I didn’t ask him what smuggling people across the border had to do with tribal self-determination; this person shut up and ate, pausing only to nod in agreement.

Afterward Linnie showed us to a guest bedroom, gave us towels, and pointed out the bathroom. Finally we were alone. But still Ollie looked grim.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

“We shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“In this bedroom?”

“In this house. These people are criminals, and they’re being kind to us for no reason whatsoever. They’ve been paid. We should be driving the hell out of here, now.”

I didn’t need to remind her that we had no car, and our ride wouldn’t be here until the morning. “If they were going to axe-murder us they would have done it by now,” I said. Then: “No, you’re right. Axe murderers always try to kill you after you’ve gone to bed, when you’re having sex.”

Ollie was not amused. She pulled off the pile of decorative pillows covering the queen-size bed and crawled in, still wearing the fleece suit. I stripped off to my underwear and got in beside her … where we lay, wide awake, listening to each other breathe.

“He knew about Rovil,” I said. “How the hell does he know?”

“He could have tapped Bobby’s phone before I made you stop using it. He could have followed you when you mailed the FedEx package. Were you followed?” She sounded angry.

“No, I wasn’t—fuck, I don’t know,” I said. “How would I know?”

“And we don’t know if Rovil’s still coming.”

“He’ll come if he can,” I said.

Ollie didn’t answer.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Dr. Gloria looked up from her notepad. “You have to consider what she’s gone through.”

What she went through? I thought we’d both had it pretty rough.

“Think, Lyda,” the angel said. “What happened back there? Tonight.”

Well, a shit-load happened back there. The fake drug exchange, the man in the black hat, Hootan getting shot. Then the run to the boat, and Aaqila …

Oh.

Ollie was facing away from me, her head tucked into her chest. I could picture Ollie, the rock raised above her head. The way she looked down at Aaqila’s body. She’d killed someone for me. I put an arm over her stomach and pressed my forehead into her back. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

Ollie didn’t move. Then she said, “For what?”

“For Aaqila. The Afghan girl.”

“She was shooting at you. I hit her in the head.” She said this calmly.

“I know, I know. But I put you in a position where you had to do that.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I sat up so I could see her face. “Ollie, I never wanted you to kill for me.”

Ollie blinked up at me. “She’s not dead. At least not when I left her. She was still breathing; I checked.”

“Oh. Thank God.” Maybe, I thought, Fayza wouldn’t hunt us down now.

“But I would have if I needed to,” she said.

Not for the first time I wondered what Ollie had done before she’d been an analyst. She said she’d been in the army, but she refused to talk about where she’d been deployed, or what she had done. I’d never pressed her. It wasn’t that kind of relationship.

“Keep telling yourself that,” Dr. Gloria said under her breath.

“I never should have put you in that position,” I said.

“You didn’t put me in that position,” Ollie said. “I put me in that position. It was my plan.”

“Because I forced you to break out of Guelph Western. I made you go off your meds, then—”

Ollie sat up. “Are you that egotistical?”

That stopped me. Ollie got out of bed looking like a child wearing her mom’s clothes. “You didn’t force me to do anything,” she said. She dropped her voice. “You didn’t make me go off my meds, or trick me into helping you. I chose to help you. So did Bobby. You think you’re so damn smart that you can manipulate everybody into doing what you want?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Of course she does,” Dr. Gloria said.

“I’m the one who fucked up,” Ollie said. She started pacing. “I should have known that the cowboy would still be tracking you.”

“How could you possibly—”

“Not the cowboy exactly, though I should have realized back at the marina that he was watching us too carefully. But somebody. Someone went to the church after you did, then killed those people and took the printer.” She was trying to keep her voice down, but she was talking fast, growing more agitated. “He had to have followed you. But who is he working for? We know now that he’s not working for the Millies.”

“Not after he shot them,” I said.

“So he’s working parallel to us, trying to shut the church down. His accent was American. Does that mean anything?”

“It sounded fake to me,” I said. “A little too John Wayne. He could be anyone who watched a lot of movies.”

“But American beneath that,” she said. “Midwestern.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t going to argue with a woman who used to monitor phone calls for a living. “So a drug agent then. DEA.”

She fanned the idea away. “No, not a cop—he wouldn’t be working alone. Maybe an ex-officer.” She spun suddenly, looking at nothing. “What if he’s working for the church? Plugging leaks? He follows you, sees you talk to Luke and Pastor Rudy, then kills them. He gets to Rovil somehow. Then he follows you to the beauty salon, then to Cornwall—I should have spotted him!”

“Easy, easy,” I said. “Edo’s a billionaire; he can afford to hire good people.”

“You’re sure it’s Edo, then.”

“Pretty fucking sure.”

She said nothing for a moment, then: “If you find him, will you kill him?”

I laughed nervously. “Jesus, Ollie!”

She crouched down in front of me. “You can trust me. If there’s something you’re going to do, or something you’ve done…”

“I haven’t—”

“You can know that whatever it is, I’ve done worse.”

“You want me to confess my sins?” I tried to make it into a joke, but my heart was beating fast.

When I was a girl, before my mother’s disease made it impossible, we went to church three times a week, and every night during revival week. It was at a revival service when I was twelve years old that I first felt God working on my heart. As I sat there in the pew during the altar call, I suddenly understood that if I didn’t surrender to Him I would go to Hell when I died. It wasn’t Hell itself that scared me—or not just Hell. It was the idea that my mother was going to Heaven without me.

I began to shake in the pew. I wanted to go up and be saved, but I was afraid to move. In my church we called that “being under conviction.” And then my mother touched me on the shoulder, and it was like a boulder tipping off the edge of a cliff. I plummeted, into the arms of a loving God.

“What is it?” Ollie asked.

My eyes had filled with tears. When—how—did that happen?

“You can tell her,” Dr. Gloria said.

“I’ve never told anyone,” I said to both of them.

Ollie put a hand on the back of my arm.

“I remember a knife,” I said.

*   *   *

I told her everything I could remember, which was hardly anything at all. I’d woken up on the floor of Edo’s apartment suite, blinded by a white light. In my hands I felt the wooden handle of a knife—and then someone took it from my hands.

“But Gilbert confessed to killing her,” Ollie said.

“Yes, he did.”

“So it couldn’t have been you.”

“Unless he was lying.”

“Why would he do that?” she asked. “Do you remember stabbing Mikala? Striking her at all?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know,” Ollie said. “What does your angel say?”

“My angel tells me what I want to hear,” I said.

“I will ignore that,” the doctor said. “Aren’t you glad you told her?”

‘Glad’ was the wrong word. I felt like I’d stripped naked in the middle of the street. The fact that Ollie had not shut down, that she’d opened her arms to me—I just couldn’t fathom that.