He thought it might be his destiny, his quest, to kill her. To kill her might redeem his honor, banish his shame, give him back his place in the order of things. Right all the wrongs.

Rolling back around against the bark of the tree, he brought the gun up into place. Found the woman through the scope. Traced the crosshairs over her chest like a benediction. Raised the barrel slightly to account for drop. His finger kissed the trigger.

Kill her.

Kill her!

Save yourself!

Or chase yourself into madness.

What if the test was of control, of reason, of patience? What if he failed?

The possibilities tumbled through his head like rocks in an avalanche. He saw himself tumbling with them. Riding shotgun down the avalanche. Being crushed by the brutal weight of it. He didn’t know what to do.

Kill her.

The blonde danced on. Taunting him. Inviting him. Oblivious of him. Whirling like a dervish. The dance of the dead. An apparition in the night.

Kill her.

Kill yourself.

She turned to a blur in the glass. A kaleidoscope image shifting as he watched. The battle within him wrung his heart like a wet rag, wrenching out tears, squeezing out pain. Trembling, he let go of the trigger and pointed the rifle to the sky, the stars jumping down at him through the barrel of the scope. The bright lights of hope. Still out of reach. Always out of reach.

JUDGES DON’T go about shooting women…

Mari played the line through her head like a magic chant to ward off danger as she wheeled her Honda in beside a mud-splattered black Jeep Cherokee. Townsend was the one who had brought Lucy to Montana. They had been lovers. Drew thought he had been giving Lucy money-or that Lucy had been extorting money from him. That made him a key to the truth about Lucy’s death. Or a suspect in her murder. She tried not to dwell on the latter as she climbed the steps to the front porch of the judge’s “cabin.”

It was a log house on the same lines as Lucy’s, only larger and with a more expensive view. The back side faced Irish Peak, which was sparkling as the sun poured down on the mountain’s cone of snow. An extravagant getaway from the pressures of the bench. Justice apparently had its rewards. Or the Townsends past and present had been loaded from other pursuits.

MacDonald Townsend was highly regarded in legal and political circles. Mari had met him once, had seen him from afar on numerous occasions. If they ever made a movie about his life, they would cast Charlton Heston in the lead role and tell him to play it as stiff as an overstarched collar. It was difficult to reconcile that public image with the image of him bending over a billiard table to help himself to a little toot of classic coke. Of course, it was just as difficult to envision the squeaky-clean, all-American public man whose wife was the head of half the charities in Sacramento as the kind of man who would climb into bed with Lucy and set the sheets on fire either. But he was.

The question was, what else might he be?

She rang the bell and waited, trying to formulate a conversational strategy. Did you kill my friend seemed a tad blunt and more than a little foolish. After all, what was to stop him from just popping her one and dumping her body down a ravine someplace? What she was really after was hints, feelings, expressions to read. Something more to add to the theory Sheriff Quinn didn’t want to hear.

Inside the house a dog was barking. Mari stepped up to one of the sidelights that flanked the door, cupped her hands around her eyes, and pressed her nose to the glass. A sleek-looking German shorthair was pouncing and bowing at an interior door beyond the foyer and to the right of the living room. The dog barked and scratched the door, seeming frantic to get inside the room.

Perhaps the door led to a bedroom and Townsend was auditioning replacements for Lucy. Perhaps it was a study and Townsend was meeting with a co-conspirator. Paying off the hit man Sheffield had taken the rap for. A picture of Del Rafferty flashed through her mind, and she shook it away. Del may have been many unfortunate things, but no Rafferty would ever be a hired gun.

“You’re starting to sound like a native, Marilee,” she mumbled, amused and a little dismayed by her automatic defense of the clan. Keeping her eyes on the dog and the door, she reached down and jabbed the doorbell again, holding it an annoyingly long time.

There was always Lucy’s hired hand to consider for the hit man lineup. Kendall Morton, shady drifter. She knew little about him, but by his description he sounded as if he just might be the kind of man willing to waste someone for spending money and then disappear. She wondered if she could get his criminal record if she called the sheriff’s department and claimed to be a business owner checking Morton out before hiring him. Quinn wouldn’t give it to her any other way.

She heaved a sigh and hit the doorbell yet again. The interior door remained closed, but the dog was diverted. It bounded toward her, loping through the house with big, loose-limbed strides, ears up, pale eyes boring into hers. It jumped up and put its paws on the side light, toenails clicking against the glass, and stared Mari in the face. He was very clearly male and, as he slurped his long, pink tongue against the glass, he was very clearly not a killer watchdog. He jumped down from the window, galloped around in a tight circle, barking, made a dash toward the closed interior door, then dashed back toward Mari, whining.

Mari tried the door. Maybe the old geezer had keeled over while auditioning paramours and was lying on the bedroom floor, praying his trustworthy dog would fetch help. Or maybe the hit man had wasted him.

The door was unlocked. She slipped into the foyer, feeling like a thief. The dog danced around her, his thunderous barks resounding off the adobe-look walls.

“Judge Townsend? Anybody home?”

After the third call, the dog tried again to get her to follow him to the closed door beyond the living room. He had scratched deep gouges into the door, leaving raw open wounds in the pine. Not far from the door, beside a potted fig tree that sat along a bank of windows, he had left a big pile of doggie business that was fresh enough to make Mari wrinkle her nose.

Standing close beside the door, she listened for voices. Silence.

“Judge Townsend?” She drummed her knuckles against the center panel, inciting another booming bark from the dog, then silence again. The dog shoved his wet nose into her hand, as if he thought he could physically compel her to reach for the doorknob. Scowling, Mari wiped the dog snot off her palm onto the leg of her jeans and reached for the knob of her own accord.

The door swung open to reveal a spectacular study. Dark wood and big windows, a forest of leather-upholstered wing chairs, and a fieldstone fireplace. The heads of a number of unfortunate creatures were mounted on the wall above the fireplace. A mule deer, an elk, a mountain goat, several antelopelike creatures she had never seen outside the pages of National Geographic. There was a zebra hide tacked up on the far wall with an enormous tiger skin beside it. The disparity in size would have made zebras glad they didn’t live in tiger country. A grizzly bear stood in the far corner, petrified for all eternity on his hind legs with his lips curled back in an ugly snarl.

Centered along the windowed wall was Townsend’s desk, a massive polished walnut piece with brass accents. Slumped over on the desk was Townsend. By the look of things, he had stuck a gun in his mouth and blown the top of his head off.

For a long while Mari stood frozen, staring. Every detail of the scene soaked into her memory like indelible ink. She wanted to look away, but couldn’t. The shock had shorted out the brain synapses that had to do with motor functions. She was trapped there, staring at the carnage, a detached corner of her brain studying the play of the sunlight through the blood and brain matter splattered on the window glass behind the desk. Blood-stained glass. The air in the sun-warmed room was rank with the thick, gagging stench of violent death.