That someone as young and hot as Janis should end this way is sad, really sad, epic sad, and Chris Roberts doesn’t like to be sad. Sad is not who he is. He’s a fun guy, and he’s driving a radically hot vehicle, and he needs some bitchin’ music to chase away the sadness.

Puff Daddy is the right stuff most of the time, but that music doesn’t feel right for driving dead Janis to an unmarked grave. He thinks about it for a couple miles, and then he pops some TLC into the system. “Baby-Baby-Baby” starts to improve his mood, and “Red Light Special” and then—wham!—“Diggin’ on You” hoses away sadness. This was the true wood, back in the day. He was into it even before puberty, cool with the music, sexually precocious, ready for the future yesterday. Tionne Watkins. Lisa Lopes. Rozonda Thomas. Hot, hot, hot. And now their big hit “No Scrubs,” totally top of the charts. The music gets him up and keeps him up as he races through the predawn Texas dark toward a future that is Arcadian, that is inevitable, that belongs to him!

27

NO MATTER HOW MUCH shampoo she used or how long she stood under the hot water, Laurie Longrin didn’t feel clean. Although the water was so stinging hot that she turned a boiled-pink color head to foot, she couldn’t melt away the chill in her chest, couldn’t stop shivering.

Her mother waited with a bath towel when Laurie at last stepped out of the shower stall. Laurie preferred to dry herself. She’d been drying herself for ages and ages. However, she understood that her mother didn’t merely want to do it, but also needed to do it, as if reassuring herself that her oldest daughter was alive and unharmed, so Laurie allowed it.

Mother kept telling her—promising her—nothing like this would happen again. They were taking steps to defend themselves against the repetition of such a horror. Every adult on their property would henceforth be armed at all times. From now until Jane Hawk was able to produce evidence to expose these power-mad bastards and clear her name, Laurie and her sisters would be homeschooled, where no one could try to get at them.

Laurie’s mom didn’t get weepy at every sad movie, didn’t get emotional over every little thing, and there were no tears in her eyes now. She was angry, furious, incensed at the people who had invaded her home. At the same time, she was tender and loving. Also at the same time, she was worried and scared and trying hard to hide those feelings.

Even as rattled as Laurie was, she could recognize all these emotions in her mother because her mom and dad were the two people in the world she most trusted and admired. She was always watching them when they didn’t realize it, not watching them from a hiding place or anything creepy like that, just studying them to figure out how they were who they were. By watching them, she’d learned who she wanted to be and how to become that person, though she wasn’t that person yet; there was a long road ahead.

Mother didn’t lie. But she couldn’t guarantee that what had happened wouldn’t happen again. She and Daddy were people who got things done, didn’t take crap, and were confident without being arrogant. What Mother meant was that she would die to stop people coming down on her family the way the thugs had done this time.

Laurie put on pajamas and sat on a vanity bench while her mother brushed and blew dry her hair, and she let herself be tucked in bed because she realized her mother needed to do it. It was also true that Laurie needed to have it done, to have the covers smoothed around her and to be kissed on the brow, the cheek.

But when Mother wanted to sit bedside to watch over her as she slept, Laurie said, “I love you. Really need you. Always will. But Daphne and Artemis are just little kids. They need you even more.”

Her mother bent over her and felt her brow, as if Laurie might have a fever. “You’re going to be all right.”

Those words had not been in the form of a question, but Laurie knew that’s what they were. “Yeah, sure, I’ll be all right. I’ve got you and Daddy and Daphne and Artemis and all the horses. I’d be a totally stupid dink if I wasn’t going to be all right.”

After Mother left, Daddy came to her and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. God, I’m so sorry. But you … you were amazing, what you did.”

He’d been set upon by a band of vicious goons with guns, maybe FBI, maybe not, but with real-looking FBI badges, and there was nothing he could have done differently and still be law-abiding. Yet he blamed himself for underestimating how wicked even real FBI guys might be if they also were bad hats. He hated having let them get the upper hand to the point that they could do what they wanted, even tie him up. He was a tough guy. She had no doubt her father was a tough guy. But he was also a good guy, and sometimes bad people had an advantage over good guys just because they were good.

She sat up in bed and put her arms around him and hugged him hard, even though she was as tired as if she’d been walking all night through a hurricane, hugged him harder than she had ever hugged him before. He hadn’t needed to say anything. And she didn’t need to say anything now, because they loved each other and knew the truth of each other—and, besides, being Texans, they didn’t indulge in a lot of useless palaver.

Daddy used a dimmer switch to turn her lamp low, but he didn’t switch it off. He could have switched it off. She would have been okay in the dark. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. No one should be afraid of the dark. It was the wrong kind of people who might kill you, not the dark. But she was glad that he left the lamp on because when he turned at the door and looked back at her, she could see him better. She liked the way he looked—strong and tough, but so very kind. He could see her better, too, so he could see her smile. Laurie figured he needed to see her smile.

When he closed the door behind him, she closed her eyes.

In Laurie’s interior darkness, Janis loomed vividly, face distorted and strange, eyes yellow with an infall of attic light, her whisper as vicious as her poisonous stare, My little pet.

Laurie opened her eyes.

She had never been so weary, tired in mind and heart and flesh and bone, but she couldn’t stop thinking.

Jane Hawk’s mother had supposedly killed herself when Jane was a little girl. Her father was a famous pianist, performing all over the world. He’d been on a TV show Sunday evening, saying his only child was mentally ill or some such horseshit. Laurie’s parents didn’t know, but she’d once overheard them talking about Martin Duroc, how his first wife hadn’t really committed suicide, that he had killed her and gotten away with it, how even as a child Jane knew, heard him or something, but had no proof, which was freaky.

1

BORREGO VALLEY AT DAWN, fleecy clouds blazing bright coral against a turquoise eastern sky paling slowly to blue …

Carter Jergen and Radley Dubose are cruising around, looking for stains on the fabric of normalcy, which might turn out to be indications, signs, manifestations—simply put, clues—to the whereabouts of Travis Hawk.

More accurately, Dubose is thus engaged, while in the front passenger seat Jergen takes note of a seemingly endless series of things about the desert that disturb him.

Three ungainly vultures describe a narrowing gyre in the dry air above the golf course at the Borrego Springs Resort, perhaps eyeing the pathetic cadaver of an early golfer who has dropped dead of heat stroke on the third green.

“Who would want to play golf in a desert?” Jergen wonders.

“Lots of people,” Dubose says. “It’s pleasant to play in such low humidity.”

“Well, you’re never going to find me whacking a golf ball around in hundred-ten-degree heat.”

“I would never look for you there, my friend. I would assume your leisure time is full up with polo, croquet, and fox hunts.”

Another dig at Jergen’s Boston Brahmin roots. The remark has no effect. By now he’s immune to such ridicule.

“Anyway,” Dubose continues, “it doesn’t get a hundred ten for at least another month. Predicted high for today is ninety-two.”

Jergen says, “Positively frigid.”

Ahead, another denizen of the desert is crossing the highway: a six-foot rattlesnake. In awareness of the VelociRaptor, the serpent raises the first three feet of its length off the pavement and turns its head toward them with eerie fluidity.

Dubose purposefully aims for the viper. The truck hits it at fifty miles an hour, and for a minute or so, the entangled creature slaps noisily against the undercarriage, like a length of cable snared around an axle.

When quiet returns, Jergen says, “What if you didn’t kill it? If we get out and it’s alive under there somewhere, it’s going to be pissed. They aren’t that easy to kill.”

“My friend, I think you’re confusing rattlesnakes with the hard-boiled hard-bitten intractable Boston debutantes you remember from your youth.”