“Calm, Gibbs. Calm. Did you call nine-one-one?”

“Yes.”

“What did you see?”

“In the parking lot-he-he got out of his car. I saw him.”

“Sterling’s outside? Is he alone?” I said, repeating some of what Gibbs told me so that Carmen would know what I was hearing. Carmen was standing three feet away. I watched her eyebrows jump up at the news about Sterling. “You’re not sure. The lights in your room, are they on or off?”

“On.”

“Turn them off. The TV, too. Shhhh. Quiet now.”

“I’m scared.”

“The door’s locked, right? The chain, too?”

“Yes. Help me, Sam. Help me.”

“Do you hear sirens yet?”

“No, no!”

Carmen’s eyes told me she was puzzled, the kind of puzzled usually reserved for those times when you think you just heard your cat ask you for a beer.

“Shhhh,” I told Gibbs. “Quiet voice. What floor are you on?”

“Um, uh. Third. Third story.”

“Third story. Get on the floor, okay? On the far side of the bed, away from the door. Can you do that?” As soon as I told her to get on the floor, I remembered that she was on her cell phone and wished I’d sent her into the bathroom.

“Yes, yes. Help me.”

“Sirens yet?”

“Uh, no. No.”

The commercial section of Vail is a few blocks wide, a few dozen blocks long. That’s it. A cruiser in a hurry could get from one end to the other in seconds. Where were they?

“You’re on the floor, right, Gibbs?”

“Yes.”

“You’re doing good.”

“Come help me.”

“I’m in Indiana, Gibbs.”

“I know. Come help me.”

“Someone will be there any second.”

I heard pounding. Gibbs said, “He’s here, Sam. He’s here. Oh no, oh no.”

“Someone’s there?” I mimed the act of knocking so that Carmen would know what Gibbs was saying. “It might be the police, Gibbs. Stay still. If you know it’s him, run for the bathroom.”

More pounding.

This time Carmen mimed the act of knocking. Then, inexplicably, she pointed down toward the floor.

For a long moment I was confused by Carmen’s charade and then, suddenly, I got it.

Holy shit.

I lowered the phone from my ear, and my pulse rocketed as though my heart had a turbocharger on it.

I moved the phone back to my face and said, “Gibbs? Stay quiet until you’re sure who it is. Don’t open the door. Shhhh.”

With the pad of my thumb firmly over the phone’s microphone, I leaned over to Holly’s oldest sister and whispered, “Get the kids and get out of the house. Now! Front door, everybody. Got a cell?”

She nodded.

“Call nine-one-one when you get outside. Tell them cops are in the basement and guns are drawn.”

I looked at Artie.

His mouth was open. His brain wasn’t.

He was staring at the big gun that was filling my hand.

“Artie?” I said, careful not to raise the hand with the pistol. “Put the knife down on the counter and follow your sister-in-law. Go on, get out of here.”

Artie followed my directions robotically. I raised the phone back to my face.

“Gibbs, are you there?” I asked.

Nothing.

Shit.

Maybe it was something she saw in my eyes, maybe it was something else entirely, but Lauren didn’t even flinch when I told her I had to go back out on Thanksgiving night to see someone. She caressed my neck for a moment, kissed me in the lingering manner that more often than not constitutes an invitation, pulled away only an inch, and said, “Be careful. Please.” Both dogs stayed by her side as I headed out the door.

Since my errand required that I pick something up at my office, I parked the car there before I strolled the short distance over to Pearl Street. I didn’t take my usual pedestrian route, which would have led a block or more northeast in the direction of the Mall, but instead ambled westward toward the sleepy part of Pearl, the part that’s on the side of Ninth nearest the mountains. The wind was gusting from Wyoming that evening, the collar on my coat was up, and my hands were stuffed in my pockets to thwart the chill.

I walked slowly, trying to find a reason not to do what I was about to do. Whatever that reason might have been, though, I wasn’t able to walk slowly enough to find it.

My destination was a cluster of condos on the north side of Pearl that had been designed to mimic a grouping of Victorian row houses. Wedding cake trim, different on every home, was painted in colors that had aged to a palate that resembled the range of hues of an Easter basket. Lights from the waning moments of holiday celebrations brightened windows in about half of the units that I could see from the sidewalk on the far side of Pearl. From the way the numbers were running, I figured I would find the town house I was looking for at the west end of the front row.

The lights in that unit were on.

Each week, when Lauren injects a long needle full of interferon into her thigh to protect herself from a double-cross from her own immune system, she uncaps the needle and plunges it straight into her thigh. “Every second of delay makes it harder to do,” she says. “No delay.”

So I didn’t delay at the door. I didn’t want this to be any harder to do than it felt like it was already. I took my left hand out of my pocket, extended a finger, and touched the doorbell.

He came to the door quickly, within seconds. I could see the shadow of his eyeball as it darkened the peephole. He didn’t open the door quickly, though. He stood behind the closed door and watched me, and watched me, and watched me through the tiny lens embedded in the door.

I checked my wristwatch after a while and began timing our little standoff. In other circumstances, with another person, I might have chosen a strategy other than dawdling, perhaps peppering the doorbell with repeated pushes, or maybe calling out, “Come on, open the door.”

But not then. Not with him. With him I stood back a step and allowed him to see me clearly. Every couple of minutes I pulled my hands from my pockets and turned completely around so that he could be confident that I wasn’t hiding anything behind my back.

Six minutes and ten seconds passed before he finally relented to some internal pressure I probably couldn’t fathom and opened the door. When the time came, he didn’t open it just a crack. He flung it wide open as though that had been his plan all along.

His physical appearance was a bit of a shock to me. He was wearing gray cotton sweats on top of a nylon running suit, had dark glasses over his eyes, and had a bandanna tied over his mouth and chin like he was Jesse James preparing to knock over a bank.

“Hello, Craig,” I said. “I think I have something of yours. Can we talk?”

“You’re the one,” he said. “You’re the one.”

Craig didn’t invite me inside, which didn’t surprise me. I sat on the steps leading up to his town house while we talked. The whole time he stood a few feet from me with his back to the front door. He was more wary of me than he was during our office visits, but I’d anticipated that he might be. The therapy session that Sharon Lewis had busted in on and aborted late the previous afternoon was certain to take a considerable toll on someone like Craig, especially in the trust-your-therapist department.

Within minutes of sitting down on Craig’s porch I reached a clinical decision about what I needed to do, but I didn’t decide exactly how to go about doing it until another fifteen minutes passed. When I explained my thinking to him, Craig was so agreeable with my plan that I guessed he’d arrived at some version of it himself long before I’d arrived at his door. I’d hoped he would be cooperative, but I was prepared to do it the hard way if I had to.