EAGLE AWOKE AT seven, as usual, and checked Susannah. She was still soundly asleep. He showered, shaved and dressed, then sat down on the bed next to her and stroked her cheek. “You ready for some breakfast?” he asked.

Her eyelids fluttered and she moved a bit. “Good morning.” “Breakfast?”

“Toast and coffee, please.”

“Don’t go back to sleep; we need to get an early start.”

“Why?” she asked sleepily.

“I’ve been out of the office for a week, and things have been piling up.”

She struggled into a sitting position. “Okay, I’m awake.”

Eagle made coffee and toast and poured juice. Susannah’s hair was still wet from the shower when she came to the table.

“How are you feeling?”

“Good,” she said. “I slept very soundly.”

“Did you dream?”

“Probably, but I don’t remember what.”

She seemed to have no thought of what had happened the day before. She had been asleep for a good fifteen hours. He wondered if she had, somehow, blocked the shooting from her mind. “I’ll get packed,” he said, “and you get dressed.”

AN HOUR LATER they took the elevator to the lobby, and Eagle held the door for her while she spoke to the man at the desk.

“Terry, please get the carpet cleaners in and have them do the apartment,” she said, “with special attention to the area by the front door.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the man replied, reaching for the phone.

Susannah returned to the elevator, and Eagle let it continue to the basement garage. Apparently, she hadn’t completely forgotten about yesterday.

THEY TOOK OFF from Santa Monica Airport in Eagle’s airplane less than an hour later, shepherded by air traffic control to the Palmdale VOR, then cleared direct Grand Canyon, direct Santa Fe. Sped along by a strong tailwind, they got a good look at the spectacular hole in the ground and were in Santa Fe in plenty of time for lunch.

“Your place or mine?” he asked her as they drove away from the airport.

“Mine,” she replied. “I’ve got some stuff to do around the house. I’ll pick up some things and come to you by dinnertime.”

“Out or in?”

“Make a reservation somewhere,” she said.

They drove the twenty minutes to her house, and he pulled into the driveway, got her bags out and took them into the house. Before he left, he sat her down in the study.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m very well, Ed, I told you that.”

“Listen, you’ve been through a traumatic experience, and it’s going to catch up with you sooner or later.” He wrote a name and number on the back of his business card and gave it to her. “This guy is the best psychotherapist in Santa Fe. His name is Daniel Shea, and he lives and works two or three miles from here. I think you should have a talk with him.”

“Ed, please believe me, I’m fine.”

“You have the number. If you start to feel… depressed, please call him.”

“If I start to feel depressed,” she said. “I’ll see you later-six or six thirty, at your house.”

“Okay.” He kissed her and left the house, then drove to his office.

HIS OFFICES WERE only a year old, atop one of the taller buildings around the Plaza, the heart of the city. Eagle strolled through the outer area, waving at his employees. “All right, everybody,” he called to them, “get to work; the boss is back.”

His secretary followed him into the office. “There’s a stack of phone messages on your desk that weren’t important enough to forward to L.A.”

“Fine, make a reservation for two at Santa Café at seven thirty, please.”

“Will do. There’s some correspondence, too, and a couple of briefs that you dictated before you left. Please review them.”

“Okay, okay.” He began making phone calls, apologizing for his absence. Half the people he spoke to had watched his testimony at Barbara’s trial. One of the messages was from Daniel Shea. He called the number.

“Dan? It’s Ed.”

"Hello, Ed. Congratulations on your performance in L.A.”

“A lot of good it did me; she’s free as a bird.”

“How do you feel about that, Ed?”

“Don’t you ask me those shrink questions, Dan,” Eagle said, chuckling. “I’ll feel just fine as long as Barbara is in another state.”

“Is that where she is?”

“I hope I never know.”

“Ed, we’ve never talked much about this, but you should know that Barbara, like her late sister, Julia, is an obsessive.”

“And what is her obsession?”

“You.”

“Oh, come on, Daniel. She’s out; she’ll want to stay out. She won’t want to mess with me.”

“Are you forgetting that Julia tried to set up her husband for a triple murder and then killed my brother? And damn near got away with it? Are you forgetting that Barbara hired two men to kill you? I’m telling you, it runs in the family. I never knew the third sister, but I’d be willing to bet she shared the family trait.”

"Well, I was careful in L.A. after I learned that she had escaped the courthouse.”

“Now she doesn’t have to be careful, you know. She can move right back to Santa Fe, if she wants to, and live on her divorce settlement from you.”

That settlement still rankled Eagle, but it had been worth it to get rid of her. “Yes, I suppose she could, but why would she want to?”

“Ed, do you know what an obsession is? It’s the opposite of a phobia. A phobia is an irrational fear of something: flying, water, open spaces, almost anything. An obsession is a compulsive fascination with something, either a love or a hatred of the object. You are the object, and she is not going to walk away from you.”

“By the way, Dan, I’ve been seeing a woman named Susannah Wilde, and yesterday, in L.A., she shot and killed her ex-husband, who was threatening her with a gun. She’s off the hook legally, but I’m not sure about psychologically. It’s weird; she behaves as if the shooting never happened, and I’m not sure how long she can keep that up.”

“Tell her to call me; I’ll work her in.”

“I already have. I just wanted you to know who she is when she calls.”

“Maybe you should come and see me, too, Ed.”

“Come on, Dan. You know I have no neuroses. I’m the sanest guy you know.”

“I’ll concede that, but it troubles me that you seem unable to face the Barbara problem.”

“Dan, if the Barbara problem arises again, I’ll deal with it, but I’m not going to spend my days and nights worrying about it.”

“That’s a sane approach, Ed, but a potentially dangerous one.”

“Let’s have dinner soon, okay?”

“Are you free tonight?” Daniel asked.

“Tell you what, meet Susannah and me at Santa Café at seven thirty.”

“I’d love to.”

“She’s going to think I’m setting her up, so don’t bring up her problem.”

“Of course not. See you at seven thirty.”

"We’ll look forward to it.” Eagle hung up and went back to the work on his desk.