They drove to D'Anton's house and blended timidly into the party. Many of the guests were older and obviously had money. Roberta felt very much out of place with them. But there were other young people, too, and no one asked her to leave.

And there were drugs – pot and cocaine being used openly, with plenty of liquor and good wine.

The two girls wandered apart. Someone gave Roberta a Vicodin. She started to get very high.

At some point, an older man spoke to her. She knew that this was the host, Dr. D'Anton – he had been pointed out to her – and she got nervous again. But he seemed interested in her and asked her about herself. He told her she was pretty, and then he did something that stayed in her mind – he reached up and spanned her forehead between thumb and forefinger, as if measuring it with calipers, then traced his fingertips across the frontal ridge above her eyebrows.

Her forehead was a little protuberant, Monks noticed, marring her attractiveness with a slightly beetle-browed look.

She only spoke with D'Anton for a minute. She kept partying, drinking too much. She got woozy. Things became unclear. She remembered trying to apologize to a woman who helped her to a couch in a quiet room. Then she passed out.

When she came to, she was on an operating table.

"I saw this light that came to warn me," she told Monks. Her voice was softly reverent. She was sitting beside him on the couch, her hands nervously petting the little mutt in her lap. "I was unconscious, my eyes were still closed, and it appeared in my mind. It was like a flame, like the pillar of fire the Lord sent to lead the Israelites. I started to wake up. And felt-" She shivered. "Felt something burning across here." Her finger touched the hairline scar.

"He was cutting your skin?" Monks said.

She nodded, swallowing dryly. "And then he started pulling it down. Ripping it right off my face. I opened my eyes. There was blood running into them, but I could see those hands, with rubber gloves, and the knife he was holding. I screamed and started thrashing around. It must have freaked him out, because then he was gone."

She was starting to cry again. Monks patted her wrist. The dog growled protectively.

"Did you think he was going to kill you, Roberta?"

"I don't know. Maybe he was trying to fix what he'd looked at before, my forehead. But he's crazy, I know that."

Monks stood and put his hands in his pockets, listening as she talked on in her shaking voice, coaxing her to continue when she broke down.

Roberta had managed to get up off the operating table. She could feel the fold of loose skin flapping down her forehead, and she could hardly see through the blood running into her eyes. She found a towel, wiped her eyes and pressed it against her forehead to stem the blood, then stumbled through the darkened building, trying to find her way outside. She had no idea where she was; it might or might not have been D'Anton's clinic. She came to a door, but it was locked.

She was frantically trying to open it when someone slipped an arm around her from behind, pinning her own arms, and jabbed a needle into her shoulder.

She tried to plead, but she lost consciousness within seconds. Her last thought was that she was going to die.

But she awoke, slowly, groggy and in pain. It took her some time to realize that she was in the driver's seat of her own car – slammed into a highway underpass bridge abutment. The windshield above the steering wheel was spiderwebbed, as if her head had hit it. The dashboard and hood were littered with shards of glass. Her face was sticky with congealed blood.

But except for the laceration on her forehead, she was unhurt.

It was still night, and deserted. She recognized the place as a wooded area of San Francisco near China Beach. She had no memory of the accident – no memory of having driven at all, since arriving at D' Anton's house.

What Roberta did next, Monks thought, defined a fundamental difference between the culture that she had grown up in and the one that he had. She had found her way to a pay phone – but instead of calling the police, she called her mother. Then she hid until Mrs. Massey and her boyfriend – an ex-con named Jerry – came to pick her up.

They went to the hospital in Redwood City. No one said anything about D'Anton – only that Roberta had been in a wreck. Her mother stayed with her, while Jerry called the police and reported the car as stolen.

A young ER doc stitched up Roberta's cut, warning her that this was only a temporary fix, to stop the bleeding. The scar would need to be repaired by a plastic surgeon, the sooner the better.

But that had never been done. In the months that followed, Roberta thought more and more about the light that had appeared to her and saved her life. She began to understand that it had been a call from Jesus. She had gotten involved with a local church that was active with the poor, and now she worked there part-time. She embraced her disfigurement as a sort of stigmata – deliverance from the vanity of physical beauty.

"It was a gift from Christ to signify my salvation," she said. 'To share in His sufferings." She watched Monks, her face hopeful, as if pleading silently for absolution.

Monks said, "Why didn't you go to the police, Roberta?"

She lowered her eyes again.

"I was – you know. In trouble, drugs, mostly. On probation. I figured, if they found me in a wrecked car, fucked up – forgive me, Lord – I was done for. I'd already spent ten days in county. Those dykes in there-" She shivered again. "No way was I going back."

"But you decided to file an insurance complaint?"

"That was Jerry's idea. I didn't want him to do it, but he talked Mom into it because maybe we could get some money. He knew this lawyer and got him to go to the insurance company and threaten to sue Dr. D' Anton.

"Next thing we know, this big black shiny Mercedes pulls up outside, and this man gets out wearing, like, a three-piece suit. He told us he was Dr. D'Anton's lawyer. He looked at the place like he'd just stepped on a turd – wouldn't sit down or even come in. Just stood there in the doorway and talked for about ten minutes, telling us how he was going to bust our balls. It was like listening to the devil, man – he was so smooth, absolutely sure of himself. He said the lawyer we'd used wasn't really a lawyer; he'd lost his license. He said I was a known criminal and a druggie, and I was making up a filthy lie to get money out of this famous doctor, and I was going to go to prison, like, for twenty years.

'Then he says to Jerry, 'Attempted fraud, in partnership with a disbarred attorney, would be a rather serious violation of your parole, wouldn't it?' I still remember that exactly." She mimicked a cold, contemptuous voice. "'A rather serious violation.' Jerry was out of here pretty quick after that."

Monks's restless gaze scanned the room. A shelf of photos included a couple of a pretty, slender girl in her teens. There was no doubt that she was Roberta. She looked saucy, wearing low-cut blouses that thrust her young breasts forward proudly – ready for the world.

'That doctor who sewed you up," Monks said.

"Did he say anything about the cut looking unusual?"

She shook her head, surprised. "Why?"

Because lacerations from a broken windshield typically consisted of many shallow V-grooves, and a precise surgical incision that long would almost certainly have caught the attention of any emergency physician.

"Just curious," Monks said. "Did Dr. D'Anton say anything to you when you were in the operating room?"

"Nooo?" she said, drawing it into a question. Her eyes were starting to get wary.

"The more specific the things you can remember, the more weight it all carries," Monks said soothingly.

"I remember those hands," she said, and added, with unveiled sarcasm, "real specifically."