"You can't leave me here. I'm innocent."

"Quiet."

"You can't keep me here!"

"Please, sir, I'd appreciate it if you'd just shut up."

"Get the goddamn rope fingerprinted. Are you listening to me? Are you listening to me?"

Jim Slocum had been – all the way from the Auden campus – and he was pretty tired of it. He leaned forward. "Shut… your… mouth. Got it?"

"You can't keep me here."

Slocum wandered off to the apartment building's detached workshed. He went up on tiptoes, looked through the window and noted that there was no one inside then he stepped behind it to take a leak.

Breathing stale air Corde and Kresge moved farther into the apartment. On the floor next to them was a wooden coat rack and umbrella stand carved with the bas relief of a hound treeing a bear. Corde glanced at the bear's black glistening mahogany teeth and walked past it.

In the living room the scents were of mildew, moist paper, dust and a sour scent as if a pet had grown old and ill in the room. The light, dimmed by drawn curtains, barely illuminated the space, which seemed uninhabited. The bookcases were filled but the jackets of the volumes all were matte paper imprinted with dull inks, old-style typography. The wooden chairs were coated with dust, the upholstered ones weren't indented. A dust sphere leisurely followed Corde into the living room.

The men danced past each other, stepping into rooms and covering each other – a choreography that Kresge learned quickly. Corde could see he was unnerved and trying to look three directions at once. They secured all the rooms except the kitchen.

They paused outside the closed French doors.

Kresge had his index finger curled around the ribbed trigger of the scattergun. Corde lifted the sizable finger out and straightened it along the guard. He then nodded toward the door and together they pushed inside.

Empty.

Kresge picked up a cup coated with a moldy layer of dry evaporated coffee. He set it down. Stacked on the table were literary magazines, books, dense articles. "Delmore Schwartz: The Poetry of Obsession." "Special Problems in Translating the Cantos." "The Rebirth of the Poet Warrior"…

The feeling first came to Corde as he stood flipping through the blank notepad beside the yellow telephone, which was decorated with a sticker in the shape of a daisy. He paused as the crinkling chill began at the knob of his neck and swept down his spine. His scrotum contracted. One by one he lifted his fingers off his pistol and he felt the pads of his fingers cool from evaporation. He looked around him at the still, pale doorways, out the window at a black gnarled willow trunk.

He's nearby. I can feel it.

Kresge dropped the journal back down on the table.

Corde walked to the stove and touched the top. It burnt his hand. The tea kettle too was hot but then he tapped the metal again cautiously and found that the pilot light was heating the empty pot. He left the kitchen and returned to the second bedroom, which served as Gilchrist's study. He searched the desk. Papers, letters, drafts of articles. Doodles. There were no photos. Nothing gave a clue as to what Leon Gilchrist looked like or where he might be.

A chill again shuddered through Corde's back. Corde had to share this. "He's nearby."

"What?"

"I feel him. He's around here someplace."

Kresge pointed to a coating of dust on the wood floors and the linoleum. Only their footprints showed. "He hasn't been here for a long time."

Corde said, "We'll get the Crime Scene boys to go through it, take some paper samples and fingerprints. Let's get out of here."

Slocum was walking out from behind the apartment building. He met Corde and Kresge in the parking lot. "I heard something behind there. I went to check but I didn't see anything. If he had a car it's gone."

"We should call in a county APB," Corde said. He walked toward his car. "DMV license and any tag numbers. Let's get back to the office and fax an ID to the state and the FBI. Get a picture of him from the university."

"Yessiree, let's move," Slocum said.

They found though that they had to make a detour.

Which was to drive Randy Sayles to the emergency room at Harrison County Community Hospital. Corde drove, hitting speeds of close to a hundred on the straightaway of 302, while Kresge crouched in the back, applying fierce pressure to the slashes in the man's carotid arteries. Because Sayles's hands were cuffed to the armrest in the backseat of the car, Gilchrist had been free to cut deep and with fearful precision.

At the hospital, while Kresge cleaned up as best he could, Corde sat in a blue plastic chair in the lounge. He sat forward, his chin in his hands. The doctor walked out of the ER and after surveying the three cops chose Corde, to whom he said simply, "I'm sorry."

Corde nodded and stood up. On the way out of the door he glanced at the sky and believed he saw for a moment a silver crescent of waxing moon before it was obliterated by an oncoming storm.

The way Sarah thought of it was that her world suddenly turned joyous.

For one thing, she woke up without the pitchforks in her stomach, the way she always felt on school days and still felt sometimes when she awakened from a dream about class or about taking a test. This morning, sitting up in her bed, she felt perfectly free, floating and safe. It was like she had all the good parts of running away from home but still had her family and her room and her magic circle in the forest behind the house.

The day too was perfection itself. The sun was like the round face of a sky tiger and the wind blew through the new leaves so crisp and fast you could hear the voices of the trees calling to each other.

Sarah strolled outside and played a game Dr. Breck had taught her. She looked at the lawn and she said out loud, "G-R-A-S-S." Then came T-R-E-E and C-L-O-U-D. And she got the giggles when she pointed to Mrs. Clemington next door and spelled, "T-R-O-L-L."

She pointed to a cow, ten feet away, separated by the post-and-rail fence. The animal gazed at her eagerly as if it was milking time.

She lay down in her circle of stones and took her tape recorder out of her backpack.

Another good thing about today: she was going to finish the last chapter of her book. This one was her favorite story. She'd been working on it for days and hadn't told anyone about it. It filled almost half a cassette and she hadn't even gotten to the climax of the story yet. She'd give the tape to Dr. Parker, and her secretary would type out the words and Sarah would get the story back in a few days. Then she would copy it into the notebook and show it to Dr. Breck. She wanted desperately to impress him and had worked particularly hard on this story.

Sarah rewound the tape to the start of the chapter to see what she had written so far. She hit the Play button.

Chapter fifteen. The Sunshine Man… Once upon a time, deep in the forest, there lived a wizard…

The deputies got a kick out of Wynton Kresge – a man who owned more law enforcement books than they knew existed and who could outshoot any of them, either-handed, on the small arms range at Higgins. As far as they could remember there'd never been a black deputy in New Lebanon and it made the office seem like a set on a Hollywood buddy movie.

They were sitting around this evening, debating where Gilchrist might have gone. Prosecutor Dwayne Lovell had gotten a bench warrant issued and faxed to Boston and San Francisco, both cities having been Gilchrist's home at one time, then Corde added Gilchrist's name to the Criminal Warrants Outstanding Bulletin and Database for state and major city law enforcement agencies.

"What will they do?" Kresge asked Corde.