SHE ARRIVED IN TUCSON AFTER TEN P.M., AND when she stepped out of the airport terminal, was amazed by both the dryness and warmth of the air. It was only early June, yet the temperature was still in the eighties this late in the evening. Still, the clean, clear air of the high desert felt good in her lungs.

“Kimberly Diamond” rented a car, then a motel room close to the airport, where she spent a fitful night. At nine a.m., she called the Tucson office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and asked to speak to Special Agent Helms.

“Helms,” he said a moment later.

“Agent Helms, my name is Kimberly Diamond. I’m an attorney, and I’m representing Sean Kelly in his termination hearing. I’d like to meet with you for a few minutes today, if you can spare the time.”

There was a long pause. “I don’t know that I can tell you anything that would help Sean. Everything’s in the record.”

“Yes, it is, Agent Helms. But I understand Agent Kelly has considered you one of his closest friends in Tucson.”

Another pause. “Yes, we’re pretty close.”

“I’m not interested in facts and figures that are in the record. I’m interested in a more personal view of Sean Kelly.”

“I really don’t know that I’m supposed to talk to you. Everything is-”

“-on the record. Yes, we covered that.” Faith stopped, knowing how most men reacted to silence from a woman.

Helms cleared his throat. “Maybe a few minutes at lunch.”

“Just name the place.”

“There’s a Mexican restaurant on Oracle, just up the street from the office. Noon, maybe?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I really don’t know if I can help, but Sean…well, Sean needs something. I’ve tried to help him before, and…” Helms’s voice trailed away, and Faith wondered what Helms had been through with her brother.

“We’ll talk at noon.”

Armed with directions from the desk clerk at the motel, Faith drove the rented Suburban-might as well be consistent, after all-north on Oracle Road, one of the main north-south drags in Tucson. She skirted the Miracle Mile, with its diners and motels and 1950s-style “tourist courts,” and passed a huge automotive dealership larger than anything she’d seen in Oklahoma. Oracle then branched into a commercial area-at least one indoor shopping mall, numerous strip shopping centers, restaurants.

She found the restaurant on the south end of a shopping center and went in. She glanced around for single men who looked like federal agents. She found him in a corner booth. A. J. Helms was in his midthirties, as tall as Sean but rail thin. He wore glasses and had a lot of gray in his light brown hair. He wore the requisite white shirt and dark suit of a federal agent, but looked uncomfortable in it, as if he were more used to jeans and T-shirts. Faith was wearing jeans herself, with a light blue tank top. She also wore a pair of stylish gray cowboy boots, the first time she’d ever worn them. Hendler had bought them for her as a joke for her birthday last year.

Since you’re becoming more of an Okie than I am, he’d said, laughing. It had seemed appropriate to Faith-important, even-to wear them now.

“Agent Helms,” she said.

He turned, stood up, and froze.

“You’re no lawyer,” he said.

Faith shook her head. “No, I’m not.”

He studied her. “You’re Sean’s sister. Faith, isn’t it?”

“Sorry for the deception. May I sit down?”

Helms indicated the seat. “He had a picture of you in his cubicle at work. You’re in DOJ, right?”

Faith sat down, watching him. He showed no indication that he’d connected her name to Senator McDermott’s statement yesterday. “Yes,” she said.

“He’s very proud of you. He probably never told you that. Wouldn’t be his style.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Faith said. Proud?

“He’s an alcoholic, you know.”

“I know.”

“A few months ago,” Helms said, “when he really started going downhill, Sonny-that’s Sonny Weller, our SAC-had him referred for counseling and AA. I even volunteered to take him to the AA meetings. There’s a meeting place just a few blocks from here. I dropped him off, I picked him up. I later found out that he’d sneaked out the back after I dropped him in front, then came strolling out the front an hour later when I came back to get him. What he didn’t realize was that I checked with the person who ran the meeting, and no one remembered him. It’s a small group, and Sean does tend to stand out in a crowd.”

Faith smiled. “That he does.” The smile faded. “Have you talked to him? I mean, recently.”

Helms fidgeted.

“Yesterday? Maybe you picked him up at the airport?”

Helms furrowed his brow. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m his sister. I’m worried about him. I want to talk to him.”

“And after that?”

Under the gangly, awkward exterior, A. J. Helms was extraordinarily perceptive, Faith realized. “I’m not sure,” Faith said. “So he did get in touch with you yesterday?”

“No.”

“He didn’t?”

“No, I mean he did get in touch, but it wasn’t yesterday.”

Faith sat very still.

“Let’s see, today’s Friday, so it would have been Tuesday. Tuesday night. And he didn’t fly in. He said he’d driven all day. He showed up at about ten o’clock that night at my house, driving a little Mazda Miata with Oklahoma plates. He just wanted to crash for a few hours, he said, so I let him. He was still asleep when I got up in the morning. When I got home from work in the afternoon, he was gone.”

Faith’s mind raced. If Sean was in Arizona two and a half days ago, he couldn’t have murdered Scott Hendler in Edmond at midday yesterday. The time frame fit. If he’d left Oklahoma City sometime after Daryn was killed, in the early morning Tuesday, and drove straight through, that could have put him at A. J. Helms’s door in Tucson at ten o’clock that night. If he stuck to interstate highways, the drive from Oklahoma City to Tucson was about fifteen hours.

She could almost hear Scott Hendler’s voice: Okay, I’ll play devil’s advocate here. He could have turned around and driven back. If he left Arizona, say, at noon on Wednesday, he’d be in Oklahoma City early Thursday morning.

In plenty of time to kill you, Scott, Faith thought, and for a moment her eyes clouded.

But it made no sense. If Sean murdered Daryn, why would he then leave town immediately, drive over a thousand miles, sleep for a few hours, turn around and drive back to commit another murder?

And now Faith knew something she hadn’t known until yesterday. The secret of the book. The secret of Franklin Sanborn.

Sean couldn’t have killed Hendler.

About Daryn, she was less sure. The issue was much less clear. Sean may have indeed been led to kill Daryn, fueled by his own obsessions, but also driven by the fact that he had been very carefully and skillfully manipulated.

You bastard, she thought. You may have manipulated Sean into committing one murder, and set him up for another.

She had to find her brother, and then they would hunt down the man who had called himself Franklin Sanborn.

“Is there somewhere he would go?” Faith asked. “Here in the area, someplace that was special to him. Somewhere…I don’t know, that he felt safe. Does that sound strange?”

Helms smiled. “Yes and no. Was he always so anal-retentive? A place for everything and everything in its place. Was he like that as a kid?”

“I guess he was,” Faith said. “I don’t think you notice such things for what they are when you’re a kid. He was always neat, I was always a slob. That’s the way we looked at it then.”

Helms was nodding. “Cleanest desk in our office. Organized, efficient. Until the bottle started getting the best of him, he was the most efficient agent I’d ever seen.” He leaned back against the booth. “There were only a few bars he used to go to. He had certain places he liked to go to drink. He knew what to expect there, places where nothing ever changed.”