“Well, thanks again for the heads-up. We’ll have a talk with him.”

When they’d hung up, Graham got another beer. He sipped a bit. Went into the kitchen to do the dishes. He found the task comforting. He hated to vacuum, hated to dust. Set him on edge. He couldn’t say why. But he loved doing the dishes. Water, maybe. The life blood of a landscaper.

As he washed and dried he rehearsed a half dozen speeches to Joey about cutting school and dangerous skateboard practices. He kept refining them. But as he put the dishes away he decided the words were stilted, artificial. They were just that-speeches. It seemed to Graham that you needed conversation, not lectures. He knew instinctively that they’d have no effect on a twelve-year-old boy. He tried to imagine the two of them sitting down and speaking seriously. He couldn’t. He gave up crafting a talk.

Hell, he’d let Brynn handle it. She’d insist on that anyway.

’Phalting…

Graham dried his hands and went into the family room and sat down on the green couch, near Anna’s rocker. She asked, “Was that Brynn?”

“No. The school.”

“Everything okay?”

“Fine.”

“Sorry you missed poker tonight, Graham.”

“No problem.”

Returning to her knitting, Anna said, “Glad I went to Rita’s. She doesn’t have long.” A tsk of her tongue. “And that daughter of hers. Well, you saw, didn’t you?”

Occasionally his soft-spoken mother-in-law surprised him by letting go with a steely judgment like this one. He had no idea what the daughter’s crime was but he knew Anna had considered the offense carefully and come back with a reasonable verdict. “Sure did.”

He flipped a coin for the channel, lost and they put on a sitcom, which was fine with him. His team was toast this season.

THE FRANTIC YOUNG woman was in her midtwenties, face gaunt and eyes red from tears, her stylishly short, pixie-ish hair, dark red, now disheveled and flecked with leaves. Her forehead was scratched and her hands shook uncontrollably, but only partly from the cold.

It had been her panicked footsteps Brynn had heard, not those of an intruder, moving toward her through the brush.

“You’re their friend,” Brynn whispered, feeling huge relief that the woman hadn’t met the Feldmans’ fate. “From Chicago?”

She nodded and then gazed out into the deepening dusk as if the men were hot on her trail. “I don’t know what to do,” she said in a manic voice. She seemed childlike. Her fear was heartrending.

“We stay here for the time being,” Brynn said.

Times to fight and times to run…

Times to hide too.

Brynn looked over at the couple’s houseguest. She wore chic clothes, city clothes-expensive jeans and a designer jacket with a beautiful fur collar. The leather was supple as silk. Three gold hoops were in one ear, two in the other, a stud atop both. A sparkling diamond tennis bracelet was on her left wrist and a bejeweled Rolex on her other. She was about as out of place in this muddy forest as she could possibly be.

Scanning the forest around them, Brynn could see no movement other than swaying branches and herds of leaves migrating in the breeze. The wind was pure torment on her soaked skin. “Over there,” she finally said, pointing to cover. The women crawled a dozen feet away-to a cavity beside a fallen chinquapin oak in a snarled area of the forest, fifty yards from Lake View Drive and about a hundred and fifty from the house at number 2. When they’d settled into a nest of forsythia, ragweed and sedge Brynn looked back toward the road and the Feldmans’. No sign of the killers.

As if awakening, the young woman suddenly focused on Brynn’s uniform blouse. “You’re a policewoman.” She turned her gaze to the road. “Are there others?”

“No. I’m alone.”

She took this news without emotion and then looked at Brynn’s cheek. “Your face…I heard gunshots. They shot you too. Like Steve and Emma.” Her voice choked. “Did you call for help?”

Brynn shook her head. “You have a phone?”

“It’s back there. In the house.”

Brynn wrapped her arms around herself. It did nothing to warm her. She looked at the woman’s supple designer jacket. Her face was pretty, heart-shaped. Her nails were long and perfectly sculpted. She could have been on the cover of a grocery store checkout magazine, illustrating an article on ten ways to stay fit and sexy. The woman dug into her pocket and pulled on tight, stylish gloves whose price Brynn couldn’t even guess at.

Brynn shivered again and was thinking if she didn’t get dry and warm soon, she might pass out. She’d never been this cold.

“That house.” The young woman nodded toward 2 Lake View. “I was going to call for help. Let’s go there, let’s call the police. We can get warm. I’m so damn cold.”

“Don’t want to yet,” Brynn said. It seemed less painful to speak in abbreviation. “Don’t know where they are. Wait until we know. They could be headed there too.”

The young woman winced.

“You hurt?” Brynn asked.

“My ankle. I fell.”

Brynn had run plenty of trauma calls. She unzipped the woman’s boots-made in Italy, she noticed-and examined the joint through her black knee-highs. It didn’t look badly hurt. A sprain probably; thank God it wasn’t broken. She saw a gold ankle bracelet that probably equaled a half dozen of Brynn’s and Graham’s car payments.

The young woman stared toward the Feldmans’ house. Chewing her lip.

“What’s your name?”

“Michelle.”

“I’m Brynn McKenzie.”

“Brynn?”

A nod. She usually didn’t explain its derivation. “I’m a deputy with the county sheriff’s office.” She explained about the 911 call. “You know who they are, those men?”

“No.”

Brynn whispered, her voice growing more distorted, “Need to figure out what to do. Tell me what happened.”

“I met Emma after work and we picked up Steve and all drove up together. Got here about five, five-thirty. I went upstairs-I was going to take a shower-and I heard these bangs. I thought the stove exploded or something. Or somebody dropped something. I didn’t know. I ran downstairs and saw two men. They didn’t see me. One of them’d put down his gun. It was on the table near the stairs. I just picked it up. They were in the kitchen, standing over the…over the bodies, talking. Just looking down and they had this expression on their faces.” She shut her eyes. Whispered, “I can’t even describe it. They were, like, ‘We shot them. Okay, no big deal. What’s next?’” Her voice cracked. “One of them, he was going through the refrigerator.”

As Brynn scanned the woods the young woman continued, forcing back tears, “I started to walk toward them. I wasn’t even thinking. I was, like, numb. And one of them-one had long hair and one had a crew cut-the one with the long hair started to turn and I guess I just pulled the trigger. It just happened. There was this bang… I don’t think I hit them.”

“No,” Brynn said. “One of them’s hurt, I think. One you just mentioned. With long hair.”

“Hurt bad?” she asked.

“His arm.”

“I should’ve…I should’ve told them to stop, or put their hands up. I don’t know. They started shooting at me. And I panicked. I just lost it completely. I ran outside. I didn’t have the car keys.” A disgusted look on her face. “I did something so stupid… I was afraid they’d come after me so I shot out the tires. They would’ve just left if I hadn’t done that. Got in the car and left… I was so stupid!”

“That’s all right. You did fine. Nobody’d think straight at a time like that. You have the gun still?”

Please, Brynn thought. I want a weapon so badly.

But the woman shook her head. “I used up all the bullets. I threw it into a creek by the house so they couldn’t find it. And I ran.” She squinted. “You’re a deputy. Do you have a gun?”

“I did. But lost it in the lake.”

Suddenly Michelle became animated. Almost giddy. “You know, like, I saw this show one time, it was on A &E or Discovery, and somebody’d been in a car wreck, a bad one, and they lost a lot of blood and they were in the wilderness for days. They should’ve died. But something happened, like the body stopped the bleeding itself. The doctors saved them and…”