After a moment, Dr. Yarbeck also smiled. Satisfied, she returned his credentials and welcomed him into her house.

“I’ll need to speak with your husband, too,” Vince reminded her as she closed the front door behind them.

“He’s in the living room, Mr. Parker. This way, please.”

The living room was large and airy. Cream-colored walls and carpet. Pale-green sofas. Big plate-glass windows, partly shielded by green awnings, provided views of the meticulously landscaped property and of houses on the hills below.

Jonathan Yarbeck was stuffing handfuls of wood chips in among the logs that he’d piled in the brick fireplace, getting ready to light a fire. He stood up, dusting his hands together, as his wife introduced Vince. “… John Parker of the FBI.”

“FBI?” Yarbeck said, raising his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Mr. Yarbeck,” Vince said, “if there are other members of the family at home, I’d also like to speak with them now, so I don’t have to repeat myself.”

Shaking his head, Yarbeck said, “There’s just Liz and me. Kids are away at college. What’s this all about?”

Vince drew the silencer-equipped pistol from inside his suit jacket and shot Jonathan Yarbeck in the chest. The attorney was flung backward against the mantel, where he hung for a moment as if nailed in place, then fell atop the brass fireplace tools.

Sssssnap.

Elisabeth Yarbeck was briefly frozen by astonishment and horror. Vince quickly moved on her. He grabbed her left arm and twisted it up behind her back, hard. When she cried out in pain, he put the pistol against the side of her head and said, “Be quiet, or I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out.”

He forced her to accompany him across the room to her husband’s body. Jonathan Yarbeck was face-down on top of a small brass coal shovel and a brass-handled poker. He was dead. But Vince did not want to take chances. He shot Yarbeck twice in the back of the head at close range.

A strange, thin, catlike sound escaped Liz Yarbeck-then she began to sob.

Because of the distance and the smoky tint on the glass, Vince did not believe even the neighbors could see through the big windows, but he wanted to deal with the woman in a more private place. He forced her into the hall and headed deeper into the house, looking in doors as they went until he found the master bedroom. There, he gave her a hard shove, and she sprawled on the floor.

“Stay put,” he said.

He switched on the bedside lamps. He went to the big sliding-glass doors that opened onto the patio and began to close the drapes.

The moment his back was turned, the woman scrambled to her feet and ran toward the hall door.

He caught her, slammed her up against the wall, drove a fist into her stomach, knocking the wind out of her, then threw her to the floor again. Lifting her head by a handful of hair, he forced her to look him in the eyes. “Listen, lady, I’m not going to shoot you. I came here to get your husband. Just your husband. But if you try to slip away from me before I’m ready to let you go, I’ll have to waste you, too. Understand?”

He was lying, of course. She was the one he was being paid to hit, and the husband had to be removed simply because he was there. However, it was true that Vince was not going to shoot her. He wanted her to be cooperative until he could tie her up and deal with her at a more leisurely pace. The two shootings had been satisfying, but he wanted to draw this one out, kill her more slowly. Sometimes, death could be savored like good food, fine wine, and glorious sunsets.

Gasping for breath, sobbing, she said, “Who are you?”

“None of your business.”

“What do you want?”

“Just shut up, cooperate, and you’ll get out of this alive.”

She was reduced to urgent prayer, running the words together and sometimes punctuating them with small desperate wordless sounds.

Vince finished closing the drapes.

He tore the phone out of the wall and pitched it across the room.

Taking the woman by the arm again, he pulled her to her feet and dragged her into the bathroom. He searched through drawers until he found first-aid Supplies; the adhesive tape was just what he needed.

In the bedroom once more, he made her lie on her back on the bed. He Used the tape to bind her ankles together and to secure her wrists in front of her. From a bureau drawer, he got a pair of her flimsy panties, which he wadded up and stuffed into her mouth. He sealed her mouth shut with a final strip of tape.

She was shaking violently, blinking through tears and sweat.

He left the bedroom, went to the living room, and knelt beside Jonathan

Yarbeck’s corpse, with which he had unfinished business. He turned it over.

One of the bullets that had entered the back of Yarbeck’s head had punched out through his throat, just under his chin. His open mouth was full of blood.

One eye was rolled back in his skull, so only the white showed.

Vince looked into the other eye. “Thank you,” he said sincerely, reverently. “Thank you, Mr. Yarbeck.”

He closed both eyelids. He kissed them.

“Thank you.”

He kissed the dead man’s forehead.

“Thank you for what you’ve given me.”

Then he went into the garage, where he searched through cabinets until he found some tools. He selected a hammer with a comfortable rubberized handle and a polished steel head.

When he returned to the quiet bedroom and put the hammer on the mattress beside the bound woman, her eyes widened almost comically.

She began to twist and squirm, tried to wrench her hands loose of the looped adhesive tape, to no avail.

Vince stripped out of his clothes.

Seeing the woman’s eyes fix on him with the same terror with which she had regarded the hammer, he said, “No, please, don’t worry, Dr. Yarbeck. I’m not going to molest you.” He hung his suit jacket and shirt on the back of a chair. “I have no sexual interest in you.” He slipped out of his shoes, socks, and trousers. “You won’t have to suffer that humiliation. I’m not that sort of man. I’m just removing my clothes to avoid getting blood all over them.”

Naked, he picked up the hammer and swung it at her left leg, shattering her knee. Perhaps fifty or sixty hammer strikes after he began, The Moment arrived.

Sssssnap.

Sudden energy blasted through him. He felt inhumanly alert, acutely sensitive of the color and texture of everything around him. And he felt far stronger than ever before in his life, like a god in a man’s body.

He dropped the hammer and fell to his bare knees beside the bed. He put his forehead on the bloodied bedspread and took deep breaths, shuddering with pleasure so intense it could almost not be borne.

A couple of minutes later, when he had recovered, when he had adjusted to his new and more powerful condition, he got up, turned to the dead woman, and bestowed kisses on her battered face, plus one in the palm of each of her hands.

“Thank you.”

He was so deeply moved by the sacrifice she had made for him that he thought he might weep. But his joy at his own good fortune was greater than his pity for her, and the tears would not flow.

In the bathroom he took a quick shower. As the hot water sluiced the soap from him, he thought about how lucky he was to have found a way to make murder his business, to be paid for what he would have done anyway, without remuneration.

When he had dressed again, he used a towel to wipe off the few things he had touched since entering the house. He always remembered every move he’d made, and he never worried about missing an object in the wipe-down and leaving a stray fingerprint. His perfect memory was just another part of his Gift.

When he let himself out of the house, he discovered that night had fallen.