“Oh, God, Lucy,” Mari muttered, rubbing her hands over her face. She felt dirty and sickened. Through a haze of tears she looked around the room of this pretty log house she had inherited and saw nothing but filth. It was tainted, all of it-the house, the land, the cars-bought with dirty money. She wanted to run away from it, burn it to the ground, take a long, hot shower.

You need a life, pal. I’ll give you mine… The line from Lucy’s final letter came back to her, and everything inside her rejected the implication that she could take up where Lucy had left off. How could Lucy have thought that? Had the decadence of her life here warped her so badly that she saw everyone as corrupt, or was corruption so commonplace in her world it had become the norm?

Mari shook her head and cried a little, mourned for the lost soul of her dead friend, a soul lost long before she had died. She tried to reconcile the Lucy who had been comrade and comforter with the Lucy who had been blackmailer and seductress. The images wouldn’t mesh, and she knew she would forever think of them as two separate people, one she had known and liked and one she would rather never have met, even posthumously.

On the TV in the background, Eldon the painter made a pithy remark and the audience laughed like hyenas while Candice Bergen looked disgusted. Then June Allyson came on to extol the virtues of disposable underwear for women with bladder control problems.

Just another day in paradise. Sitcoms and stupid commercials. Blackmailers and libertines. Beauty and beasts. Incompatible worlds inhabiting the same time and space. Surrealism in motion.

“And you’re caught smack in the middle of it, Marilee,” she muttered.

Her brain whirled with all the information, the possibilities, the questions. She now had proof of many things, but no proof of who had actually murdered Lucy. She thought she might have enough to get the case reopened, but she wasn’t so sure Quinn would agree. Lucy was dead, Sheffield had been punished in the eyes of the court. If Townsend had killed her, what did it matter-he was dead too. But there were other suspects.

Everything tied to Bryce. According to Lucy’s notes, he arranged the hunts. He made the tapes. He held the strings of a dozen powerful people. The puppet master. He seduced his friends into the hunt, deftly turning the tables so they became the ones in the cross hairs. Not because he needed their money or the favors they could grant him, but because he loved the game.

Bryce stood to lose the most by Lucy’s enterprise. Maybe the stakes had outstripped the enjoyment he took from playing with her. Maybe she had overstepped a boundary line. Maybe Bryce was the man for whom Sheffield had taken the fall. Or maybe her death had nothing to do with Bryce. Maybe Kendall Morton had acted alone. Or maybe all the theories were bullshit and Sheffield had accidentally shot her.

Mari didn’t know what to do. What she needed was someone to corroborate the evidence, at the very least someone who would be willing to listen to her as she tried to sort it all out. Drew came immediately to mind. Uncertainty came immediately after. Was this what he knew and wouldn’t talk about-Bryce’s little hunt club? If he knew, why hadn’t he done something about it? Because he was guilty too? Like a faded dream, she could just barely remember the argument Drew and Kevin had fallen into that first day she had stopped into the Moose. They had fought about the ethics of hunting, and it was obvious that was not the first time the subject had been the source of contention for them. For all she knew, this could have been the fight that had sent Drew storming away from the lodge the previous night.

You think you know someone and then suddenly you look at them and you don’t know them at all.

“Ain’t that the truth,” she muttered.

Almost against her will other fragments of thoughts came to mind. The night she surprised the intruder in her hotel room. A man in black. Drew standing in the room later, looking harried, wearing black.

“God, you’re going conspiracy cuckoo, Marilee.” She pushed herself away from the desk to pace again and to run her hands into her hair. “Drew isn’t involved. Don’t be crazy.”

Crazy.

Del Rafferty was crazy.

I don’t wanna know what happened to you! I don’t wanna know about the tigers! Leave me alone! Leave me alone or I’ll leave you for the dog-boys, damn you!

Not didn’t know, didn’t want to know.

She had discounted the whole idea of Del helping on the basis of the tiger remark. It sounded crazy. He had mistaken her for a corpse and thought he’d seen a tiger. There were no tigers in Montana. And what the hell were dog-boys? The guy was so far gone around the bend, he would never get back without a guide. Or so she had thought.

But what if Del wasn’t completely crazy? What if he had seen one of Bryce’s hunts? He might have thought himself that it was insane. But Mari had seen the tiger now too. She could assure him what he had seen was real. That would give them something in common, and if she could establish common ground, maybe he would tell her what-if anything-he knew about Lucy’s death.

I don’t wanna know what happened to you!

Which implied that he did know.

The sheriff wouldn’t like Del as a witness, and J.D. wouldn’t like her going up into his uncle’s territory at all. But she needed to find the truth and close the door on this ugly chapter of her friend’s life. Now more than ever she wanted it over and done with, dead and buried. Mentally she told Quinn and Rafferty to go take a flying leap, and went out to the barn to saddle her mule.

HE WATCHED her through the Leupold 10x scope, the Remington 700 resting comfortably against his shoulder. She looked a foot away. He could see all the strange, subtle shades in her hair, the frown of determination curving her little mouth as she talked incessantly to the mule. Beside him one of the hounds whined. He gave the dog a hard squint and it lay down with its head on its paws and a woeful look in its eyes.

He had tracked her up from the blue rock. She came boldly, brazenly, riding that mule as if she already owned the mountain. The blondes would try to take it away. He knew that. That was why they came at night-to taunt him, to drive him away. And now she was coming back in the daylight again. Bold as brass.

He could pick her off now. The air settled in his lungs. His finger came back and took a little slack out of the trigger, but he didn’t shoot. He wasn’t certain this wasn’t part of the test. And he could see that this was the little blonde. The talker, not the dead blonde, not the blonde who danced under the light of the moon. J.D. would be disgusted with him if he shot this one. He had said to leave her be.

Del let the trigger out, but remained as still as if he were a rock or a tree. Maybe J.D. didn’t know that the blondes would take control. He was under their spell, wasn’t he? Maybe that was their master plan and it was left to Del to stop them from taking the Stars and Bars. He would be a hero if he stopped them. His family could be proud of him again instead of secretly ashamed. He could be proud of himself, and that was something he hadn’t been in a very long time. Since before he could remember. Since before the ’Nam.

As silent as nothingness, he rose and started up the hill. The blonde was heading for his cabin. She couldn’t be allowed inside. He would be there before her.

Mari’s boots scuffed in the dirt of the yard as she paced. She switched her hands from the hip pockets of her jeans to the front pockets and marched on, trudging slowly around the corral. The horses watched her with idle curiosity. Tied to a post, Clyde closed his big brown eyes and went to sleep.