“How’d they get in?”

“Back door,” Greg replies. He turns another page, holds up his notebook, showing Paris the now familiar bow-and-arrow emblem, a replica Greg had drawn in pencil. “That your symbol?” he asks, staring straight ahead.

“It sure looks like it,” Paris says, then lowers his voice. “Did I hear this right? No one’s found her brain?”

“Nope,” Greg says. “We’ve cleared the building. Nothing.”

“You think this fucker took it with him?”

Greg turns, fixes Paris with an adrenaline-charged stare, a look that Paris had seen a thousand times before, the one that says: We have eleven-year-old hit men in this country, Jack. People who fuck and strangle their own children. We have guys who dress up in clown suits and bury thirty boys under their houses; drug gangs that harvest unborn babies right from the womb. We’ve both seen these things. Shall we now be shocked that someone is making doggie bags of human brains?

“I guess I have my answer,” Paris says.

“I guess you do,” Greg replies, nearly salivating at the prospect of this new chase, this fresh opportunity to catch a murderer and put him on the other side of the bars. Or, preferably, in this case, the other side of the sod. “I guess you do.”

11

Murderer.

The word ricochets in her mind, around and around and around, a white-hot billiard ball that won’t find a pocket. Mur-der-er. Three syllables, three cushions. Constant. It used to be a word that she applied to real criminals, gangsters, the people you see in prison documentaries, their fingers wrapped tightly around the bars, their eyes boring through you with hatred and violence. But now the word applied to her. She would be one of those people soon.

“Murderer” is at the top of her résumé now.

How long had it been? One day? Two? She hadn’t slept a minute, of course. The first two pints of Jack Daniel’s had passed through her like perspiration, a thin brown mist that paused neither to calm her nerves nor to salve her Christian soul. Her commandment-shattering, burn-in-hell-for-ever soul.

Remember Mary? Isabella’s mother?

Oh yeah. The killer, right?

That’s her. Hear what happened?

No, what?

Died in a prison riot.

No.

Yep. She killed that black guy and they sent her to the Ohio Reformatory for Women. Died in a small pool of bloody vomit and urine.

The thought makes her crack the seal on the third pint. There is one more bottle after this one. After that . . .

She is sitting on the floor in her kitchen, lights off, save for the steady glow of her cigarettes, each one lit from the last. She is waiting for the knock on the door, the hard rap of a police-issue flashlight that will signal post time at the gates of hell.

Options?

Let’s see. If she leaves town she will never see Isabella again. That’s a lock. If she stays and somehow beats the rap, they will still never give her daughter back to her.

One option left. Take the money. Take her daughter.

And run.

Willis Walker had the right to be mad. No question about it. Given. Nolo contendere, your honor. He even had the right to call the police and have her arrested. After all, she had drugged him and robbed him, right?

Right.

Hell, he probably had the right to punch her in the mouth. The recollection returns her mind, momentarily, to the ache that had settled into the left side of her face.

But Willis Walker did not have the right to kill her. And that’s precisely what she felt he was going to do. He fired actual bullets at her. She had no choice. Put a thousand women in that situation and 998 of them would do exactly the same thing. Bash his fuckin’ brains in.

She takes another deep swallow, this one reaching her nerves, beginning to calm them. She feels one rung better. Then, the facts come into focus.

The woman at Vernelle’s was blond.

She wasn’t blond.

No one saw her at the Dream-A-Dream Motel.

No one saw her when she picked up her car at Vernelle’s. Besides, she was wearing a knit cap and a dark raincoat.

She was all but positive she had wiped down everything in the motel room.

She was fine. She will take her fifty grand—only three thousand or so to go now, she thinks with some twisted measure of accomplishment, thanks to Willis Walker—and leave this horrible life behind her.

She rises, puts the bottle on top of the refrigerator. Enough with the booze, she thinks. Enough with the worry, the guilt. She doesn’t need to apologize to anyone.

What she needs to do is work out.

The night is clear and cold, perfect for jogging, but the four or five packs of cigarettes that she has smoked in the last twenty-four hours had prevented her from achieving any real aerobic benefits from her lackadaisical run around the block.

She slows to a walk as she turns the corner onto Lee Road and sees that there is a man standing in front of her apartment building. The area is well lighted so she isn’t too worried about getting mugged. Besides, she has her pepper spray in her right hand.

But maybe it’s not a mugger, she thinks.

Maybe it’s worse.

Maybe it’s a cop.

She stops for a moment, gathers her wind, and decides there is no real reason to be concerned. The man in front of her building is probably a tenant, just a guy getting ready for a run himself—stretching, doing a few deep knee-bends. Had she seen him around the building before? She wasn’t sure. But she was absolutely certain that she wouldn’t mind seeing him again. Tall, wavy hair, big shoulders. He is wearing an olive and black Nike jogging suit, the kind with reflective white stripes on the elbows. He also wears black wool gloves and a black waist pack.

He is standing in front of the door, so there will be no avoiding him, no sidestepping a conversation if he chooses to start one. She approaches, unafraid, but still keeping her finger on the pepper spray’s trigger.

“Hi,” the man says.

“Hi.”

“Just starting your run?” he asks. Another knee-bend.

“Just finished,” she says, glancing past him, cringing at her reflection in the glass door. She looks like a wet collie. Of course. “Enough for me tonight.”

“What a pity. What’s your name?”

Her mind whirls. It is a little forward of him, a little too fast for her taste, but that’s not what throws her. What throws her is that she had not anticipated being anyone tonight. “Rachel,” she answers, as if the name were simply the next name up on a never-ending roster of deception. “Rachel Anne O’Malley.”

“You’re Irish.”

“Yes,” she says, telling the lie by rote. “Well, half. I’m Irish on my father’s side. My mother’s Italian.”

“Pretty volatile combination,” the man says, flashing a smile. “Italian and Irish.”

“Constant battle,” she jokes, surprised at her acumen at this after so long, shocked at her growing ease with the events of the last twenty-four hours. “Eat, drink, eat, drink, eat, drink . . .”

The booze, it appears, had finally kicked in, in spite of her halfhearted run around the block. Rachel Anne O’Malley is a little loaded after all.

He puts his foot on the decorative concrete bench and begins to stretch his leg muscles.

She has an insane thought: Maybe she’d take stud-boy upstairs. Maybe sleeping with a complete stranger will make the specter of Willis Walker go away.

Then, just as suddenly, she comes to her senses. She decides to run a little more, but alone. The last thing she needs is some cock she can’t get rid of, some pretty-boy lover to hang around just long enough to fuck up everything she’s worked for in the past two years.

But it seems that stud-boy, and his cock, are not quite finished with her.