The day suited Mari’s mood. She sat at the table on the deck and had her breakfast, trying to clear her mind of the clutter of suspects and motives for a few minutes, trying halfheartedly to identify the birdsong that went on continually in the trees around her. A magpie landed on the railing and squawked at her indignantly, fanning out his metallic-green tail and bobbing down and up, looking like a tuxedoed dandy in his black-and-white plumage. She left him the last bites of the bear claw and headed out to feed the llamas.

The barn was as dim as a cave inside. Mari flipped on the light and wished there were a dozen more. She felt as if all her nerve endings were reaching up out of her skin, humming with electric anticipation. Her imagination conjured Kendall Morton lurking in every corner.

She pulled out the feed buckets and leaned down into the bin to scoop out Clyde’s grain first. The llama pellets were nearly gone and she practically had to dive head-first into the bin to reach the last of them. She would have to make a trip to the Feed and Read. Order more pellets, maybe pick up a copy of People. She dug into the feed with the scoop and pried up the end of something heavy.

“What the-?”

A strange apprehension started in the pit of her stomach and traveled outward as she straightened. The buried treasure had been upended. One corner stuck up through the drift of feed pellets. A book sealed inside a plastic bag. She knew without unearthing it what the title would be and a part of her wanted nothing more than to turn and walk away, pretend it wasn’t there. She knew she wouldn’t like the answers it gave her, wouldn’t like the truths it told about her friend.

If she filled the bin with fresh llama feed, how long would it take before she would be confronted by the evidence again? A month? Two? Even as her brain pondered the question, though, she was bending over into the bin again. She was all through avoiding truths about herself or anyone else. She would confront this one head-on and deal with it and get on with her life.

She pinched the end of the clear plastic bag and tugged. The brown pellets rolled aside. She came up out of the bin with Martindale-Hubbell volume 2, California attorneys A-O, and a videotape labeled simply “Townsend.”

Samantha drifted up toward consciousness like a diver drifting up toward the surface from the depths of the ocean. Out of the blackness toward rippling, shimmering light. But as soon as she broke the surface, she wanted to go back down. The light stabbed into her eyes. Pain hit the back of her head and exploded in bolts down through her back and arms and legs, tumbling her stomach over en route.

Moaning, she tried to curl into a ball and turn on her side, but she couldn’t bring her knees up because her ankles were tied to the foot of the bed on which she lay. Her wrists were bound as well, each to a post in the iron headboard. It rattled as she tried to pull her arms down, the sound hitting her raw brain like a bundle of steel fence posts.

Panic and nausea swirled inside her, rolling up the back of her throat, choking her as it hit the gag that was stuffed in her mouth. She swallowed convulsively, choking as tears blurred her vision. Memories of the night hovered in the back of her pounding head. The darkness. The stillness. The call of the owl.

It came back in a rush. Fear. Fighting for her life. The hood suffocating her. A tall figure clad in black. A mask. The club hitting her blow after blow after blow.

She had no idea what had happened in the time since she had lost consciousness. She had no idea where she was. She had no idea who had attacked her or why, or what their plans might be for her. Panic went through her like a thousand volts of electricity, jerking her body against its tethers, arching her back up off the bed. Pain went through her in spasms and she sobbed, but she couldn’t seem to stop fighting. She kicked and thrashed until the adrenaline ran out, then she lay there aching, crying softly, feeling the blood drip off her wrists.

Slowly, her surroundings began to penetrate the small sphere that had been her world since coming to. Rough cabin walls. A small window filled with gray light. She could hear the birds singing outside and the snort of a horse. In the cabin there was no sound at all. As far as she could tell, she was alone.

“Where the hell is she?” Bryce demanded, slamming the cordless phone down on the glass-topped table. The juice glasses shuddered and sloshed. No one had answered the phone at Samantha’s house. She wasn’t at the hotel. Most important, she wasn’t in the bed in his guest room. She was gone. That hadn’t been a variable in his plan.

Sharon calmly rescued her croissant from a dousing and dabbed the puddle on the table delicately with her napkin. “She probably caught a ride into town with one of the hands. You said she would have second thoughts.”

“I didn’t think she would leave!”

He paced beside the table, his hands on his narrow hips. He had prepared himself meticulously for breakfast, dressing down in jeans and old boots and a hunter-green oxford shirt, an ancient tooled belt around his waist with six inches of excess leather hanging limply down alongside his fly. He had planned to take a breakfast tray up to Samantha’s rooms, make love to her again, then invite her to go riding-just the two of them. Time alone for them to bond. Time for him to impress upon her what a fine life she could have with him.

Sharon sent him a look as she tore her croissant in two and baptized one end in currant jam. “I knew she would leave,” she muttered. “I just didn’t think it would be so soon. Apparently she has a low threshold for sin.”

Bryce wheeled on her, his eyes bright with fury. “I’m tired of your little asides, Sharon,” he snapped. “I tolerate too much from you, but I have limits, and you’ve just about reached them.”

She rose from her chair like a queen, an icy exterior draped in white silk and a core of hurt that glowed in her eyes. Her hair was slicked back into a knot, the look emphasizing the heavy bone structure of her face. She stared hard at Bryce-down at Bryce, because she had chosen to wear a pair of gold mules with heels, needing to feel superior to him in some way, any way.

“Don’t you threaten me,” she warned, her voice trembling with emotion. “Your little whores will come and go. I will always be here. I know you too well. I know too much. I can make your life hell-and don’t think I won’t.” She narrowed her eyes and smiled, cobralike. “Don’t think for a minute I won’t, you ungrateful son of a bitch.”

Reisa came out onto the terrace with a coffee urn and a vacant look in her eyes. Sharon stalked past her and into the house, trailing a fluttering train of white silk and a cloud of perfume.

“Coffee, Mr. Bryce?”

“Get out of my way,” Bryce snapped. Stepping around the housekeeper, he headed for the side gate and his Mercedes.

Mari expected the tape to be pornographic, the result of a little game of “Candid Camera” in Lucy’s bedroom. A video chronicle of Townsend’s escapades in Lucy’s bed or some other bed or with donkeys or children. Since Lucy was involved, she expected sex to be involved. But as she sat amid the ruins of her friend’s study, her eyes trained on the television that had somehow escaped destruction, sex was not what she got.

The opening shot was taken from horseback. On the trail ahead of the cameraman were Townsend and a small, thin man with a face like a carp and dark hair that looked like thread that had been stitched into his scalp. The two were dressed in safari khaki and camouflage hunting gear. Ahead of them was a rough-looking character with a drooping crumb-duster mustache and a crunched old water-stained cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. There was talk of rifles and scopes and other hunts. Townsend sounded excited. There was a flush on his cheekbones. Someone off-camera said the name “Graf” and the little man swiveled around in his saddle.