If Ryan died in this place, Wilson Mott’s agents might leave his body behind rather than risk explaining why he and they had been here. Found by Dr. Death, he might wind up as one more exhibit in the gallery of cadavers. Stripped naked, preserved, and glazed after being bent into a humiliating posture, he would ornament a currently vacant corner of the house, thereafter subject to Spencer Barghest’s attention and unholy touch.

Whether by an act of sheer will or by the grace of Fate, Ryan survived the episode and, after a couple of minutes, felt his heart reestablish rhythmic beats and measured force.

The dry, cool air in Barghest’s house was odorless but had a faint metallic taste. Counseling himself not to contemplate the source of that flavor, Ryan stopped breathing through his mouth.

He sat up straight in the office chair and rolled it to the desk once more. After a hesitation, he opened the first ring binder to the photograph that he’d been studying when nausea had overcome him.

Still operating on a hunch, he paged with grim determination through the first book of photos. His patience was at last rewarded when he saw the third face in the second binder.

Samantha. Her eyes were taped open, her full lips slightly parted, as if she had let out a sigh of satisfaction as the shutter of the camera caught her.

This was not Samantha, of course, but Teresa, her identical twin. Prior to death, she lingered in a vegetative state, abed for months following the auto accident, and the experience diminished her beauty. So pale, Teresa nevertheless remained lovely, and in fact her suffering gave her the ethereal radiance, the fragile otherworldly beauty of a martyr ascending to sainthood in an old-master painting.

Evidently, Barghest had known Rebecca six years ago. He must have been present at Teresa’s death.

By her own account, Samantha also had been at her sister’s bedside during those final hours. Yet she never mentioned Barghest.

She rarely spoke of her lost twin. But that was understandable and in no way suspicious. Surely the loss still hurt.

She had revealed the length of Teresa’s ordeal only a few nights earlier, under the strawberry trees. Previously she had allowed Ryan to think that her sister died either in the accident or shortly thereafter.

Again, Sam’s reticence was proof of nothing more than the pain that Teresa’s death still caused her.

In the photo, the dead woman’s head rested on a pillow. With care that suggested tenderness, her golden hair had been brushed and arranged flatteringly around her face.

In contrast to the hair, the tape holding open the sightless eyes was an affront, even a violation.

As loud and irregular as Ryan’s heart had been recently, so now it was to a similar degree quiet and steady, and the house was also quiet, and the night beyond the house, as if every soul in Las Vegas in the same instant fell into a deep sleep or turned to dust, as if every wheel stopped rotating and every noisy machine lost power, as if nocturnal birds could not use their wings or find their songs, as if all crawling things were seized by paralysis between creep and slither, and an absolute stillness befell the air, allowing no breeze or draft or eddy. Time froze in tickless clocks.

Whether the hush was real or imagined, so extraordinary was the moment that Ryan had the urge to shout and shatter the silence before the world permanently petrified.

He did not cry out, however, because he sensed meaning in this unmitigated muffle, a truth insisting on discovery.

The silence seemed to well from the photo in front of Ryan, to pool up from it and flood the world, as though dead Teresa’s face had the power to still Creation and to compel Ryan’s attention. His subconscious commanded: Observe, see, discover. In this image was something of terrible importance to him, a shocking revelation that he had thus far overlooked and that might save him.

He studied her dead stare, wondering if the twists of light and shadow reflected on her eyes would reveal the room in which she had died and the people in attendance at her passing, or something else that would explain his current, mortal circumstances.

Those reflections were too small. No amount of squinting could force them to resolve into intelligible images.

His gaze traveled down her lovely cheeks, along the exquisite slopes and curves of her nose, to her generous and perfectly formed mouth.

Her parted lips issued no breath, only silence, but he half expected to hear, with his mind’s ear, a few words that would explain his hypertrophic heart and reveal his future.

At the periphery of Ryan’s vision, movement startled him.

He looked up, expecting that one of the glazed cadavers had pulled free of its armature and had come for him.

The nameless brunette stepped into the study from the hallway, and her voice broke the spell of silence. “I don’t get creeped-out easily, but this place is getting to me.”

“Me too,” he said.

He slipped Teresa’s photo out of the plastic sleeve, set it aside, and closed the ring binder.

“He’ll miss it,” the brunette warned.

“Maybe he will. I don’t care. Let him wonder.”

Ryan returned both ring binders to the bookshelf where he had found them.

In the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms folded across her breasts, she said, “We have a tail on them. They finished dinner. Now they’re back at her apartment.”

She must have been between thirty and thirty-five, but she had the air of someone older. She radiated a self-confidence that seemed to be wisdom more than pride.

“Would you let him?” Ryan wondered.

“Let him what?”

“Touch you.”

Her eyes were not gravestone granite, after all, but castle ramparts, and only a fool would try to storm her.

She said, “I’d shoot off his pecker.”

“I believe you would.”

“It’d be a service to humanity.”

Ryan wondered, “Why does Rebecca let him?”

“Something’s wrong with her.”

“What?”

“And not just her. Half the world is in love with death.”

“Not me.”

As if in quiet accusation, the brunette glanced at the photo of Teresa on the desk.

Ryan said, “That’s just evidence.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Earlier, he had searched the desk. He returned to the drawer that contained stationery and selected a nine-by-twelve envelope, into which he slipped the photograph.

“I’m done here,” he said.

They walked the house together, turning off lights, pretending not to listen for the footfalls of corpses in their wake.

In the foyer, at the security-system panel, she said, “The alarm was engaged when I got here. I have to reset it.”

As she keyed in a code that she had somehow learned, Ryan asked, “How did you disarm it without setting it off?”

“A few small tools and years of practice.”

The tools were evidently sufficiently compact to fit in her purse, for she carried no other bag.

Outside, she said, “Stay with me,” and after passing under the weeping boughs of the melaleucas, she headed south on the public sidewalk. “I’m parked a block and a half away.”

He knew that she didn’t need him at her side for protection any more than did the hulking George Zane.

In the absence of streetlamps and in the weakness of the moon, they cast no shadows.

Here, miles from the flash of the casinos, the sky offered a desolation of stars.

Like all Mojave settlements, regardless of size and history, this one seemed to have a tenuous existence. An ancient ocean had withdrawn millennia ago, leaving a vast sea of sand, but the desert was no more eternal than the waters before it, and the city markedly more ephemeral than the desert.

“Whatever’s wrong in your life,” she said, “it’s none of my business.”