two nurses outside the temporary ICU, and they nodded and asked quietly, "Are you going in?"

"Just a peek."

"They've been quiet," one of the nurses said. "Dr. Maret just left."

Moving as silently as she could, in the semi-dark, she moved next to the babies' special bed. When you didn't look closely, they looked like any other toddlers, who happened to be sleeping head-to-head; small hands across their chests, eyes softly closed, small chests rising up and down. The first irregularity that a visitor might notice was the ridges in their skulls: Weather had placed a series of skin expanders under their scalps, to increase the amount of skin available to cover the skull defects — the holes — when they were separated.

There was really no need for her to look at them: she simply wanted to. Two babies, innocent, silent, feeling no pain; their world was about to change. She watched them for a minute, and Ellen sighed, and one foot moved, and then she subsided again.

Weather tiptoed out.

***

The old man in the pharmacy was moaning, the woman trying to talk, and the old man heard the woman fall down against a chair, after trying to get up, and then somebody was rapping at the service window and they both tried to scream, and they were loud, but muffled. He was chewing at the duct tape on his mouth, and finally it came loose from one side and he spat it away from his face.

"Dorothy, can you hear me?"

A muffled "Yes."

"I think I'm hurt bad. If I don't make it, tell the police that I scratched one of the robbers. I should have blood on my hand."

She replied, but the reply was unintelligible. He'd been working on the tape on his wrists, and eventually pulled one free... he tried to get up, but was too weak. He couldn't orient himself; nothing seemed to be working. He fumbled at the tape over his eyes, failed to get it free, moaned, moaned...

More time went by and the old man felt himself going dark; didn't know what was happening, but his heart was pounding and he told himself, calm down, calm down. He'd had heart and circulatory problems, clots, and he didn't need a clot breaking free, but his heart was pounding and he was sweating and something was going more wrong than it should be, more wrong than rolling around on a tile floor gagged and blinded and beaten. Hurt bad.

Then the door rattled and he shouted and he heard an answering shout, and he shouted again and Dorothy tried to scream through her gag, and some time later the door rattled again, and he heard it open, and somebody cried out, and then more people were there.

He blacked out for a moment, then came back, realized he was on a gurney, that they'd put a board on him, they were moving down a hallway. Somebody said, a few inches from his face, "We're moving you down to the ER, we're moving you..."

He said, as loud as he could as the world faded, "I scratched him. I scratched him. Tell the police, I scratched him..."

***

The operating room had been reworked for the separation operation. Maret had stripped out all the general surgery stuff, put in more lights, brought in the custom table. The table had been made in Germany, and lined with a magic memory foam that would adapt to the kids as their bodies were moved this way and that.

Sara and Ellen Raynes were joined at the skull, vertically, but slightly turned from each other. If an observer was standing at Sara's feet, looking at her face, and Sara was looking straight up, then Ellen's face was upside down and rotated to the observer's left. Imaging studies, done by Regan and her associates, indicated that their brains were separate, but they shared a portion of the dura mater under the skull, a kind of fibrous lining that protected and facilitated the drainage of venous blood from the brain.

The in-coming blood, in the arterial system, was good in both babies; but if the blood couldn't be drained away, and recirculated, it would put increasing pressure on the brains, eventually killing them.

Sara and Ellen were eighteen months old. Their parents had known the babies were conjoined before birth. The option of abortion had been proposed, but rejected by the parents, Lucy and Larry Raynes, for religious and emotional reasons. The children had been delivered by caesarian section at seven-and-a-half months. Sara had been born with a congenital heart defect, which further complicated matters.

***

Weather pushed into the OR and found three surgeons working with the baby-doll — a life-sized, actual-weight dense-foam model of the Raynes twins. They had it on the table, and were rolling it against the foam.

"So... no change," Gabriel Maret said.

Maret was a short man, with a head slightly too large for his body, the size emphasized by a wild thatch of curly black hair, shot through with silver. He was dark-eyed, olive-complected, with a chipped front tooth. He favored cashmere in his carefully-tailored, French-cut winter suits, and the women around the hospital paid close attention to him: He was French, and the observing women agreed that his accent, in English, was perfect.

Maret had come to dinner with Lucas and Weather every week or so over the winter, enjoying the kids and the family life. He was divorced, with four children of his own. He and his wife still shared an apartment in Paris, and, sometimes, he said, a bed. "It's insane," he said. "She is more stubborn than one of your mules."

"More stubborn than you?" Weather had asked.

He considered the question: "Maybe not that stubborn," he said.

He and her husband, Lucas, who got along improbably well, once spent an hour talking about men's fashion, nearly driving Weather crazy with the inanity of it. She'd said, "Fifteen minutes on loafers? Loafers?"

"We were just getting started," Lucas said. She wasn't sure he was joking.

***

"So... no change," Maret said.

"Not as long as everything goes right," said John Dansk, a neurosurgeon. "If we run into trouble splicing the six vein, if we lose it, we may have to take out another piece and that means rolling Sara this way and Ellen will torque back to the right."

The six vein was a vein shared by the twins. They'd tie it off on Ellen's side, and attempt to splice it into the five vein on Sara's, the better to move blood out of Sara's brain. The vein numbers simply came from imaging charts prepared by the radiologists.

"So what are you suggesting?" Maret asked. He glanced at Weather: "You are gorgeous this morning."

"I know," she said, to make him laugh. As did the other women around him, she liked to make him laugh.

Dansk scowled at them and said, "I'm suggesting that we slice a few wedges out of the base of the mold, so that we can use them as shims if we have to brace one of the kids."

"Why not have a nurse hold her?" Maret asked.

"Because we might be talking a couple of hours, if worse comes to worse."

"You know how much that mold cost?" Maret asked.

"About one nine-thousandth of your annual salary," Dansk said.

Maret shrugged. "So, we cut a few wedges. Why not? If we need them, we have them, and if we don't, it won't matter."

"Should have thought of this before now," said Rick Hanson, an orthopedic surgeon who would make the bone cuts through the kids' shared skull. He seemed shaky; he'd invented a half-dozen little saws for this operation, and would be the focus of a lot of attention. Because of the way the children's skulls intersected, they formed a complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle — basically, an oval ring of bone — of which he'd be removing only a few pieces at a time. Normally the cutting would have been done by the neurosurgeon, with drills and flexible wire saws. Hanson, from Washington University in St. Louis, had developed his own set of electric saws matched to jigs — cutting templates — for complicated bone cuts. Maret had decided that Hanson's technique would be ideal, and would make it possible to prepare perfectly fitted composite plates to cover the holes in the babies' skulls.

"We're just nervous," Maret said now. "That's normal." Maret was the team leader, the one with all the experience. He'd done two other craniopagus separations, one in France, one in Miami. Of the four children involved, two had survived — one from each operation. When he talked about the work, he talked mostly about the children who'd died.

***

Another doc pushed into the room, followed by a second one. They had all kinds — anesthesiologists, radiologists, neurosurgeons, cardiologists, plastic and orthopedic surgeons, and a medical professor who specialized in anatomical structures of the skull, as it pertained to craniofacial reconstruction. They had twenty nurses and surgical assistants.

Weather said to Dansk, the neurosurgeon, "If you want to cut those wedges, you better get it done: they've got to start cleaning the place up."

Dansk said, "I'm on it," and, "I need a scalpel or something. Anybody got an X-Acto knife?"

***

Above the table, in an observation room behind a canted glass wall, people were beginning to filter into the stadium seating.

A nurse came into the OR — one of the sterile nurses — and said, "I wanted to see if we could make the move one more time."

She wanted to practice breaking the tables apart, so that when the final cut was made, and the twins were separated, they could be moved to separate operating areas for the fitting of the new composite skull shells.

"Why don't we visually check the linkage..." Maret began.

It was starting; Weather didn't think it, but she felt it, felt the excitement and the tension starting to build. She worked almost every day, cutting, sewing, cauterizing, diagnosing. This was different.

She thought, "Remember to pee."

***

The Raynes twins were a rare and complicated medical phenomenon. Craniopagus twins comprise only about one percent of conjoined twins. Because of the rarity of the condition, experience with separation surgery was limited. One of the twins, Sara, suffered from defects in the septum of the heart — the wall that divides the right side of the heart from the left side — and the defects were already causing congestion in the circulatory system.

The type of surgery usually favored for craniopagus separation might take place over several months. The most critical part of most operations was doing a staged separation of the brain's blood-drainage system. Each operation would isolate the drainage systems a bit more, and would allow the bodies to create new bypass channels.

In the Raynes' case, surgeons feared that a protracted series of operations would weaken and possibly kill Sara, which would also threaten the stronger Ellen, especially if Sara were to go into a rapid decline.

The additional factor in the Raynes' case was that the conjoined area was relatively small — the hole left behind in the babies' skulls after the separation would be no bigger than the diameter of an orange. That meant that a single operation was possible — even with some shared venous drainage, it was thought that one continuous operation would be the best chance for saving both twins.

The surgical team would do the separation, and once separated, the team would break in two, each working on an individual twin. The joint surgery was expected to last up to twenty hours.

The team was committed to saving both twins.

***

Weather did aesthetic, reconstructive and microsurgery. Her availability in Minnesota, and a paper she'd done on a thumb reconstruction, had caught Maret's eye when he began to consider the Raynes twins.

In Weather's case, a young boy had caught his thumb in a hydraulic log-splitter: the thumb had been pulped. After the wound healed, Weather had removed one of the boy's second toes, and used the toe to replace the thumb. Since a thumb represented a full fifty percent of the function of the hand, the reconstruction gave back the kid the use of his hand. As he used the new thumb, it would strengthen and grow, and eventually come to resemble a normal thumb, except for the extra knuckle.

As part of the eleven-hour operation, Weather had hooked up two nerves, two tiny arteries and two even smaller veins — veins the size of broom straws. The photomicrographs of the sutured veins had particularly attracted Maret's attention. The more veins that could be hooked up, the better off the twins would be — and Weather could do that work, even on the smallest vessels.

He'd also been attracted to her sheer stamina: eleven hours of microsurgery was a super-marathon. He sold her on the idea of joining the team, which also made her available to study the twins, to get to know the parents, and to place the skin expanders under their scalps.

***

Weather had turned away from Maret and the argument — "Remember to pee" — when they heard a commotion outside the operating room.

"What is that?" Maret asked. Dansk had just come back with a large scalpel, and he turned to look. A few seconds later, an anesthesiologist named Yamaguchi burst into the room. He looked, Weather thought, like someone who'd just come to the emergency room to see his child: panicked.

He said, urgently, to Maret, Weather, and the others, "It's off. The operation's off. We've got, we've got..."

Weather caught his sleeve and said, "Slow down, slow down."

"It's off," Yamaguchi said. "Some guys just raided the pharmacy and cleaned the place out. Everything is shut down. Everything."

Maret's face clicked through a series of expressions, from, "Is this a joke?" to astonishment: "What?"

"Some guys with guns," Yamaguchi said. He was flapping his arms, like a loon trying to take off. "Robbers. They robbed the pharmacy. The police are here. There's nothing left, they took everything... That old guy who works there, the one who wears the surgical hat..."

"Don," said Weather.

"Yeah, Don — he's hurt pretty bad. They're taking him into the ER."

"You must be shitting me," Maret said with a non-Gallic precision, looking around at his astonished crew.

***

Alain Barakat stood at the back of the emergency operating room, mask dangling around his neck, watching the work: the surgeon was cursing at the nurse, who was fumbling the gear, and they were all watching the blood pressure dropping and the surgeon was saying, "Get it in there, get it in there, get some pressure on it," and the nurse stood on a chair and lifted the bottle of saline and somebody else said, "Two minutes for the blood." The surgeon said, "I don't think we have the time, I don't think we've got it..." and the anesthesiologist said, "We're losing him man," and the doc said, "Fuck this, I'm going in," and he cut and cut again and again, going in through the beginning of a brutal black bruise on the old man's belly, and the anesthesiologist said, "Hurry it up, man," and the surgeon said, "Ah, Jesus, I've got no blood, I got no blood here," and he hurled the scalpel into a corner and it clanged around and he said, "It must've been his goddamn kidneys, let's see if we can roll him..." and the nurses moved up to help with the roll and the anesthesiologist said, "Man, he's arresting..."

Barakat, standing in the corner, said, "Shit shit shit shit shit shit..."

One minute later, the old man was gone. No point in trying to restart the heart — there was no blood going through it. They all stood around, shell-shocked, and then the surgeon said, "Let's clean up."

One of the nurses said, "We had no time. He was going too quick."

They all looked at the body on the table, worn Adidas sneakers pointed out at 45-degrees, chest flat and still, the bloody gash on the gut. The anesthesiologist turned to get something and saw Barakat, a tall man, standing in the corner, hands pressed to the side of his head, and the anesthesiologist said, "Wasn't you, man. You did good. Everybody did good. He was gone when we got him."

And Barakat thought: Now everybody will be here. Now the police will tear the place apart.

Because he really didn't care about the old man.

***

The separation team was standing around, repeating what Yamaguchi had said, when Thomas Carlson, the hospital administrator, came hurrying down the hall. Carlson was wearing his white physician's coat, which he often did on public occasions, to remind people that he had an MD in addition to the MBA; but for all that, not a bad guy, Weather thought.

He went straight to Maret: "Gabe, you've heard."

"I've heard there was a robbery."

"Unfortunately. The problem is, we've also got a man down. He's hurt pretty badly, and we won't have access to your drugs — any drugs, except in an absolute emergency, and then we'll be crawling around on the floor trying to find them. The place is completely wrecked. They threw everything out of the lockers, what they didn't take..."

"So: everybody is here," Maret said.

"But you're going to have to wait," Carlson said. "God, I'm sorry, man. But this is an incredible mess. As long as the kids are stable..."

Maret nodded: "Well. I guess we can wait."

***

Weather and Maret went together to tell the Rayneses. The parents were waiting in what the team called the "separation lounge," once a meditation room, which had been converted for family use and for team conferences.

The Rayneses were sitting on a couch, looking out over a table full of magazines: neither one was reading. They were in their early thirties, and except for their sex, as alike as new marbles: honey-blond, tall, slender, from the small town of New Ulm in southern Minnesota. Larry worked in a heating and air-conditioning business owned by his father; Lucy worked at the Post Office. Neither had lived outside of New Ulm. Both of them spoke fluent German, and went to Germany every summer, to hike. They had no other children.

They'd conferred with Maret on the separation process, but had worked more with Weather than any other physician, because of Weather's involvement in the preliminary surgery.

They were astonished by the news. "What does it mean? It's off? For how long?" Lucy Raynes blurted. "I mean...?"

"We'll go tomorrow," Weather said, patting her arm. "Same time. This whole thing is so bizarre... there are police everywhere, I guess. The girls are fine, no change for them."

"I can't believe it," Larry Raynes said. "After we got this far..."

His wife put an arm around his waist and squeezed him: "We'll be okay. It'll be all right."

***

Of the two Rayneses, Lucy was the most demanding of information, had studied the details of the separation, used terms like Ôsuperior sagittal sinus' and Ôcalvaria,' read medical papers on other separations. She'd spoken to the media on a number of occasions, both televised and print. Larry, on the other hand, mostly talked about timing, and the children's development; and often, to Weather, seemed to simply want to get it over with it. He wasn't stupid, but swept along in a current too strong for him, part medical science, part circus. He wanted to go home.

Maret had warned everybody about the circus. "Whenever this is done, we get the media, because of the drama and the sympathetic aspects. You have to be prepared. In Miami, we had reporters following the surgeons home, knocking on doors, waiting in the streets."

Now he said to the Rayneses, "I'll talk to the media in ten minutes or so. I'd like you to be with me."

Larry Raynes said to his wife, "You go. I'll go sit with the kids."

Weather left them talking, and went back to the locker room to change back into her street clothes.

***

By the time she got back, most of the team had drifted away. The OR nurses were shutting the place down. Weather stopped to talk with her surgical assistant, when one of the team's cardiologists, Alan Seitz, who'd been called to the ER, came ambling down the hall, looking distracted.

"What?" Weather asked.

"That Don guy died," Seitz said. "One of the robbers kicked him to death. Broke up his kidneys. He was soaked in Coumadin. He bled out before we could get anything going. We were dumping fluid into him fast as we could, nothing to do."

Weather stepped up and gave him a squeeze. Seitz was an old friend. "Nothing to do. You only do what you can."

"Yeah." Seitz looked around and said, "I mean, Jesus Christ: kicked to death. In the hospital."

The woman had haunted eyes. Pale, drooping at the outer edges, they stared into theunseen camera with an odd combination of defiance and defeat.

She didn't move. Neither did the camera. The wall behindher was brown-blue, the color of an old bruise. The couch on which she perchedwas gray. She was a pretty woman, made less so by fear. Her shoulders werebunched high, her neck tendons taut as bridge cables. A black, sleeveless dressshowcased soft white arms. Too-blond hair fell limply to her shoulders.

Moments passed. Nothing happened. In another situation Imight've cracked wise about it being one of Andy Warhol's old anti-films:interminable, static studies of the Empire State Building, a man sleeping.

When a homicide lieutenant brings you something to watch,you keep your mouth shut.

Milo stood behind me. His black hair and raincoat wererumpled. The coat was cheap, green, wrinkled past the point of salvation. Itgave off a not unpleasant vegetative odor. He'd placed a massive breakfastburrito in a take-out box on my desk, hadn't touched it.

When he drops in, he usually beelines for the fridge,empties a quart of something, raids the shelves for bad carbs. This morning,he'd marched to my office, loaded the DVD with a flourish.

"For your consideration."

Blanche, my little French bulldog, sat next to me,uncharacteristically serious. She'd tried her usual smile, had figured outsomething was different when Milo didn't stoop to pet her.

I rubbed her knobby head. She looked up at me, returnedher attention to the monitor.

The woman's lips moved.

Milo said, "Here we go."

More silence on the screen.

"So I lied."

The woman said, "My name is Elise Freeman. I'm ateacher and tutor at Windsor Preparatory Academy in Brentwood." Her voicewas throaty. She knotted her fingers, flopped them onto her lap. "I'mmaking this recording to document sustained abuse I have received at the handsof faculty members at Windsor Preparatory Academy in Brentwood. Which I willhereon refer to as Prep."

Deep breath. "For the past two years at Prep, I havebeen subjected to repeated, unwarranted, aggressive, and distressing sexualharassment from three individuals. Their names are." Her right hand rose.A finger pointed upward. "Enrico Hauer. H-A-U-E-R." Two fingers:"James Winterthorn." More slow, enunciated spelling, then a trio ofdigits. "Pat Skaggs."

The hand dropped. "For the past two years EnricoHauer, James Winterthorn, and Pat Skaggs have made my life a living hell byengaging in brutal, unsolicited, and threatening sexual behavior. I am makingthis recording so that in the event something violent happens to me, theauthorities will know where to look. I do not know what else to do as I feeltrapped and frightened and have nowhere to turn. I hope this recording neverneeds to come to light but if it does, I am glad that I made it."

Her eyes clenched shut. Her lips moved soundlessly andshe slumped. Suddenly her jaw jutted and she was sitting up straight. Moredefiance than defeat.

Staring hard at the camera. "Thanks forlistening."

The screen went blue. Milo said, "Talk about a D-movieplot device."

I said, "But you're here. She was murdered?"

"Maybe. She's on ice."

"Backlog at the coroner?"

His laughter was harsh. "Nope, this morning I'm Mr.Literal. Ice of the dry sort. Frozen CO2. She was found...

Chapter One

Thursday night, Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren was out on a date. It wasn't the worst date she'd ever been on. It wasn't the best date she'd ever been on. It was, however, the only date she'd been on in quite some time, so unless Chip the accountant turned out to be a total loser, she planned on taking him home for a rigorous session of balance- theledger. So far, they'd made it through half a loaf of bread soaked in olive oil, and half a cow seared medium rare. Chip had managed not to talk about the prime rib bleeding all over her plate or her need to sop up juices with yet another slice of bread. Most men were taken aback by her appetite. They needed to joke uncomfortably about her ability to tuck away plate after plate of food. Then they felt the need to joke even more uncomfortably that, of course, none of it showed on her girlish figure.

Yeah, yeah, she had the appetite of a sumo wrestler but the build of a cover girl. She was nearly forty, for God's sake, and well aware by now of her freakish metabolism. She certainly didn't need any soft- middled desk jockey pointing it out. Food was her passion. Mostly because her job with Boston PD's homicide unit didn't leave much time for sex. She polished off the prime rib, went to work on the twice- baked potato. Chip was a forensic accountant. They'd been set up by the wife of a friend of a guy in the unit. Yep, it made that much sense to D.D. as well. But here she was, sitting in a coveted booth at the Hilltop Steakhouse, and really, Chip was all right. Little doughy in the middle, little bald on top, but funny. D.D. liked funny. When he smiled, the corners of his deep brown eyes crinkled and that was good enough for her.

She was having meat and potatoes for dinner and, if all went as planned, Chip for dessert.

So, of course, her pager went off.

She scowled, shoved it to the back of her waistband, as if that would make a difference.

"What's that?" Chip asked, catching the chime.

"Birth control," she muttered.

Chip blushed to the roots of his receding brown hair, then in the next minute grinned with such self- deprecating power she nearly went weak in the knees.

Better be good, D.D. thought. Better be a fucking massacre, or I'll be damned if I'm giving up my night.

But then she read the call and was sorry she'd ever thought such a thing.

Chip the funny accountant got a kiss on the cheek.

Then Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren hit the road.

D.D. had been a Boston PD detective for nearly twelve years now.

She'd started out investigating traffic fatalities and drug- related homicides before graduating to such major media events as the discovery of six mummified corpses in an underground chamber; then, more recently, the disappearance of a beautiful young schoolteacher from South Boston. Her bosses liked to put her in front of the camera.
Nothing like a pretty blonde detective to mix things up.

She didn't mind. D.D. thrived on stress. Enjoyed a good pressurecooker case even more than an all-you-can-eat buffet. Only drawback was the toll on her personal life. As a sergeant in the homicide unit, D.D. was the leader of a three- person squad. It wasn't uncommon for them to spend all day tracking down leads, interviewing informants, or revisiting crime scenes. Then they spent most of the night writing up the resulting interviews, affidavits, and/or warrant requests. Each squad also had to take turns being "on...

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...