"Are you my friend? Or is it just that you need me?"

"Give me a chance to show you. Then make up your own mind."

I'll bet she was a good hostage negotiator, he thought as he hit END. She's manipulating me already.

Four hours after bicycling the last mile to her car, Alex Morse sat on a bench in the shadow of a Catholic cathedral in downtown Natchez and watched Thora Shepard walk out of the Mainstream Fitness center, her blond hair flying from beneath a blue silk scarf. She turned right and started walking west on Main Street. A quarter mile in this direction would carry her to the two-hundred-foot bluff that overlooked the Mississippi River. Thora often ran along the edge of that bluff, which stretched for miles with only chain-link fencing or a few scrub bushes separating her from eternity. Alex had jogged along behind her once, amazed by the vastness of the Mississippi River. The muddy flood was a full mile across at Natchez, and beyond it the Louisiana Delta stretched flat beyond the limits of human vision.

But Thora would not be jogging today. She was wearing Mosquito sunglasses and a tailored pantsuit that cost more than Alex earned in a month. As Thora strode gracefully down the street, she looked fit for a magazine cover shoot. Alex could see the double-takes as Thora passed people on the sidewalk. The thing was, it wasn't only men who stared-women stared, too. She was that kind of woman. And maybe that was the root of Alex's antipathy. Alex had never been able to like blondes. She didn't want to stereotype anyone, but in the case of blondes, it was hard not to. They had a certain way of walking, of talking, of flipping their goddamn hair, that just plain got to her. That helpless lilt in their voices-the pathetic little-girl sound-even the smallest trace of it made Alex want to hit somebody. And that was leaving out the whole "dumb" issue. She knew that blondes weren't all dumb by genetic command, but on the other hand, she hadn't known many-if any-who were rigorously intellectual. And that was the core of her problem with them. Most blondes had simply never had to work hard to get what they wanted in life; therefore, they had developed few skills-beyond flirting and inserting knives between female shoulder blades-that would prove useful in any practical situation.

Of course hardly any "blondes" nowadays were true blondes. She had to give Thora that. Few human beings-even those who were blond as children-made it far through adulthood without their hair darkening naturally. But Thora had Danish blood, and her Viking blond hair was almost the same shade of straw as that of her father, who at fifty-eight still had a shockingly full head of hair. For this reason, Thora Shepard-unlike the frosted, streaked, bottled, frizzed, teased, and dark-rooted blondes Alex saw and despised every day-radiated a kind of predatory confidence, an avian watchfulness that signaled you would not get far trying to pull something over on her. It also made men and women turn and stare after her as she walked by them on the street. And finally, it had made a smart and fairly good-looking young doctor named Chris Shepard propose marriage to her-not to mention legally adopt a fatherless baby born nine years before. Not bad for a woman with her past.

Alex hurried across Main Street and began walking behind Thora, who was a block ahead now. She felt a pang of irritation as a young man wearing a business suit turned 180 degrees to watch Thora walk away from him. Then an older man stopped Thora and engaged her in conversation. Thora spoke animatedly, using her hands often to make her point. Alex turned and looked into a shop window.

She had instinctively disliked Thora from the beginning, but she wasn't sure why. No one could argue that Thora had had an easy childhood. She had begun life with a silver spoon in her mouth, but that spoon had quickly been snatched away. The daughter of a renowned Vanderbilt surgeon, Thora Rayner had spent the first eight years of her life in the elite social world of Nashville, Tennessee. A tony school, the right country club, the riding academy, the works. But when Thora was eight, her mother's alcoholism had reached a crisis point. After several attempts at drying out, Anna Rayner slipped into an alcoholic daze that showed no sign of abating. With the help of some friends, Lars Rayner committed his wife to a state hospital, then filed divorce papers. Six months later he was free of her, but the price of keeping his fortune had been his daughter. Signing away his rights to Thora had little effect on Dr. Rayner, but this act profoundly altered the little girl's future.

Thora's life became an odyssey from one small East Tennessee town to another. She attended public schools, private academies being far out of economic reach, as her court-mandated child-support payments were squandered on alcohol. Her mother's drinking waxed and waned by no particular rule, but on several occasions Thora had to be taken in by her paternal grandmother. Her high school grades were middling to poor until her junior year, when she apparently decided to show her father what she could do when she put her mind to it. When Thora blew the top out of both the ACT and SAT, Lars Rayner finally took notice. He offered to pull strings to get Thora into Vanderbilt, and also to foot the bills. Thora refused. Instead, she applied on her own and won an academic scholarship to her father's alma mater.

Sadly, her luck did not last long. Her maternal genes and conditioning were against her. After a perfect first semester, her grades steadily worsened until the second half of her sophomore year, which she did not complete. When she took a job as a waitress in a dive in the Printers Alley district, the reason soon became apparent: Thora was pregnant. The boyfriend vanished, but Thora chose to have the baby in spite of this. With financial and babysitting help from her grandmother, she entered nursing school and after two years graduated with honors. She began work at the VA hospital in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, but quit after only nine months, suddenly and inexplicably relocating to Natchez, Mississippi. Alex suspected that a messy affair lay behind this move, but she had no proof (though she did have a detective working to find it). Thora had been hired by St. Catherine's Hospital, and it was there that she'd met Red Simmons, the oilman who would become her first husband and soon after make her a widow. A very rich widow.

Alex glanced to her left. Thora spoke for another twenty seconds, then hugged the older man and continued down Main Street. Alex took a small camera from her purse and shot a picture of the man as he passed. He looked sixty, probably too old to be a paramour.

Alex had long prided herself on her physical conditioning, but simply following Thora through her daily routine was exhausting. Up at dawn for a morning run-four miles, minimum, and sometimes ten-then a quick shower at home, followed by a trip to the Shepards' building site in Avalon. Thora would argue with the contractors for a half hour or so, then drive her Mercedes convertible to the country club for a swim or a couple of sets of tennis (Alex usually watched from the parking lot). Afterward, she alternated touch-ups on her hair and nails with serious weight work at Mainstream Fitness. Another shower, and then lunch with at least one girlfriend. She favored Thai food, from an excellent restaurant not far from Mainstream, and that was probably her present destination. After her meal (very little nourishment, Alex had noted from a nearby table), Thora often made a second trip to the building site.

The only absolutely required stop of her day was St. Stephen's Prep, to pick up Ben. While most mothers waited in line for up to twenty minutes-in case their children came charging out of school right after the bell-Thora always showed up twenty minutes late. That way she avoided the boring wait and usually found Ben shooting baskets alone on the playground. After taking him home to the maid, she would spend the remainder of the afternoon running errands or shopping, then stop by the Avalon site one final time before going home to the Elgin house.