”Paul? Can you hear me?“

The rasp comes again. Not from his mouth, though. It’s coming from the laceration in his windpipe. The contents of my stomach come up in a rush, and it’s all I can do to keep from vomiting on Paul. When I recover myself, I realize that the dying professor is trying to turn his head to look at his dead wife. All I can think of is Sonny Cross’s dying concern for the safety of his sons.

”Janet’s fine,“ I assure Paul, hoping he didn’t see her stabbed, but certain that he’ll be dead soon in any case.

Air continues to bubble through the slash in his throat, and he struggles harder to turn.

I take him by the shoulders and stop him. ”The paramedics said Janet’s fine, Paul. It’s you they’re worried about. Hang on, okay? You have to hang on for Janet. Another ambulance is on the way.“

His eyes close.

A crazy thought comes to me, and before I can stop myself, I voice it. ”Did Marko do this, Paul? Did Marko stab you?“

His eyes open again, wide this time, and with a remarkable feat of will, he shakes his head.

”Did Marko do this?“ I repeat, wanting to be sure.

Paul shakes his head once again, then closes his eyes and sags backward.

”Can you hear me, Paul?“

Nothing.

I take his hand and squeeze it. ”I’m here, Paul. You’re not alone. Can you hear me?“

Nothing.

I reach across him with my left hand and grasp two of his fingers. ”That’s Janet holding your hand. She wants you to hold on. Can you hear me?“

The fingers move, and for an instant I feel hope. But then a seemingly endless rasp issues from the throat wound, slowly diminishing to a fluid rattle. Paul Wilson is still in the way that only dead men are still.

I drop his hands and get to my feet, suddenly aware of how foolish I’ve been to focus on these two while their killer could still be near. I dart back outside and move into the shadows at the side of the house.

In the distance, I hear a siren.

As it grows louder and higher in pitch, I find myself looking up at the apartment over the garage. Suddenly I realize the obvious, that the Wilsons weren’t the target of whoever killed them: Marko was. Sprinting across the driveway, I bound up the steps to Marko’s apartment.

The door stands ajar.

While I try to decide whether or not to enter, I hear the scream of burning rubber out on the street. Someone is fleeing the scene right now. Jesus. The killer was probably still in Marko’s apartment while I was checking on Paul and Janet. Praying I won’t find Marko’s corpse inside, I enter the apartment.

It’s a single room, with a bed, a kitchenette, and a toilet behind a partition. The floor is a sea of bedclothes, books, and drawers jerked from the dresser against the wall. An armoire lies facedown on a table, its front shattered by the force with which it fell. Only a computer screen glowing against the far wall seems to have escaped the damage.

The siren is closer now.

I pick my way through the debris and go to the computer. It’s a Windows platform system. I go to the My Documents folder and check its contents. The files look innocuous: school reports and letters from junior colleges regarding a possible football scholarship. I scan the rest of the hard drive, but nothing jumps out at me. Marko seems to be a serious gamer, with numerous combat-oriented games residing on his drive.

The wail of an ambulance joins the police siren, and the cacophony sounds as though it’s coming from the Wilsons’ front yard. Knowing I’m pressing my luck, I go to the Windows control area and click ”Show Hidden Files.“ When I recheck the hard drive, several new folders have appeared, each with a semitransparent icon indicating that it was designated by the computer’s primary user to be concealed from a casual user. I try to open one folder, but I’m immediately prompted for a password. Another folder gives the same result. Desperate for some clue to Marko’s inner psyche, I look down at the floor, into some drawers that were ripped from the computer desk. Between the drawers, lying amid cracked CDs and DVDs, is a USB flash drive similar to the ones in Kate Townsend’s shoe box. This one is a Sony, about a half inch wide and three inches long.

As the sirens fade into silence out front, I plug the flash drive into the USB port and copy the formerly hidden folders onto it. Then I dismount the drive, shove it into the instep of my shoe, and run downstairs to the driveway.

”Stop!“yells a male voice. ”Police! Put up your hands.“

I can’t see the face of the officer in the driveway because a floodlight on the side of the Wilsons’ house is backlighting him. But I see the gun in his outstretched hands.

”I’m Penn Cage! I made the 911 call.“

”Reach slowly into your pocket and take out some ID.“

As I obey the command, I speak in the calmest voice I can muster. ”The bodies are in the sunroom out back. Paul and Janet Wilson. They have an exchange student living with them, but he’s not here. He’s involved in the drug trade, and the killer tore his room apart. He lives over the garage.“

The officer moves toward me and checks my ID, then follows me back to the sunroom. He’s Natchez PD, not a sheriff’s deputy, and I’m glad for that. While he surveys the crime scene, two paramedics with a gurney arrive, followed by more uniformed cops and a plain-clothes detective named John Ruff. I’ve talked to Ruff five or six times, but never in a professional capacity. Usually I see him at the softball field. Like me, he has a daughter who plays.

”This is something, huh?“ he says in a soft voice.

”I can’t believe it, John. After what’s already happened?“

Ruff nods and steers me away from the patrolmen to question me. I answer his questions as fully as I’m able, but the shock of seeing three murder victims in one day is taking its toll on my concentration. The vagaries of fate and chance are hitting home as well. Paul and Janet Wilson must have been attacked only seconds after I hung up with Paul. If I hadn’t pulled over to maintain good cellular reception with Mia, the couple might still be alive. Or I might be dead…

While Ruff questions me about the immediate past, a memory from my more distant history intrudes. It was here, on Espero Drive, that the first homicide that ever touched me personally occurred. A divorced young schoolteacher was raped and brutally murdered one night while her four- and seven-year-old daughters slept in the house. Her killer wasn’t a depraved stranger passing through Natchez, but a fifteen-year-old boy with whom I had played often. I was seventeen at the time, and while I understood both rape and murder, I’d never heard of the two being united in the way I would come to know so well later, when serial murder became an American obsession. But what shocked me most deeply-and likewise the town-was that such a crime could intrude upon our placid little universe at all. Even now, twenty-six years and infinite blows of disillusionment later, the spectacle of Paul and Janet Wilson cut to pieces in their own home seems more like a stunt mounted for Punk’d rather than reality. As I recite my narrative to Detective Ruff, I keep expecting Paul and Janet to get to their feet, wipe the fake blood from their clothes, and burst out laughing. But they just lie there, bad sports about the whole thing.

At last Ruff runs out of questions and tells me I’m free to go. As I rise to leave, I hear a commotion in the front of the house. Angry voices, all male, the volume steadily increasing. I hear what sounds like a scuffle, and then a red-faced deputy charges into the sunroom. My fists tighten involuntarily. It’s the black-haired deputy who stole the fingerprints from Drew’s private bathroom while Drew gave his blood for the DNA test. Deputy Burns, I remember, or so Chief Logan guessed after I described the guy.