"Are you all right?" I blindly inched forward, hands held out in front of me.

"Benton?"

"Jesus." He sounded shaky as he got to his feet.

"Are you okay?"

"Damn, I can't believe this." His voice moved farther away from me. Glass crunched as he groped along the wall, and what sounded like an empty paint bucket clanged dully as he knocked it with his foot. I squinted when a naked bulb went on overhead, my eyes adjusting to a vision of Benton Wesley dirty and dripping blood.

"Let me see." I gently took hold of his left wrist as he scanned our surroundings, rather dazed.

"Benton, we need to get you to a hospital," I said as I examined multiple lacerations on his palm.

"You've got glass embedded in several of these cuts, and you're going to need stitches."

"You're a doctor." The handkerchief he wrapped around his hand instantly turned red.

"You need a hospital," I repeated as I noticed blood spreading darkly through the torn fabric of his left trouser leg.

"I hate hospitals." Behind his stoicism, pain smoldered in his eyes like fever.

"Let's look around and get out of this hole. I promise not to bleed to death in the meantime."

I wondered where the hell Marino was. It did not appear that SBI Agent Ferguson had entered his basement in years. Nor did I see any reason why he should have unless he had a penchant for dust, cobwebs, rusting garden tools, and rotting carpet. Water stained the concrete floor and cinderblock walls, and body parts of crickets told me that legions had lived and died down here. As we wandered corner to corner, we saw nothing to make us suspicious that Emily Steiner had ever been a visitor.

"I've seen enough," said Wesley, whose bright red trail on the dusty floor had come full circle.

"Benton, we've got to do something about your bleeding."

"What do you suggest?"

"Look that way for a moment." I directed him to turn his back to me. He did not question why as he complied, and I quickly stepped out of my shoes and hiked up my skirt. In seconds, I had my panty hose off.

"Okay. Let me have your arm," I told him next.

I tucked it snugly between my elbow and side as any physician in similar circumstances might. But as I wrapped the panty hose around his injured hand, I could feel his eyes on me. I became intensely aware of his breath touching my hair as his arm touched my breast, and a heat so palpable I feared he felt it, too, spread up my neck. Amazed and completely flustered, I quickly finished my improvised dressing of his wounds and backed away.

"That should hold you until we can get to a place where I can do something more serious." I avoided his eyes.

"Thank you, Kay."

"I suppose I should ask where we're going next," I went on in a bland tone that belied my agitation.

"Unless you're planning on our sleeping in the helicopter."

"I put Pete in charge of accommodations."

"You do live dangerously."

"Usually not this dangerously." He flipped off the light and made no attempt to relock the basement door. The moon was a gold coin cut in half, the sky around it midnight blue, and through branches of far-off trees peeked the lights of Ferguson's neighbors.

I wondered if any of them knew he was dead. On the street, we found Marino in the front seat of a Black Mountain Police cruiser, smoking a cigarette, a map spread open in his lap. The interior light was on, the young officer behind the wheel no more relaxed than he had seemed hours earlier when he had picked us up at the football field.

"What the hell happened to you?" Marino said to Wesley.

"You decide to punch out a window?"

"More or less," Wesley replied.

Marino's eyes wandered from Wesley's pantyhose bandage to my bare legs.

"Well, well, now ain't that something," he muttered.

"I wish they'd taught that when I was taking CPR."

"Where are our bags?" I ignored him.

"They're in the trunk, ma'am," said the officer.

"Officer T. C. Baird here's going to be a Good Samaritan and drop us by the Travel-Eze, where yours truly's already taken care of reservations," Marino went on in the same irritating tone.

"Three deluxe rooms at thirty-nine ninety-nine a pop. I got us a discount because we're cops."

"I'm not a cop." I looked hard at him. Marino flicked his cigarette butt out the window.

"Take it easy. Doc. On a good day, you could pass for one. "

"On a good day, so can you," I answered him.

"I think I've just been insulted."

"No, I'm the one who's just been insulted. You know better than to misrepresent me for discounts or any other reason," I said, for I was an appointed government official bound by very clear rules. Marino knew damn well that I could not afford the slightest compromise of scrupulosity, for I had enemies. I had many of them. Wesley opened the cruiser's back door.

"After you," he quietly said to me. Of Officer Baird he asked, "Do we know anything further about Mote?"

"He's in intensive care, sir."

"What about his condition?"

"It doesn't sound too good, sir. Not at this time." Wesley climbed in next to me, delicately resting his bandaged hand on his thigh. He said, "Pete, we've got a lot of people to talk to around here."

"Yeah, well, while you two was playing doctor in the basement, I was already working on that." Marino held up a notepad and flipped through pages scribbled with illegible notes.

"Are we ready to go?" Baird asked.

"More than ready," Wesley answered, and he was losing patience with Marino, too. The interior light went off and the car moved forward. For a while, Marino, Wesley, and I talked as if the young officer wasn't there as we passed over unfamiliar dark streets, cool mountain air blowing through barely opened windows. We sketched out our strategy for tomorrow morning. I would assist Dr. Jenrette with the autopsy of Max Ferguson while Marino talked to Emily Steiner's mother. Wesley would fly back to Quantico with the tissue from Ferguson's freezer, and the results of these activities would determine what we did next. It was almost two a. m. when we spotted the Travel- Eze Motel ahead of us on U. S. 70, its sign neon yellow against the rolling dark horizon.

I couldn't have been happier had our quarters been a Four Seasons, until we were informed at the registration desk that the restaurant had closed, room service had ended, and there was no bar. In fact, the clerk advised in his North Carolina accent, at this hour we would be better off looking forward to breakfast instead of looking back at the dinner we had missed.

"You got to be kidding," Marino said, thunder gathering in his face.

"If I don't get something to eat my gut's going to turn inside out."

"I'm mighty sorry, sir." The clerk was but a boy with rosy cheeks and hair almost as yellow as the motel's sign.

"But the good news is there's vending machines on each floor." He pointed.

"And a Mr. Zip no more'n a mile from here."

"Our ride just left." Marino glared at him.

"What? I'm supposed to walk a mile at this hour to some joint called Mr. Zip?" The clerk's smile froze, fear shining in his eyes like tiny candles as he looked to Wesley and me for reassurance. But we were too worn out to be much help. When Wesley rested his bloody panty-hose wrapped hand on the counter, the lad's expression turned to horror.

"Sir! Do you need a doctor?" His voice went up an octave and cracked.

"Just my room key will be fine," Wesley replied. The clerk turned around and nervously lifted three keys from their consecutive hooks, dropping two of them to the carpet. He stooped to pick them up and dropped one of them again. At last, he presented them to us, the room numbers stamped on the attached plastic medallions big enough to read at twenty paces.

"You ever heard of security in this joint?" Marino said as if he had hated the boy since birth.