“That’s…unexpected,” Ryan said. “I’m grateful.”

“They’re good people, Ryan. Good, decent people. Which is why you have to swear to me you will not write or speak publicly about this poor girl, using either the photo or her name. As good as these people are, I would nevertheless not be surprised-and wouldn’t blame them-if they sued you for violation of their privacy.”

“The photo, her name-they’re just for me,” Ryan assured him.

“I am e-mailing everything to you as we speak.”

“And, Doctor…thank you for taking my request to heart and acting on it so quickly.”

Instead of going down to his study on the second floor, Ryan used the laptop and the compact printer in the master suite to open and print out the surgeon’s e-mail.

Except for a slightly different hair style, the heart donor proved to be a dead ringer for the woman with the switchblade.

Her name had been Lily.

Her raised chin, her set mouth, her forthright gaze suggested more than mere confidence, perhaps defiance.

Sitting at the desk in the retreat, studying the photo of Lily, Ryan knew this must be the twin of the woman who assaulted him.

I am the voice of the lilies.

He put the photo of Lily X beside the picture of Teresa Reach. The black-haired Eurasian beauty, the golden-haired beauty, the first vibrantly alive in the photo but dead now, the second dead even when photographed, both victims of automobile accidents, both having been diagnosed as brain-dead, one assisted into death by Spencer Barghest, the other by Dr. Hobb when he harvested her heart, each with a twin who survived her.

The longer Ryan considered the two photos, the more uneasy he grew, because it seemed that before him lay a terrible truth that continued to elude him and that in time, when he least expected, would hit him with the power of a tsunami.

Not long after meeting Samantha, Ryan had read a great deal about identical twins. In particular, he recalled that the survivor, separated from an identical by tragedy, often felt unjustified guilt as well as grief.

He wondered if Lily’s twin had been driving the car in which she had suffered the catastrophic head trauma. Her guilt would then be to a degree justified, and her grief intensified.

The longer he compared the photos, the more clearly he recalled how certain he had been, sixteen months ago, that the image of Teresa held the answer to the mysteries then plaguing him. That intuition began to prickle his spine again, the apprehension that she was the key not only to what had happened to him sixteen months earlier but also to everything that was happening now.

Ryan had exhaustively analyzed Teresa’s photo and had found no detail that could be called a clue. Laboriously repeating that analysis was not likely to lead him to any eureka moment.

But perhaps the photo itself did not contain the revelation. Maybe the importance of the photo was who had taken it or where he had found it, or how she had been assisted out of life, by what means and under exactly what circumstances-details that might be contained in Barghest’s written accounts, if they could be found, of the suicides that he had made possible.

At 9:45, Ryan placed a call to Wilson Mott, who as always was pleased to hear from him.

“I’ll be flying to Las Vegas this afternoon,” Ryan said. “The people who worked with me there last year-George Zane and Cathy Sienna-are they available now?”

“Yes, they’re available. But neither of them is based in Nevada. They work out of our Los Angeles office.”

“They can fly with me,” Ryan said.

“I think it’s more appropriate if they don’t use your Learjet. We have our own transport. Besides, if they have to make appointments and preparations for you, they need to be there at least a few hours in advance.”

“Yes, more appropriate. All right. If you recall, the last time I had two appointments.”

“I’ve got the file in front of me,” said Mott. “You had business with two individuals at separate locations.”

“It’s the gentleman that I’ll need to repeat,” Ryan said. “And rather urgently.”

“We’ll do our best,” Mott said.

Ryan hung up.

He put the photos of the two dead women in the manila envelope.

Unbidden, an image came into his mind’s eye: the hospital room in which he had stayed the night before the transplant, the floor and walls and furniture polished not by anyone’s hand but by the effect of the sedative he had been given, even the shadows glossy, Wally Dunnaman at the window, the chrome-yellow night of the city beyond, and the air shivering with the crash of bells.

Standing in the warm master retreat, beside the elegant amboina desk, Ryan Perry began to tremble, then to shake, and dread overtook him. He asked himself what he dreaded, and he did not know, although he suspected that soon he would be provided with the answer.

A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young. -Edgar Allan Poe, “Lenore”

Late Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, the low sky looked as gray as the face of a degenerate gambler standing up from a baccarat table after being busted to bankruptcy.

The high Mojave lay in the grip of a chill. Down from the bald faces of the mountains, down from the abandoned iron and lead mines long forgotten, off the broken slopes of pyrite canyons and feldspar ravines, across desiccated desert flats, through the bright barrens of the casinos came a damp wind, not yet strong enough to whip clouds of dust off sere and empty lots or to shake nesting rats out of the lush crowns of phoenix palms, but sure to swell stronger as the day waned.

At the private-plane terminal, George Zane waited with a twelve-cylinder black Mercedes sedan. The man looked even more powerful than the muscle car.

As he opened the rear door for Ryan, he said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Perry.”

“Good to see you again, George. Got some bad weather coming.”

“Whether we need it or not,” the big man replied.

In the car, as they turned onto the airport-exit road, Ryan said, “Do you know if Barghest is going to be out tonight? Will we be able to get into his place?”

“We’re headed straight there,” Zane said. “Turns out he drove to Reno for some kook conference, won’t be back until Wednesday.”

“Kook conference?”

“That’s what I call it. Bunch of our best and brightest getting together to talk about the benefits of reducing human population to five hundred million.”

“What’s that-six billion people gone? How do they figure to make that happen?”

“Oh,” Zane said, “from what I read, they’ve got a slew of ways figured out to get the job done. Their problem is selling the program to the rest of us.”

At an intersection, a few sheets of a newspaper were airborne on the breeze, billowing to full spreads, gliding slowly in a wide spiral, their flight as ponderous as that of albatrosses circling in search of doomed ships.

“Shouldn’t we wait a couple hours, until after dark?” Ryan wondered.

“Always looks less suspicious to go in during daylight if you can,” Zane said. “Straight on and bold is better.”

The neighborhood appeared even more conventional in daylight than it had been at night: simple ranch houses, gliders and swings on the porches, well-kept yards, basketball hoops above garage doors, an American flag here and there.

Dr. Death’s house looked as ordinary as any residence on the street-which made Ryan wonder what might be in some of the other houses.

As Zane swung the Mercedes into the driveway, the garage door rose. He drove inside, where earlier he had dropped off Cathy Sienna and where now she stood at the connecting door to the house.