Val hit the speed dial button to the pharmacy. Winston Krauss answered, but his voice was muted, as if he had an incredibly bad cold.

“Pine Cobe Drug and Gibt.”

“Winston, you sound horrible.”

“I hab on my mask and snorkle.”

“Oh, Winston.” Val rubbed her eyes, causing her contacts to slide back in her head somewhere. “Not at the store.”

“I’m in the back room.” His voice became clear on the last word of the sentence. “There, I took it off. I’m glad you called, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about killer whales.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m attracted to Orcas. I’ve been watching a Jacques Cousteau tape about them…”

“Winston, can we cover this in session…?”

“I’m worried. I was especially turned on by the male one. Does that make me a homosexual?”

Jeez, it didn’t worry him that he was a wannabe whale-humper, as long as he wasn’t a gay wannabe whale-humper. As a psychiatrist, she’d tried to drop terms like “full-blown batshit” from her vocabulary, even in thought, yet with Winston, she couldn’t keep the term from rising. Lately, Val felt as if she was running the batshit concession on the cave floor. It had to stop. “Winston, I’m putting everyone back on their SSRIs. Get rid of the placebos. I’m going to put everyone on Paxil to get their levels up as quickly as possible. Make sure to warn the ones who were on Prozac that they absolutely can’t miss a day like they used to. I’ll move those who need it later.”

“You want me to take everyone off of the placebos? Do you know how much money we are making?”

“Start today. I’m going to call my patients. I want you to give them credit for the unused placebos they still have.”

“I won’t do it. I almost have enough saved to spend a month at the Cetacean Research Center on Grand Bahama. You can’t take that away from me.”

“Winston, I won’t compromise my patients’ mental health so you can go on vacation and fuck Flipper.”

“I said I won’t do it. You were the one who started this. What about your patients’ mental health then?”

“I was wrong. I’m not going to put everyone back on antidepressants either, so you’re going to lose some revenue there too. Some of them didn’t need the drugs in the first place.”

“No.”

Val was shocked at the conviction in Winston’s voice. His self-esteem problem no longer seemed an issue. What a crappy time for him to be making progress. “So you want the town to know about your little problem?”

“You won’t do that. You have more to lose than I do, Valerie. If you blow the whistle on me, then I’ll tell the whole story to the papers. I’ll get immunity and you’ll go to jail.”

“You bastard. I’ll send my patients down to the Thrifty Mart in San Junipero. Then you won’t even have the legitimate sales.”

“No, you won’t. Things are going to stay just the way they are, Dr. Val.” Winston hung up.

Valerie Riordan stared at the receiver for a second be fore replacing it in its cradle. How? How in the hell had she given control of her life over to someone like Winston Krauss? More important, how was she going to get it back without going to jail?

Joseph Leander had the automatic stuck against Theo’s ribs. He’d thrown Theo’s gun into the backseat. Leander was wearing a tweed jacket and wool dress slacks and a film of sweat was forming on his forehead. The Volvo bounced over a rut in the dirt road and Theo felt the barrel of the automatic dig into his ribs. He was trying to remember what you were supposed to do in such a situation, but all he could remember from the cop shows that he’d watched was never to give up your gun.

“Joseph, could you pull that gun out of my ribs, or put the safety on, or something? This is a pretty bumpy road. I’d hate to lose a lung because I didn’t get new shocks.” That sounded sufficiently glib, he thought. Professionally calm. Now if he could just avoid wetting himself.

“You couldn’t leave it alone, could you? It would have just passed into history and no one would have noticed, but you had to dig things up.”

“So you did kill her?”

“Let’s say I helped her make a decision that she’d been waffling about.”

“She was the mother of your children.”

“Right, and she treated me with about as much respect as a turkey baster.”

“Wow, you lost me there, partner.”

“They use them for artificial insemination, Crowe, you fucking stoner. One squirt and you throw them away.”

“You got tired of being a turkey baster, so you hung your wife?”

“Her herb garden killed her. Foxglove tea. Contains huge amount of digitalis. Stops the heart and it’s almost undetectable unless you’re looking for it. Ironic, isn’t it? I would have never known about any of that crap if she hadn’t blathered on about it constantly.”

Theo was not at all happy that Leander was telling him this. It meant that he was going to have to make some sort of move to save himself or he was dead. Ram a tree maybe? He checked Leander’s seat belt; it was buckled. What kind of criminal kidnaps someone and remembers to buckle his seat belt? Stall for now. “There were heel marks on the wall.”

“Nice touches, I thought. I don’t know, she may have still been alive when I hung her up there.”

They were coming out of the forest that surrounded the ranch into an open pasture. Theo could see a metal shed next to a double-wide house trailer a couple of hundred yards ahead. A bright red Dodge truck was parked by the shed.

“Hmmm,” Leander said. “They got a new trailer for the boys. Pull up to the shed and park.”

Theo felt panic rise in his throat like acid and fought it down. Keep them talking and they won’t shoot. Hadn’t he heard that somewhere? “So you killed your wife for a big-screen TV and a tumble with Betsy? Divorce never occurred to you?”

Leander laughed and Theo felt a chill run through his body. “You really are dense, aren’t you, Crowe? See that shed up there? Well, I hauled twenty-eight million dollars’ worth of methamphetamine out of that shed last year. Granted, I only get a piece of that, but it’s a nice piece. I move it all. I’m a salesman, a family man, innocuous and unnoticeable. Who’d suspect me? Mr. Milquetoast.”

“Your wife?”

“Bess found out about it. Funny thing is, she was following me because she suspected an affair, but she never found out a thing about Betsy and me. She was going to turn me in. I had no choice.”

Theo pulled up next to the shed and turned off the Volvo. “You have a choice now, Joseph. You don’t have to do this.”

“I’m not doing anything but going back to my life until there’s enough money in my offshore accounts to take off. Don’t get me wrong, Crowe. I didn’t enjoy killing Bess. I’m not a killer. Hell, I’ve never even taken any drugs. This isn’t crime, it’s just a well-paid delivery route.”

“So you’re not going to shoot me?” Theo really, really wanted to believe that.

“Not if you do what I tell you to do. Get out of the car. Leave the keys. Slide over and come out on my side.”

Theo did as he was told and Leander kept the pistol trained on him the whole time. Where did Leander learn to do that? He’d hadn’t had a television that long. Guy must have taken a mail-order course or something.

“Miguel! Ignacio! Come out here!” Leander gestured with the pistol for Theo to move toward the shack. “Go inside.”

Theo ducked to get through the door and immediately saw rack upon rack of lab glass, glass tubing, and plastic barrels of chemicals. A single metal chair sat in front of half a dozen electric burners that were filling the shed with a brutal heat.

“Sit down,” Leander commanded.

As Theo sat, he felt the handcuffs being yanked out of his back pocket.

“Put your hands behind you.” Theo did as he was told and Leander threaded the handcuffs through two metal bars at the back of the chair and snapped them over Theo’s wrists.