Riker tried to ignore the knocking on his motel room door, but the early morning caller was persistent. The shower was running in the bathroom; no help was coming from Charles Butler. The detective dragged his legs to the edge of the bed. The drapes were flimsy, and the room was entirely too bright. He put on his sunglasses to answer the door.

Standing in the awful sunlight of a cloudless new day was the young desk clerk he had met last night. The boy handed him a bag imprinted with the name of a local restaurant. “Mr. Butler already paid for it, sir. The tip’s covered, too.”

Evidently, Charles had finally broken the language barrier and explained the concept of room service to the staff of this backwater motel. And the tip must have been huge. The boy’s g rin was that wide, that friendly. Riker slammed the door.

Too much sun.

The paper bag yielded coffee to start his heart and pastries for a sugar rush. He lit a cigarette, and his life was complete-all the drugs necessary to begin the day.

Eyes all the way open now, he noticed the small black-and-white photograph of a young man in a rock ’n’ roll T-shirt. It was propped up against the alarm clock so he would not fail to see it. This was the picture once hidden in the lining of Savannah’s s u itcase. On the back of it was a date that made the boy close to Savannah’s age when this snapshot was taken. Riker flipped it over to stare at the faded portrait of a damn good-looking youngster in his twenties. Long, fair hair grazed the shoulders, and the face had the makings of rock-star style: a touch of wit to the eyes and the hint of a wild side in his smile. The image was worn in the center with traces of pink lipstick, and he guessed that Savannah had kissed it too often. That spoke to the absence of her lover. So the lady had lost this man. The affair had ended and the photo was all she had left.

Or maybe not.

Riker looked up to see his friend in a bathrobe. He held up the photograph of the boy. “The letters Mallory wanted-the kid meant old love letters, right?”

“That would be my guess,” said Charles Butler. “It’s the sort of correspondence that Miss Sirus was most likely to keep for all these years.” He nodded at the snapshot in Riker’s hand. “You saw the date on the back? The relationship probably ended when Savannah Sirus was as young as that boy.”

Riker set down the photograph. “This doesn’t t e ll me why Mallory would want that woman’s o ld love letters.”

Charles, the quintessential gentleman, kept silent, showing great confidence that the detective would work this out in another minute.

And Riker did. Everything was clear, for Mallory’s s hort note to Savannah had demanded the letters, as if she had a right to them. The kid had wanted her letters. “They were written by Mallory’s father.”

“Seems logical, doesn’t it? But more important,” said Charles, “the love letters were written to a woman who was not Mallory’s mother.”

That would explain a lot, given the compulsive way that Mallory had always kept track of every transgression, real and imagined. “So Mallory’s father abandoned her mother to run off with Savannah Sirus.” One more cheat, another old score to settle. And now, in Riker’s o w n personal autopsy of suspicious suicide, he had motive.

Mallory, what did you do to that woman?

“The first time I met your dad, he was a sixteen-year-old car thief out of California,” said Ray of Ray’s Autobody Shop. “Didn’t e ven have a driver’s license.” Mallory’s host sat down at a long wooden table stained with rings from a thousand coffee cups. “Well, not a car thief-I’m exaggerating. I’m sure he owned that old Volkswagen-even if he wasn’t legally old enough to drive it. But he tried to steal the parts he needed to keep it running.”

Mallory looked around the kitchen, aching to put it in order. This was the mess of a man who lived alone, though finger paintings and photographs of young grandchildren were stuck to the refrigerator with cartoon magnets. The washing machine in the corner was merely a repository for dirty laundry that even this impossibly grimy man would no longer wear. Here and there, she could make out the layer of years when his wife was still living. Signs of her were in the rosebud pattern of the curtains. The teacups were ornate. Judging by the pile of dishes in the sink, he used the good china every day-because it reminded him of his wife. She looked at the worn pattern on her spoon-real silver, and silverware was a tradi- tional wedding gift. The kitchen called up memories of her foster father’s house in the years following the death of Helen, the woman who had raised her from the age of ten.

Ray Adler poured hot coffee into her cup, then set a carton of milk on the table alongside a five-pound bag of sugar with another silver spoon sticking out of the tear in the top. “Now the last time Peyton came through, he was heading the other way, back to the West Coast, and it was ten years later. He had two college degrees and he was working on a third. That was a predictable outcome. Peyton was one smart kid.”

Mallory drank her coffee black and listened to the story of Ray’s father catching the young thief in the act of stealing engine parts by dead of night. This might have been her own story, but Lou Markowitz had caught her robbing a Jaguar when she was a child-a more precocious thief than Peyton Hale.

“My father didn’t t u rn him in,” said Ray. “Dad didn’t w ant to mess up a kid’s whole life for thirty dollars’ worth of parts. So he made Peyton work for what he stole. Well, it was like going back to school for my dad-and me, too. That boy could make a busted carburetor rise again from the dead and bark at the moon. In other words-the boy had a way with cars. All that summer, old junkers rolled into the garage, and they rolled out again the next best thing to new. It was magic. Our local trade doubled, and we even pulled in folks from Missouri. That’s when Peyton got Dad going on the autobody work, prefabs, real strange modifications. That got us business from four states. These days, I build race cars, too. I get work from as far away as Oregon. Oh, your father was so smart. The back seat of his car was just chock full of old paperbacks, real thick ones. Instead of a salary, Dad gave him a cut on the trade that summer. So when Peyton got back on the road again, he had a stake.”

“And he went back to school.”

“Yeah, he did. But he’d come back here every summer, work some to make his tuition, then drive on to California and back. Last time through, he was writing a history of Route 66. He wanted to get it all down on paper before it disappeared. But it was more than history. He was building a whole new philosophy around the car. Philosophy, that was his major in school. Odd thing is-it suited him. If you’d only known him, you’d see that clear as I do.”

Ray left the room for a minute or two and returned with a wooden box.

“These are things that got left behind on his last road trip.” He opened it with a key and a trace of reverence, as if it contained religious artifacts. Gently he picked up a photograph. “This is him and your mother. Yo u look just like Cass. That could be you standing there. But I don’t know the lady on his other arm.”

Mallory did.

Savannah Sirus’s young face was turned toward Peyton Hale who, like her mother, Cassandra, was smiling for the camera. Was this a picture of a crime in progress, maybe taken on the day when Savannah began to lay her plans?

The two men wore more casual clothing this morning. Of course, Charles Butler’s b lue jeans and denim shirt were matched by the same dye lot, custom-tailored and more costly than the entire contents of the detective’s closet back home. However, Riker felt great affection and loyalty for his own flannel shirt and authentically faded jeans that fit in all the right places. Years of wear had made them baggy and threadbare at the knees- good driving jeans. He was at the wheel and on the way to the sheriff’s office as they rehashed last night’s conversation. “No, I’ve got no idea what her father’s name is. I never thought of anyone but Lou Marko-witz as her dad. You think Mallory’s hunting her real father down for payback?”