CURTIS PELTIER'S CONFESSION not only explained a great deal about Jack Mercier's actions; it also made things a whole lot more difficult for me. The blood link between Mercier and Grace was bad news.

There was more bad news waiting for me when I got back to the Scarborough house. I couldn't tell why, exactly, but something seemed wrong with the place as soon as I pulled up in front of the door. At first I put it down to that feeling of dislocation you get when you return home after being away, however briefly, but it was more than that. It was as if someone had taken the house and shifted it slightly on its axis, so that the moonlight no longer shone on it in quite the way that it once had and the shadows fell differently along the ground. The smell of gas from the mailbox served as a reminder of what had taken place that morning. Spiders in the mailbox was bad enough, but I wasn't sure that I could handle recluses in my home.

I approached the door, opened the screen, and tested the lock, but it remained secure. I inserted the key and opened the front door, expecting to see some scene of desolation before me, but there was nothing at first. The house was quiet and the doors stood slightly ajar to allow the flow of air through the rooms. In the hallway, an old coat stand that I used for keeping mail and as a place to lay my keys had been pulled slightly away from the wall. I could see the clear marks on the floor where the legs had once stood, now slightly tarnished with speckles of dust. In the living room, I had the same sensation, as if someone had gone through my house and moved everything marginally out of kilter. The couch and chairs had been lifted, then imperfectly replaced. In the kitchen, crockery had been shifted, foodstuffs in the fridge removed and then returned in a haphazard manner. Even the sheets on my bed were tossed, the top sheet pulled loose at the end. I went to my desk at the back of the living room, and thought I knew then what they had come for.

The copy of the file on the case had been taken from me.

I spent the next hour doing something that was unexpected but, upon reflection, natural. I went through the house, cleaning it, vacuuming and brushing, dusting and polishing. I took the sheets from my bed and threw them in a laundry bag, along with the small selection of clothes in my closet. Then I washed all of the cups and plates, the knives and forks, in boiling water and left them on the draining board. By the time I had finished, sweat was running down my face, my hands and face were filthy, and my clothes were stuck to my back, but I felt that I had reclaimed my space a little from those who had intruded upon it. Had I not done so, everything in my house would have felt tarnished by their presence.

When I had showered and changed into the last of the clothes in my overnight bag, I tried calling Curtis Peltier's house, but there was no reply. I wanted to warn him that whoever had searched my house might try to do the same to his, but his machine clicked on. I left a message, asking him to call me.

I drove down to Oak Hill and dropped off my laundry, then turned back and headed for the Kraft Mini-Storage on Gorham Road, close by my house. I used my key to open one of the storage bays I kept there, still filled with some old possessions of my grandfather's, along with items I had kept from the Brooklyn home I had shared briefly with Susan and Jennifer. In the bright light, I sat on the edge of a packing crate and went through the police reports one by one, concentrating in particular on those prepared by Lutz as the detective responsible for the investigation into Grace Peltier's death. His involvement in the case didn't fill me with a great sense of reassurance, but I could still find nothing in his reports to justify my suspicions of him. He had done a perfectly adequate job, even to the extent of interviewing the elusive Carter Paragon.

When I returned to the house, I went to my bedroom and removed an eighteen-inch section of the baseboard from behind the chest of drawers. I took a bundle wrapped in oilcloth from out of the gap I had made. Two other similar items, one larger, one smaller, also lay inside, but I didn't touch them. I took the bundle into the kitchen, lay a newspaper on the table, and unwrapped the gun.

It was a Third Generation Smith amp; Wesson Model 1076, a 10-millimeter model developed especially for the FBI. I had owned a similar model for a year, until I lost it in a lake in northern Maine while running for my life. In some ways I had been glad to see the last of that gun. I had done terrible things with it, and it had come to represent all that was worst in me.

Yet two weeks after I lost it, a new 1076 had arrived for me, sent by Louis and delivered by one of his emissaries, a huge black man in a Klan Killer T-shirt. Louis called me an hour or two after its delivery.

“I don't want it, Louis,” I told him. “I'm sick of guns, and especially this gun.”

“You feel that way now, but this your gun,” he said. “You used it because you had to use it, and you was good with it. Maybe a day will come when you be glad you have it.”

Instead of throwing it away, I had wrapped it in oilcloth. I did the same thing with my father's.38 Colt Detective Special and a 9-millimeter Heckler amp; Koch semiautomatic, for which I didn't have a permit. Then I had cut away part of the baseboard and placed the guns safely in the space I had made for them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Now I released the magazine, using the catch at the left side of the butt. I pulled back the slide in case there was a round in the chamber, still sticking to the old safety routine. I inspected the chamber through the ejection port, then released the slide and pulled the trigger. For the next thirty minutes I cleaned and oiled the gun, then loaded it and sighted at the door. Even fully loaded, it weighed a little over two and a half pounds. I tested its lines with my thumb, ran my finger over the serial number on the left-hand side of the frame, and felt inexplicably afraid.

There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs, and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you're lost forever.

Looking at the gun, feeling the power of it, its base, unarguable lethality, I saw myself standing at the verge of those dark waters and felt the burning on my skin, heard the cool lapping of the waves calling me to fall into their depths. I did not look down, for fear of what I might see reflected on the surface.

In an effort to pull myself away, I rose and checked my messages. There was one from Rachel phoning to say “Hi.” I returned her call immediately, and she picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, you,” she said. “I got those tickets for the Wang.”

“Great.”

“That doesn't sound very enthusiastic.”

“I haven't had such a good day. I got assaulted by a policeman for mocking his belief system, and someone threatened to take my head off with a nine iron.”

“And you're usually so naturally charming,” she said, before her voice grew serious. “You want to tell me what's going on?”

I told her a little of what I knew, or suspected, so far. I didn't mention Marcy Becker, Ali Wynn, or the two policemen. I didn't like talking about it over the phone, or in a house so recently violated by strangers.