Praise for the novels of TAYLOR SMITH

“A former international diplomat and intelligence analyst, Smith uses her experience to good effect in her latest thriller.”

—Library Journal on Deadly Grace

“Taylor Smith combines the best of Grisham and Le Carré into a fabulous suspense thriller that is uniquely her own style.”

—Midwest Book Review on The Innocents Club

“Fifteen rounds of sturdy international espionage-cum-detection…”

—Kirkus Reviews on The Innocents Club

“Taylor Smith…John Grisham. It’s a perfectly plausible comparison—though Smith’s a better prose stylist.”

—Publishers Weekly on Random Acts

“The mix of suspense, forensic science, romance and mystery make this a real page-turner.”

—Orange Coast on Random Acts

“The story line is fast-paced and filled with numerous twists…. Taylor Smith…continues her amazing rapid climb to the top rung….”

—Painted Rock Reviews on Random Acts

“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spellbinding tone of immediacy.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Best of Enemies

“The pace is swift and the action is concentrated…making it a perfect summer read.”

—Orange Coast on The Best of Enemies

“In this absorbing tale…characters are engaging….”

—Publishers Weekly on Common Passions

Also available from MIRA Books and TAYLOR SMITH

THE INNOCENTS CLUB

RANDOM ACTS

THE BEST OF ENEMIES

COMMON PASSIONS

GUILT BY SILENCE

Deadly Grace
Taylor Smith

www.mirabooks.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A work of historical fiction like this owes much to many people, especially to the Allied veterans of World War II, to whom I offer profound thanks for their sacrifices. Among those, in addition to my father and my father-in-law, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to three people who were kind enough to share their personal memoirs with me: Ben Ward, U.S. Army glider pilot; and Jean Grant and Pam Orford, British nurses.

My dear friend, Holocaust survivor Louis Posner, was unfailingly generous with his extensive research library, as well as his memories of the events of that tragic period. Sadly, he died suddenly during the writing of this novel and never got to see the finished product, but for a spellbinding true-life story of his gripping experiences, I highly recommend Louis’s published memoir, Through a Boy’s Eyes: The Turbulent Years 1926-45 (Seven Locks Press, 2000).

The character of Miss Vivian Atwater is loosely based on real-life British spymaster Vera Atkins. After extraordinary wartime service with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, Miss Atkins (unlike her fictional counterpart, happily) lived to the ripe old age of ninety-two in a cottage overlooking the English Channel where, on a clear day, it is said, she could see the coast of France.

Special thanks to Special Agent Gary L. Price, U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, who graciously answered all my questions on his discipline and his branch of the Service. Thanks also to my writing buddy, Doug Lyle, M.D., for his medical advice, as well as former FBI Special Agent Jack Trimarco, who gives all G-men a good name. Deepest thanks also to my agent, Philip Spitzer, and to my editors Dianne Moggy, Amy Moore-Benson and Valerie Gray, who’ve been incredibly understanding through this past tough year. I’m very grateful.

It may be noted that the town of Havenwood bears a certain similarity to another prairie town I frequent and love, and that some of Havenwood’s colorful characters seem to possess the same spunk as my Lac du Bonnet aunties, who never fail to inspire me and lift my spirits. Thanks to them all (and the uncles and cousins, too) for so many years of love and laughter. And last but never least, love and thanks to Anna, Kate and Richard, who agonize with me through every page and rewrite, poor souls. Lucky me, to have you guys in my corner.

This is dedicated to my Auntie Olly Campbell, who wrote the book on love and loyalty—with thanks from the heart for all you do and all you are.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 1

Havenwood, Minnesota

Tuesday, January 9, 1979

She had no memory of her own death. No idea when it might have happened, or how, or how long she’d lain insensible in the netherworld between life and death. But when Jillian Meade awoke, she had no doubt she was in hell.

It was exactly as Reverend Owens had described in the fire-and-brimstone Sunday sermons that had terrified her as a child: acrid smoke that singed the nostrils and choked the lungs. A dry, searing wind that burned the skin like acid. Flying soot that stung the eyes so that she had to blink back tears to see. She was in a place of utter desolation, the darkness relieved only by the flickering of red and orange shadows writhing in the roiling smoke. A low vibration echoed around her, like the menacing growl of some great beast ready to spring for the kill.

And her bones ached, she realized. She was lying on a hard surface, and something was digging into her hip. Jillian shifted position painfully, and like a dreamer slowly awaking, she began to make out shapes in the murky shadows around her. She puzzled at what she saw. Furniture. She was on the floor, wedged into a corner, a tipped-over chair beneath her. She rolled to one side and pushed it away, the hellish light tracing the familiar spindles of its ladder back.

How many times had she sat on the hard, unforgiving seat of one of those chairs as a child, hands stubbornly behind her, fingers clenched around those spindles rather than around a spoon containing pale, woody lima beans or slimy Cream of Wheat? Stifling a cough, Jillian lifted her head. How was it that hell looked so much like her mother’s kitchen? The simple explanation was, of course, that she wasn’t dead, but back at her mother’s house in Minnesota. But why was she lying on the floor? Why was the house in darkness, except for that odd, menacing red flicker coming from down the hall? And why—

Oh, God! Fire!

“Mother!” Coughing and choking, Jillian tried to rise, but when she placed her hands on the ceramic tile floor, her palms, wet and slick, skidded out from under her. She propped herself on her elbows, instead, and screamed again. “Mother! Where are you?”

Blinking through tears, she could just make out the shapes of the other three kitchen chairs, still upright around the oval oak table. A thick, gray brume was circling the room, wafting across the face of the cabinets, undulating under the ceiling like toxic silk.

Avoiding her slippery palms, Jillian used her wrists and elbows to brace herself as she struggled to her knees. Through the archway leading to the front hall and the rest of the house beyond, the subtle pattern of the flowered Victorian wallpaper had taken on a gaudy orange glow. The fire seemed to be coming from down the hall, toward the living room.

She scrambled to her feet.

“Mother!” Her voice was a strangled bleat. A claw of pain ripped at her lungs, and she doubled over, spitting up thick phlegm, coughing and choking, hands on her knees. When the spasm finally passed, she held her breath and unrolled the collar of her turtleneck sweater, covering her nose and trying to take small, filtered breaths.

“Mother, where are you?”

This time there was an answer, but the voice she heard was deep and male. “Jillian? Are you in there?”

It was coming from behind her, she realized, at the back door. She spun around and saw a shadow at the high window. The door handle rattled, but it seemed to be locked. “Jillian!”

“Here! I’m in here!” She knew she should run and open the door. Or go and find her mother. Do something! a voice in her head bellowed. But she was frozen in place, disoriented and growing faint from the expenditure of scant oxygen.

The door handle rattled once more and then the shadow at the window disappeared. A split second later, a gloved fist slammed through the glass. The smoke stirred, twisting and swirling toward this new escape outlet as a great, padded arm reached through, easily grabbing the inside knob and turning it. As the door flung wide, Jillian was knocked to her knees by the rush of superheated air coming from behind her. The fire, fanned by fresh oxygen, was on the move.

“Jillian!”

A pair of hands hooked under her armpits, yanking her upward, and she found herself looking into Nils Berglund’s worried face. He was dressed in uniform, the fluorescent yellow stitching on his shoulder patches glowing in the dim light. His head was bare, and his cropped, snow-dusted hair sparkled in the flickering light as the flakes melted in the heat. He rose to his feet, lifting her easily along with him.

“What are you doing here? Where’s your mother?”

Jillian’s legs felt like rubber, and she was forced to wrap her fingers in the soft, padded bulk of his bomber jacket to keep herself from crumbling to the floor. “I don’t know! I was out cold, and when I woke up…” Another painful spasm seized her lungs and she choked on the smoke once more.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here!” Wrapping an arm around her, Berglund started for the door, half-dragging, half-carrying her with him, but after only a couple of steps, Jillian locked her knees and braced her feet—bare, she suddenly realized—on the hard tile floor.

“No, Nils! We have to find my mother!”

“I will, after I get you out of here!”

They were almost to the door, but she grabbed the rounded tile rim of the kitchen counter and steadied herself. “No, go now! I’ll wait here.”

“Outside, dammit!” he yelled, dragging her off the counter. He shoved her through the door and out onto the wide wooden back porch. “Get away from the house! The fire trucks are on the way. They’ll give you a blanket. Go!”

Not waiting for an answer, he left her there and ran back into the house. “Mrs. Meade! Grace! Where are you?”

Jillian wrapped an arm around one of the porch’s upright beams and drank a greedy gulp of fresh air, but it was too cold, too rich, and her lungs seized. Doubling over again, she coughed and hacked, gasping for air between each painful spasm that felt like a thousand tiny shards of glass slicing her lungs. Snow was falling around the house in great, feathery flakes, spinning and brilliant white against the black night. As Jillian struggled dizzily for air, the entire world seemed to be swirling.

Then, over the raspy sound of her own breathing, she thought she heard the faint wail of sirens. She pulled herself, hand-over-hand, along the freezing porch rail and looked out into the night through wind-whipped snow, ears straining. The half-acre lot on which the house sat was mostly wooded. At the far edge of the wood, as she searched for any sign of the fire trucks, she thought she saw something move—something or someone. But her eyes, smoke-stung and running with tears, couldn’t make anything out. One of the Newkirks, maybe? Was it the neighbors who’d called in the alarm?

A bang sounded from behind her and she spun on her heel. The storm door was swinging on its hinges, buffeted by the pressurized air from inside the house, slamming against the stucco siding. She reached out and grabbed it on the next swing, peering into the kitchen, blinking as smoke and hot air poured out from the inside.

“Nils! Can you see her?”

The only answer was the splintering of glass as the window over the sink just a few feet away on her left shattered and sent glass shards tinkling across the wooden decking. She ignored the sting on her feet as the smoke inside cleared briefly in the newly formed vortex of air. Nils was standing at the framed archway that led to the front hall, but no sooner had she spotted him than he dropped, disappearing from her sight line behind the kitchen table.

“Are you all right?” she called.

“I found her!”

Jillian held on to the storm door while she waited for him to bring her mother out, ducking her head briefly once or twice for a gulp of fresh air. The sirens were unmistakable now, a panicky caterwaul that pierced the cold winter night. She glanced over her shoulder. Through the spruce trees at the bottom of the drive she spotted red lights winking as the trucks rounded the corner at the end of Lakeshore Road and turned up the street toward her mother’s drive. Feeling was coming back into her legs, and the wooden planks were icy under her bare feet. She shivered, her jeans and black turtleneck sweater scant protection against the wicked night air.

Shifting her weight from one freezing foot to the other, she stuck her head around the door frame again. “Come on, Nils! Get out! The trucks are here!”

Silence.

“Nils?”

The smoke swirling under the ceiling was thick as soup now and dropping fast. Jillian hesitated for a moment, then drew a deep breath and ducked low, trying to stay under the worst of it as she headed into the kitchen, across to where she’d last seen him. Rounding the oval oak table, she saw his back, POLICE stenciled on his jacket in large, reflective yellow letters. He was crouched on the floor, and to one side of him a pair of stockinged legs lay akimbo, splayed feet shod in familiar, tiny black pumps. The pose was uncharacteristically awkward, but Jillian would have recognized those legs anywhere—veinless, smooth and remarkably girlish for a woman of sixty. A source of great pride to her mother.

“Oh, God, Nils! Is she—”

His head snapped up at the sound of her voice. “Jill, no!” His arm shot out to hold her back.

Too late.

Jillian froze as his body shifted and she saw what it had been hiding. She dropped to the floor. “Oh, my God! No! Mother!”

Her mother lay on the tile floor, head tilted strangely to one side, intense blue eyes staring dully into space, half-hidden under heavy lids. Her silver-blond hair was tucked up as always into a chignon at the nape of her neck, virtually unruffled except for a single strand that had come loose and lay across her slack jaw. Her mouth was open, as if she’d been struck dumb in midprotest. Jillian’s gaze dropped to the dark stain that had seeped across the front of her mother’s pale cashmere sweater. All color was obscured by the strange tinge to the light flickering from the hall, but she knew the sweater set was robin’s-egg blue, just like her mother’s eyes. Grace had been wearing this sweater as she sat in her favorite wing chair in the front room…. When? Only moments ago, it seemed, sitting there, large as life, her spine ramrod straight, held away from the chair back, her hands clasped delicately in her lap, knees together, legs crossed demurely at the ankles. Always the picture of a lady. Now, the sweater was ruined. Her mother was lying sprawled on the floor, and the irrational thought crossed Jillian’s mind that Grace Meade would be appalled to know she’d been found in such an ungraceful state.

“Let’s get out of here!” Nils yelled over the roar of the fire and the wail of sirens that were right outside now. He coughed, drawing in air that was rapidly becoming completely un-breathable as he gathered the small, limp body into his arms.

Jillian stood and pressed herself against the wall, repelled by the burden in his arms, yet unable to look away. Her gaze rose with him as he struggled to his feet. He was huge, her mother’s tiny form almost lost in the bulk of him.

He cocked his head toward the back door. “Get going! I’ll follow you!”

He shifted the weight in his arms for a better grip, and as he did, her mother’s head turned, those pale, dead eyes fixing Jillian with an accusatory glare. She recoiled, and as her knees buckled, she slid down the wall, landing with a thud on her backside.

“For Christ sake, get up!” Nils bellowed. “The fire’s spreading! The whole place is going to go!”

She wanted to run but she was nailed in place by the judgment she saw in her mother’s eyes. Nils hefted the body over one shoulder, freeing up a hand, and he used it to grip Jillian’s upper arm. She shook him off and turned away, squeezing her eyes shut. Anything but to look at the stare of that monstrous thing that was—but couldn’t be—her mother.

Mummy, no, please!

He grabbed her again, but she fought him off and scuttled down the hall, deeper into the house, moving toward the dull roar and the flickering light of flames that had now fully engulfed the living room.

“Jill! Get back here, dammit!”

Instead, she lay down on the threshold of the dining room, opposite the fire, pressing her cheek into its waxed and buffed cherry planks. The fire crackled in her ears, but beyond that sensation, which was more pressure than sound, she was aware of nothing. Her eyelids closed, and she gave herself over gratefully to whatever void she could find.

It wasn’t to be. Something clamped on to her arms, and she was lifted in two sharp yanks, first to a sitting position, then to her feet. She opened her eyes. Nils held her by the elbows, both of his hands free now of that other load. He shook her once, then again, all will had drained out of her. Her head flopped, her body limp, joints unstrung.

“Dammit, Jill, come on! Do you want to die in here?”

A sweet lassitude overtook her. Yes. Leave me alone.

He caught her face and cupped it in his hands, his wide, worried face filling her field of vision.

“Jill, please!”

He leaned toward her until their foreheads were touching, and he held her close, thumbs stroking her face. Then his head tilted and he kissed her, hard. She felt his lips on hers, and for a moment, she was seventeen all over again. The intervening years faded away, and they were Nils and Jill, inseparable, deeply, obsessively in love, the way it only happens the first time, when every experience is new, every touch a revelation. It all came back to her—the smell of him, the taste of him, the safe refuge of him.

When he pulled back and looked at her again, his expression tortured, she nodded. He got to his feet and extended a hand, and she reached out, ready to take it, until she spotted the dark stain on the left shoulder of his jacket. Blood, she realized, soaked deep into the padding. Her mother’s blood. She tried to push him away—push the blood away—only to realize that her own hands, too, were sticky and wet with it. She stared at them, horrified, and she screamed.

He grabbed her roughly. She fought him, scratching and kicking, but it was a hopeless mismatch. He was huge, well over six feet and even heavier now than he’d been in his high school linebacker days. He lifted her easily and was about to sling her over that same bloody shoulder when a lucky kick from her right foot connected with his groin. His grip weakened momentarily, and as he crumpled, Jillian pushed herself off his brawny frame and started to run. But before she’d gone more than a couple of steps, her bare heel hit a wet patch and skidded out from under her. She landed flat on her back on the hardwood floor, the wind knocked out of her.

She lay there for a moment, then rolled over—only to find herself right where Nils had laid down his bloody burden, face-to-face with her mother’s dull, half-lidded stare. Unblinking, it cut through her like a judgment.

She was, indeed, in hell, Jillian thought. Exactly where she belonged.

CHAPTER 2

Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, January 10, 1979

Much later, when it was all over—and yet not really over because, as Alex Cruz knew, there were some events you never truly got over but only locked away in that dark recess of the mind where nightmares live—afterward, he did the calculations, backtracking, trying to figure out the exact sequence of events. Where he’d been the first time he’d heard the names Jillian and Grace Meade. Whether he’d had any premonition he was about to encounter a face of evil unlike anything he’d seen before in either his professional or personal life. Whether there’d been any warning sign that this would be the case to finally push him over the razor-thin line between the letter of the law he’d sworn to uphold and the rough justice of the vigilante; the line between his troubled past and the uncertain fate that lay ahead of him.

Even before he’d heard of these two women, Cruz had already witnessed more than his share of the horrors that human beings could unleash upon one another. He’d been a grunt in the jungles of Vietnam, then spent more than a decade as a U.S. Army criminal investigator, specializing in homicide, rape and other crimes of violence. Now, as a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he spent his days tracking the worst of the worst—terrorists, kidnappers and serial killers who claimed the entire planet as their personal hunting ground.

At this point, there wasn’t much he hadn’t come across in the way of human depravity, but the events at the root of Grace Meade’s murder and the others connected to it would forever stand alone in his mind, unequaled in terms of sheer cruelty. Did he have the slightest inkling of that the day the case first landed on his desk? One thing was reasonably certain: On the night Jillian Meade was trying to die in Minnesota, Cruz would have been eighteen hundred miles away and, taking into account time zone differences, already in bed. While the fire in Minnesota blazed, trapping mother and daughter, Cruz was struggling with the restless insomnia that had plagued him for almost as long as he could remember, part of the price he paid for past mistakes. If Jillian Meade was trying to die that night, Alex Cruz had long since resigned himself to the knowledge that he was condemned for his own sins to live.

The day after the fire, Cruz arrived at the office early. If he hadn’t been trying to dodge Sean Finney, who worked in the next cubicle, he might have overlooked the notice regarding Jillian Meade, only one of at least a half-dozen pending cases sitting in his “In” basket. Given his already heavy caseload, he might have passed this one on to someone else, or at least delayed following up on it for a few days. But that morning, Cruz was determined to find a reason to get out of the office and avoid the loaded questions and broad hints Finney had been lobbing his way with increasing frequency of late. He needed a case that would take him on the road where he could slip back into comfortable anonymity.

Eleven months into a new job with the FBI, he was close to violating one of his cardinal rules: never blur the boundaries between the job and his private life. Maryanne Finney was Sean’s cousin, and Cruz had met her at a New Year’s Eve party hosted by his co-worker. An attractive redhead with hair that corkscrewed halfway down her back, Maryanne had an infectious smile that didn’t take no for an answer, even from a taciturn newcomer who tried to telegraph he wasn’t looking for romantic entanglements. Within hours of meeting her, Cruz had found himself accepting an invitation to a Sunday dinner at her parents’ home in Bethesda, seduced by Maryanne’s sweet Irish blarney when she’d assured him that it wouldn’t be a formal date but that he’d be doing her a favor by going.

“They’re a fine bunch, my family, but forever nagging me to settle down and produce a gaggle of little Finneys. They can’t help themselves. It’s a genetic defect—the Irish Catholic thing, you know. Last thing I’m interested in, believe me, after spending my days in a classroom riding herd on other people’s rambunctious monsters. If a stranger’s around, though, they’ll be on their best behavior. Might actually stifle themselves about my pitiful life, at least for one day.”

Like he himself wasn’t the pitiful one, Cruz thought, an old stray taken in by a kindhearted woman. And so it had started, light and friendly, but in the usual way of these matters, one thing had led to another. Maryanne’s enthusiasm in the bedroom, he’d discovered later that evening, was as cheerful and energetic as everything else about her. When she finally fell into sleep, it was deep and undisturbed, leaving him awake in the dark with only his guilty conscience for company. As he’d watched the pale luminous curve of her shoulder and neck in the soft glow of the candles she’d lit before they made love, he’d seen a Botticelli painting of uncomplicated virtues, a woman who, despite her protestations to the contrary, did seem to hanker after a man who’d stick around for the long haul.

He wasn’t what a nice woman like that needed or wanted. After all these years, he was too wedded to his solitude and too addicted to the job. Sooner or later, every woman with whom he got involved came to the same conclusion, and the endings were always the same—tears, angry words and self-recrimination. So Cruz had done what seemed like the kindest thing—he called Maryanne the next day to apologize for letting things go further than they should have.

He’d been avoiding Sean Finney ever since. Like every matchmaker since the beginning of time, Finney took bumptious delight in the thought that his introduction of cousin and co-worker might bear fruit. As if that weren’t bad enough, Sean was evidently plugged into some mysterious Finney family tom-tom network that seemed to have been vibrating since the moment Cruz’s path had crossed Maryanne’s, so that Sean spent half his time haunting Cruz’s cubicle, fishing for details on what was transpiring between them. She deserved better than the both of them, Cruz thought guiltily, flipping through the papers on his desk.

He was assigned to the FBI’s International Liaison Division, investigating a wide array of cross-border offenses—organized crime, kidnapping, terrorism, outlaw motorcycle gang activity, child abduction, art theft and violent crimes such as murder, rape and robbery—sifting through evidence, following up leads and liaising with law enforcement agencies domestically and internationally. During his Army career, Cruz had worked homicide cases all over the world, and the Bureau, desperate for experienced agents to help deal with the burgeoning of cross-border crime syndicates and international terrorism, had snapped him up as soon as he’d resigned his commission and his résumé had hit the street.

By 9:00 a.m., he’d narrowed down his day’s work to the two or three cases that offered him the chance to get out in the field. Before the day was out, the Meade affair would push all the others aside. It wouldn’t be long after that that he would be pursuing the elusive mystery of Jillian and Grace Meade with a single-mindedness bordering on obsession.

He was reaching for his coat when Sean Finney’s rust-colored head and myopic gray eyes suddenly popped up over the beige fabric-covered divider that separated their desks. “Hey, Alex! What’s cookin’? You comin’ or goin’?”

“Going,” Cruz replied, regretting that he hadn’t moved a little faster. Engrossed in his review of background briefs, he hadn’t even heard the voluble, heavyset Finney arrive. Yet there he was, larger than life, with his gravely smoker’s voice and his unavoidable bonhomie.

“Where you headed?”

Cruz held up a blue sheet of paper, one of the stack of color-coded international alerts that crossed their desks daily. “Gotta track down a subject, try to take a statement.”

The alerts, part of a global cooperative effort between various national law enforcement agencies, sought information and assistance in locating wanted persons. Red bulletins warned police and border checkpoints to be on the lookout for fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants. Green ones were for career criminals, like child molesters or pornographers, likely to commit repeat offenses in several countries. Yellow notices meant missing persons, gray ones detailed organized crime groups. The white notices, most often directed to Sean Finney’s desk, provided details on stolen art and cultural objects. Black diffusions sought help in identifying dead bodies that had turned up with false or missing identification.

A blue alert like the one Cruz held in his hand was a request from a foreign police agency—in this case, Britain’s Scotland Yard—to trace a witness to a crime. Many of these witnesses were actually suspects who, if the evidence panned out, would eventually be the subjects of red Fugitive Wanted notices. Once the suspect was located, an extradition request would be the next thing to come down the pipeline.

It was in this blue-printed notice that Cruz had spotted the Washington address of a witness wanted for questioning regarding two homicides that had gone down in Britain a couple of weeks earlier. One of the victims had been a seventy-one-year-old former civil servant by the name of Vivian Atwater, who’d been shot in her London apartment, which was subsequently torched. The other was a sixty-year-old spinster in Dover, England, and the murder of Margaret Entwistle appeared to have followed a similar M.O. Both women were somehow linked to an American whose address, conveniently, was right there in the capital, only a couple of miles from his office.

“ScotlandYard sent this over. They’ve had a couple of what they’re calling ‘elder murders’over the past couple of weeks,” Cruz told Finney. “They’re asking us to have a talk with a woman here in D.C. who knew both vics, see if she can shed some light.”

“She? We got a female perp?”

“Don’t know. Apparently she’d met with both victims a few days before they were killed. The fact that she called on one of the victims might be coincidence, but two starts to look a little hinky.”

“You got that right. So you’re gonna run her down?”

“Gonna try,” Cruz said as he started to lock up his cabinets.

“Need some backup?”

“I think I can handle it.”

“Oh.” Finney sounded disappointed. Cruz felt the air move as he tossed his coat over the spare chair in his cubicle, then heard the hiss of a match as his neighbor lit the first of many cigarettes that fouled the air around his desk daily.

All the more reason not to let the guy ride along in his car. Finney leaned over the divider. “If you change your mind and decide you could use some help—”

“You bet. I’ll let you know.” Cruz nodded and headed out of his cubicle. The squad room had filled by now, agents and analysts sifting paper, typing up case notes and working phones that never seemed to stop ringing.

Cruz made it as far as the elevator before his luck ran out. Finney’s voice cut through the hum like a rusty hacksaw. “Hey, Alex, by the way—seen Maryanne lately?”

Caught in a trap of my own damn making, Cruz thought grimly, as heads popped up all around. Just then, the elevator door wheezed open. He leapt on, playing deaf and dumb as he hit the Close Door button.

According to the passport details supplied by Scotland Yard, the witness sought for questioning on the two open-book homicides in the U.K. possessed dual citizenship due to her parentage. Mother: English. Father: American. Date of birth: July 14, 1944. Place of birth: Drancy, France—which, technically, Cruz supposed, would make her a citizen of that country, too, if she ever cared to claim the right. A war baby, obviously. Thirty-five years old, born on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.

Cruz, too, had an historic birth date: December 7, 1941, the day of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This coincidence might have seemed auspicious, had he thought about it at the time and been the type to find meaning in such things. If he had, perhaps he’d have been able to predict that, with such mutually bloody birth dates, he and this woman were bound to become the bitter adversaries they did.

The address supplied in the blue notice led him to a weathered, four-story brick apartment building near Dupont Circle in downtown Washington. On the intercom board between the building’s open outer door and the locked inner door, Jillian Meade’s name was listed next to 204. Cruz pressed the buzzer and waited, peering through the art deco stained glass windows of the inner door to a black and white tiled lobby. When there was no response after half a minute or so, he tried the buzzer again, then jiggled the handle on the lobby door. Locked. Turning back to the intercom, Cruz noticed a red plastic strip punched with the letters Super in white. He tried the buzzer next to it, with the same result as before. He had just about decided the trip had been a waste of time when he was startled by a crackled shout from the overhead speaker.

“I already called the cops, assholes!”

Taken aback, Cruz hesitated, then leaned toward the intercom grill. “Is this the building superintendent?”

“Who’s this?”

“Federal agent. I’d like a word, please.” Silence. “Sir?” When there was still no answer, Cruz rang again. Nothing. He was getting ready to lean on the buzzer for as long as it took when he heard a muffled but crotchety voice from the other side of the lobby door.

“Yeah, yeah, keep yer shirt on! I’m not jet-propelled, y’-know.”

Through the stained glass window, Cruz made out the image of a small, grizzled man in a dark jump suit limping across the lobby. The old man put one rheumy eye to the glass and hollered, “You’re no cop!”

“Yes, sir, I am,” Cruz said loudly, straining to be heard through the heavy door. “Sort of.”

“What ‘sort of’? Where’s your damn uniform? Ya either are or you’re not, fella, and if you’re not, then I can tell you right now, the real ones are on the way.”

“I’m a federal agent,” Cruz said, pulling out a leather folder and slapping it up against the glass.

The old man peered at it, then pulled back, head shaking. “Well, that looks real official, I’m sure, but I’m damned if I can read it, ’specially without my glasses.”

“I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sir.”

“The whoosis? Who are they when they’re at home?”

“FBI.”

The old man cupped a hand behind his ear. “Who?”

“Sir, if you could open the door—”

“Wait, wait, lemme open the friggin’ door.” The super pushed it open a crack but stood barring the way with his bantam rooster frame. Cruz towered over him, looking down at the shine on the top of his bald head.

“Lemme see that,” the caretaker said, waving a gnarled finger at Cruz’s ID folder. “Oh, the FBI! Why didn’t you say so? Jeez, Louise! I was figuring on the D.C. coppers.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir. I’m just trying to locate one of your tenants.”

“You didn’t come on account of I called the police?”

“No, sir.”

“Well that just friggin’ figures, don’t it?” The old man peered around Cruz toward the outer door and the street beyond. “Called more’n three-quarters of an hour ago, but they never bloody show up when you need ’em.”

“What did you call about?”

He waved an impatient hand. “Tenants were complainin’ ’bout somebody hittin’ the intercom buzzers. Then they go answer and nobody’s there. Kids, prob’ly. It’s happened before. You get these punks’ll lean on all the buzzers, see. Chances are somebody upstairs is waitin’ for pizza delivery or something, unlocks the door without checkin’ who is it. Next thing I know, I got graffiti all over the hallways and units gettin’ broke into. Real pain in the ass. One of the tenants says she saw some frizzle-headed guy wandering around a while ago, lookin’ like he didn’t know where he was going.”

“Did she speak to him?”

“Nah. Said she figured he was there to visit somebody. Only mentioned it because when she came down here, she heard a couple of the neighbors complainin’ ’bout gettin’ buzzed. I woulda gone up to check it out myself, ’cept I got this hernia problem. Goin’ in to get it fixed next week. Otherwise, I got no problem goin’ after the little buggers myself and givin’ ’em a rap upside the head so they don’t come back here. Figured I better call the cops this time, though, let them do it. Only now,” the old man added resentfully, “you tell me you’re not even the cops.”

“Sorry. I’m sure they’re on the way if you called.”

“Course I called. I said it, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. Look, if you like, I can go up there with you to check it out.”

The super looked him up and down for a moment, as though trying to decide whether or not Cruz made a suitable bodyguard. “Nah. It was over an hour ago already. If the guy was up to anything, he’s been and gone already. I’ll hear about it soon enough. So what about you? What do you want?”

“Like I said, I’m trying to locate someone who I understand lives in the building. A Jillian Meade?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, I know her.”

“She around, do you know?”

The super hefted his thin, blue-clad shoulders. “I dunno. You buzz her?”

“Yes, but there was no answer.”

“Then she’s probably at work.”

“Do you know where that is?” Cruz asked. “Where she works, I mean?” He was answered with another shrug. “How long has she been living here?”

“Oh, I dunno, couple, three years, at least. Yeah, at least that, come to think of it, ’cause she was here during the Bicentennial, I remember. She was one of the ones decked out her balcony in red, white and blue bunting.”

“What kind of tenant is she?” Cruz asked, pulling a notebook out of his hip pocket and making notes.

“What can I say? Pays her rent on time, quiet.”

“She’s single? Lives alone?”

“Uh-huh. Kinda shy, but okay, you know. Goes to work early, comes home between, oh, six and seven most nights, I’d say. Never had any trouble outta her.” The old man peered over Cruz’s shoulder, trying to see if he was getting this all down in his notebook.

“Any friends you can point me to? A boyfriend, maybe?”

The super thought about it, his stained fingernails scratching across the stubble on his chin. “Not really. All the time she’s been here, can’t say I seen her go out on many dates. Now and then, there’s this older guy comes around. Not that I’m spyin’ twenty-four hours a day or nothin’ like that, but my place is right down here on the ground floor, and I keep an eye on things. You gotta, in a city this size. Stuff goin’ down all the time.”

“Uh-huh. But this man who comes to see Miss Meade?” Cruz prodded. “You got a name, by chance?”

“Nah. Seen him come and go with her a few times, is all. Not a real social butterfly, is Miss Meade.”

“And he’s the only one?”

“Only one I ever seen. She ain’t ugly, that’s for sure, ’specially if you catch her without those glasses on. But she ain’t no girl no more neither, know what I mean? I figure she’s just another one of those career office gals this city’s full of. But, hey! At least she don’t make trouble, right? All my tenants should be so easy.”

“Okay,” Cruz said. “You say she gets home from work around six or so? But you don’t know where she works?”

“Well, now, hang on a minute, lemme think about that.” The old man’s bristly eyebrows skidded together over his nose as he frowned, thinking hard. “I asked her that once, now you mention it. A few months back, it was. I was up in her apartment fixin’ a leaky john. Just tryin’ to make a little conversation, ’cause God knows, that woman hardly says ‘boo’ herself. And I did ask her what she did for a living. Now where did she say she worked? It was someplace, you know, like…oh, hey!” He snapped his fingers. “I remember. The Smithsonian. Yeah, that’s it!”

Cruz’s pen paused in midair over the notebook. “Like, at that big old castle, do you mean, or at one of the other related museums? ‘Smithsonian’ covers a lot of territory.”

“Ah, well, now, that I can’t tell you. Anyway, what does the FBI want with Miss Meade? She in some kind of trouble?”

“It’s just a routine inquiry.”

“I had a guy here once worked for the State Department. FBI came around, then, too, checkin’ him out. For a security clearance, they said. That what this is about?”

“Something like that,” Cruz said. A flash of light bounced off the stained glass of the lobby door, and both men turned to see a black and white cruiser pull up to the front of the building, cherry lights rotating. “Looks like the police finally made it.”

“Well, it’s about friggin’ time.”

“I’ll leave you to deal with them, then, sir,” Cruz said, pocketing his notebook. “I appreciate your help, Mr.—?”

“Ripkin. No problem. I run a nice quiet buildin’, you know. Don’t want any funny stuff here.”

“Sure thing. Listen, Mr. Ripkin, I’m going to try to contact Miss Meade through her office, but if I miss her there, I’ll check back here again this evening. If you see her or hear from her before then, though, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention I came by.” Cruz had no idea whether or not Jillian Meade presented a risk of flight, but there was no point taking unnecessary risks.

“Whatever,” the super said distractedly, the glare returning to his beetle eyes as his attention shifted to the street, where two beefy D.C. patrolmen were lumbering up the building’s front steps. “About bloody time you guys showed up!” he hollered as the front door opened.

Cruz gave the patrolmen a sympathetic nod and slipped out around them.

There was a drugstore at the corner of the street. Cruz ducked into it to use the pay phone and put in a call to the Smithsonian Institution main switchboard. The operator, after consulting a master directory, was able to tell him there was a Jillian Meade listed on staff at the National Museum of American History, one of several buildings scattered around the capital that fell under the Smithsonian’s broad organizational umbrella.

The museum was located just across Constitution Avenue from the red-roofed buildings of the Federal Triangle. Its architecture was boxlike, a pink marble mausoleum that housed a vast collection of Americana, from the original star-spangled Banner that Francis Scott Key had seen “by the dawn’s early light,” to a pocket compass used by Lewis and Clark—a massive assemblage of memorabilia that ran the gamut from priceless national icons to sentimental kitsch.

In the main lobby, Cruz waited to ask the busy guard at the Information desk where he could find Jillian Meade’s office. All around him, the halls echoed with the shouts and laughter of children, the hissing and shushing of their teachers, and the valiant efforts of docents to be heard above the din of young voices and feet tramping across Italian marble floors. Once he’d gotten directions, Cruz dodged kids careening up and down the stairs as he made his way to the third floor, where, according to the guard, he would find Miss Meade in a corner suite of administrative offices next to the military history display.

Most of the third floor was taken up with exhibits of ceramics, printing presses, money and medals, but on the far northeast side of the floor was the permanent exhibit on the history of the American armed forces. Passing through it to reach the admin offices, Cruz ran an uneasy gauntlet past mannequins dressed in U.S. military uniforms from down through the years, standing on sober guard. There were artifacts and photos linked to various conflicts, from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First and Second World Wars and the UN action in Korea, all laid out in glass-covered display cases, a proud collection of weapons, tactical plans, strategic maps and portraits of victorious men and officers.

By contrast, Cruz noted, the exhibit on Vietnam was pitifully small, tucked away in the farthermost corner of the section. It was a case study in controversy avoidance, set up to carefully dodge the temptation to assign blame for the debacle that had taken fifty-eight thousand American lives in a war that couldn’t be won. Five years after the fall of Saigon, emotions were still running too high for any kind of national consensus on that war, and the display reflected the national mood, treating the period like the historic equivalent of a drooling idiot relative whose embarrassing existence the family preferred to ignore. One day there would be a reckoning, Cruz thought. But not yet.

He was almost past the exhibit when a photograph in a case near the end of the display area caught his eye. He stopped and stared, his attention snagged not so much by the platoon of grunts in familiar jungle camouflage peering out at the camera, looking pitifully young in their face paint and false bravado, as by the buildings and hills behind them. He knew this place, he realized. Had stood on that very spot. It was a staging area outside Da Nang, a camp from which a small recon unit of seven men, himself included, had set out one day in 1966 under the command of an incompetent 1st Lieutenant named Darryl Houghton. A scared kid from Dayton, Ohio, Houghton had tried to cover his fear with bullying and intimidation, then issued one dumb order too many and never came back.

Cruz felt the air move and he looked nervously over his shoulder, but there was no one else around except for a uniformed guard standing watch over a Civil War cannon. For the moment, he was alone, falling through time and space. Logically, he knew the drumming sound in his ears was the rumble of kids’ feet running up and down distant halls and not the drone of helicopter blades, but he couldn’t explain why his nostrils had suddenly picked up the distinctive odor of heated gun oil—the familiar smell of petroleum steam that issued from the red-hot muzzle of an M-16 rifle after it had been fired. And there was something else: the sour stench of rotting plant material, the kind that always managed to work its way inside his clothes and ears and nose as he crawled on his belly on the jungle floor, trying to stay beneath the sight line of roving VC patrols. Worst of all, he was smelling black vinyl body bags, the way they got when they’d been filled and left out too long in the brutal heat.

An eruption of childish giggles brought him back to the present as a school group guided by a harassed docent spilled around the corner and spread out across the armed forces exhibit. Shaking ghosts off his back, Cruz moved on.

Passing through a door marked “Museum Staff Only,” he found himself in the reception area of the corner suite of offices to which the Information guard had directed him. A woman sat at a secretarial desk, turned away from him so that he was out of her peripheral field of vision. Fingers flying over the keys of an IBM Selectric, she seemed not to notice the click of the door or the raucous group outside.

Approaching the desk, Cruz saw why. She was wearing a set of headphones, half-hidden in the feathery, swept-back layers of her blond hair, connected to a Dictaphone machine on the desk beside her. Putting a hand to his mouth, he coughed once, then again, louder. She glanced up, then did a startled double take.

“Oh, my Lord! You scared the you-know-what out of me!” she cried, ripping off the headset with one hand as her other hand flew to her heart. Her chair swiveled around. Her eyes were heavily shaded with blue, her lashes blacker and thicker than Nature had ever been capable of producing without the help of the cosmetics industry. Early twenties, Cruz guessed.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I tried to make as much noise as I could coming in.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, it’s okay. Never mind. Happens all the time. I just get so absorbed in what I’m doing, you know?” He nodded sympathetically and she gave him a smile. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here to see Jillian Meade.”

A perturbed crease marred the smooth expanse of her forehead. “Did you have an appointment?”

“No, but I was hoping to catch her in. It’s important.”

Deeply pink lips twisted in a grimace of regret. “You should’ve called ahead. Could’ve saved yourself the trip. She’s not in.”

“Will she be back later?”

“Unh-unh, not today, not tomorrow, either, I don’t think. I was told she’s out probably till the end of the week.”

“Out where? I happen to know she’s not at home.”

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“No, this is official business. Is there someone who can tell me where I can find her?”

“I’m not really sure?” the woman replied, her voice rising uncertainly, as if posing unhelpful responses as questions might make them less irritating. “I’m just a temp? The girl who usually works here was in a car accident a couple of days ago and I was just called in to take her place while she’s laid up.”

“So, who would know?”

“Maybe you should talk to Mr. Twomey.”

“And he would be who?”

“The boss here,” she suggested, cocking her thumb at a set of double doors behind her. A brass plate at the side of the door noted the room number and the occupant: Haddon Twomey, Chief Curator. “Can you hang on a sec and I’ll see if he’s free?” When Cruz nodded, she rose, then seemed to have second thoughts. “Can I tell him who you are?”

“Special Agent Cruz with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Whoa, FBI? Okay then, let me go ask.”

She disappeared into the corner office. As murmuring voices sounded from behind the door, Cruz looked around the reception area. It was a study in beige, furnished entirely in plastic and steel. The tan walls were covered in brightly colored posters left over from the Bicentennial celebration. A half-dozen buff-colored, steel-framed chairs lined the walls, and back issues of the Smithsonian Magazine were splayed across beige plastic cubes that passed for tables. There were three other doors around the reception area besides the one he’d come in, all made of the same dark wood as the curator’s, although these others were single rather than double openings. None had name plates. Maybe one of these was Jillian Meade’s office.

Cruz heard the soft click of a door latch and turned as the receptionist came back and nodded, holding the door open for him. “You can go in now,” she said, pressing herself against the door as he passed, then closing it behind her.

The office in which he found himself was markedly more luxurious than the utilitarian reception area. A massive desk the size of a dinghy took up nearly half the room, angled catty-corner against fully loaded bookshelves that covered two of the room’s four walls. The desk, made of dark wood, was intricately carved with pillars and scrolls, and it looked very old—and, Cruz thought, very expensive. Several brightly colored area rugs covered the same nondescript carpet as in the reception area. The rugs, Cruz was reasonably certain, were genuine Navajo, and old ones, too. As for the rest of the pieces in the room, he suspected were rare antiques, as well.

Opposite the desk were two floor-to-ceiling windows set into the building’s northeast corner, one on either side of the supporting corner block. Heavy silk panels in a rich shade of gold framed the windows, while the glass was covered with sheer gauzy material that did little to cut down the amount of light from the clear January day streaming in.

“Good afternoon…Agent Cruz, I believe?” The carefully modulated voice came from a silhouette that stood in front of the windows, back-lit so that Cruz found it impossible to tell whether the man was facing him or not.

“Yes, sir.” Crossing the room, Cruz angled his approach so that he put the windows to one side, affording a better view of the other man. His eyes adjusted to the change in the light, and Twomey’s features began to emerge from shadow.

He was tall, thin and patrician-looking, slightly stooped at the shoulder. Somewhere in his fifties, Cruz estimated by the mix of gray and white in his hair, which swept straight back off Twomey’s high brow, waving slightly over his collar. His blue pin-striped shirt was open-necked under a crested navy blazer that seemed faintly nautical, although it probably reflected his status as an alumnus of some Ivy League school. Was this the older man the building super had said sometimes called on Jillian Meade? Cruz wondered. The man’s eyebrows were tufted, his eyes half-lidded, as if he were bored or weary or both. His nose was long and prominent, with deep crevices running from either nostril to the edges of his plummy, turned-down lips, giving him the appearance of being permanently offended by the whiff of something malodorous in the air. Just the sight of him made every working class hackle on Cruz’s neck stand up in protest.

“So, you’re a junior G-man, are you?” Twomey asked, his hand dangling in Cruz’s general direction.

Cruz shook it and found the skin icy to the touch and uncommonly smooth for a man. Like picking up a carp.

“We’ve had occasion to seek your people’s assistance in the past,” Twomey said. “An irreplaceable silver tea service manufactured by Paul Revere himself went missing from one of our exhibits some time back. The FBI said they had a lead to a New Orleans-based antique dealer of rather shady reputation. They suspected he’d secreted it out of the country, hidden in plain view in a shipment of English silver that an equally dubious but very wealthy client living in Barbados had bought at an auction around the same time. There’d been an export permit issued, but I suppose most government bureaucrats wouldn’t know plate from pewter, much less Paul Revere, would they?”

Cruz opted not to speculate about which ignorant bureaucrats he was referring to. And while they were on the subject, wasn’t Twomey on the government payroll, too? “Did you ever get it back?”

“No. Your people still haven’t come through for us.”

Cruz had the feeling he was supposed to feel guilty, but he was damned if he was going to apologize for not showing up with Twomey’s missing teapot.

“I’m trying to get in touch with Miss Meade,” he said.

“Yes, so the girl said. Jillian is one of my curatorial associates, but she’s not in today. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Can you tell me where I might find her?”

“She’s out of town.”

“A business trip?”

“No, personal. What’s this about?”

Cruz gave him the same stock answer he’d given the caretaker—the same answer he gave anyone with no need to know and without the sense to realize they had no need to know. “It’s a routine matter. When do you expect her back at work?”

“I’m not sure. Friday, maybe? Monday, at the latest, she said.”

“Where did she go?”

“To Minnesota to see her mother. I had the impression there was a problem at home, although Jillian didn’t come right out and say, and I certainly wasn’t about to pry.”

“What kind of problem?”

Twomey moved to the desk and perched on the edge of it. “As I say, I didn’t press her on it. I do know that her mother had a cancer scare last year, so perhaps there was a recurrence.”

“Where in Minnesota, do you know?”

“A small town called Havenwood. It’s about a hundred miles from Minneapolis, I think Jillian said. She grew up there.”

“She wasn’t born there,” Cruz noted.

Twomey arched a brow, and the disapproving lines around his mouth deepened. “No, she wasn’t, as a matter of fact. Been doing your homework, I see. She was born in France. Her mother was an English war bride, her father an American pilot with the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. That’s—”

“The forerunner of the CIA, yes, I know,” Cruz said. He might not know plate from pewter but he wasn’t a total idiot. “So the family came back to the States after the war?”

“Jillian and her mother did. Her father was killed in action over there. His parents invited Mrs. Meade to bring the baby—Jillian, that is—and come live with them. That’s how she ended up out there, although Jillian left after high school. Attended Georgetown University, and then she came to work here.”

“What does she do here? You said she’s a curatorial associate. What does that mean, exactly?”

Twomey shrugged. “She puts together exhibits for our permanent and roving collections. Researches background materials, writes pamphlets and monographs. We have several different departments here, a couple of dozen researchers, but Jillian is really quite the best of the lot. Her specialty is the military and social history of World War II. She’s been working on an oral history for the past four or five years, collecting interviews with people who were involved in various anti-Nazi operations in the European theater. It’s fascinating work, you know. That generation isn’t going to be around forever, and she’s doing invaluable work, collecting their reminiscences. I’ve been encouraging her to develop it into a book or a doctoral thesis.”

“She’s been looking at operations in the European theater?” Cruz said, his interest piqued now.

“Yes. It started with recently declassified OSS files here in Washington that I’d arranged for her to have access to. Jillian began sifting through them and then got permission to follow up with some of the retired operatives. She’s amassed quite an amount of interesting material. As I say, I think she has the makings of a book. Jillian’s published several monographs and co-authored a couple of exhibit-related books under the auspices of our presses here, but I think this is going to be her breakout work.”

“You seem very impressed with her.”

“Absolutely. In the field of history, Agent Cruz, there are good researchers, good interviewers and good writers. Rarely, though, do you find all three in one person. Jillian is that rare exception. Unfortunately, unlike others of far lesser talent, she doesn’t seem to realize her own gifts. I must confess, I despair sometimes of her reaching her full potential. It’s a question of self-confidence, isn’t it? But I’m trying to encourage her in any way I can.”

“So, you’re sort of Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle?”

Twomey arched his brow slightly. “If I can mentor someone with Miss Meade’s talents, Agent Cruz, then I am happy to do that.”

Right, Cruz thought. The guy’s in love with her. If she attracted a prig like this Twomey, he could just imagine the kind of dry, repressed, severe old maid this Jillian Meade was going to turn out to be. But that said, she hardly sounded like someone who’d be out creating mayhem and leaving dead bodies in her wake. “Had she been to Europe lately?”

“Yes. She was over in London and Paris last month. She’s working on a new exhibit we’re pulling together here on American covert support to the French Resistance. We’d been offered access to some materials at the Imperial War Museum in London and the Quai d’Orsay. I sent Jillian over to take a look. She was obviously the best person for the job, but I was encouraging her while she was there to follow up on her own research, as well.”

“What did she tell you about her trip? Anything unusual happen while she was over there?”

“Like what?”

Like, two people were murdered and she was among the last people to see them alive, Cruz was tempted to say. But he was there to get information, not offer it. “Anything unusual,” he repeated, shrugging. “Anyone she met, or anything she might have seen that was out of the ordinary.”

“I haven’t really gotten the full rundown yet on how she made out over there. She just got back a few days before Christmas, and then she was leaving to spend the holidays with her mother. I was off with friends and then attending a symposium at Harvard last week. I’d no sooner gotten back into town than Jillian told me she had to go out to Minnesota and look in on her mother. Ships passing in the night, you see.”

“The girl outside said she was due back Friday?”

“Or Monday,” Twomey replied, nodding.

“Do you happen to have a number for her mother in Minnesota?” Cruz asked. Whatever else was going on, it was stretching credulity to think this Meade woman was going to be a murder suspect. Maybe this was one of those cases he could dispatch with a quick telephone interview, then move on to other, more pressing cases.

Twomey moved behind his desk, rummaging around in loose papers. “Yes, she did leave a number. She’d sent some new brochures off to the printer, and I wanted to be able to get in touch with her if there was any problem with them. Look, what is this about? Why is the FBI, for heaven sake, taking an interest in Jillian Meade?”

Cruz shrugged. “Just a routine inquiry, as I said.”

“Aha, there it is!” Twomey spotted a scrap of paper taped to the corner of his telephone. Withdrawing a fountain pen from a burled walnut holder on his desk, he copied a number on a piece of paper and handed it to Cruz.

“Appreciate the information, Mr. Twomey.”

“It’s Dr. Twomey, actually.”

“Right,” Cruz said. He was already at the door with a hand on the knob, but he paused to examine a row of framed photographs and certificates he hadn’t noticed on the back wall. Most seemed to feature Twomey himself, alone or in a group, standing at lecterns, or shaking hands with assorted dignitaries. “Is Jillian Meade in any of these?”

“I’m not sure. Let’s see…” Twomey moved beside him to scan the collection. “No…no…yes, there she is. This was taken during the Bicentennial two years ago. There was a Smithsonian ball on the Fourth of July, and we all ended up on the roof watching the fireworks. That’s Jillian right there, in the red dress.”

Cruz leaned in to peer at the group Twomey indicated. He was a little surprised to find Jillian Meade not quite as homely as he’d been picturing her. She was one of a dozen men and women of various ages, the men in black tie, the women in gowns, caught by someone’s camera as the fireworks exploded in the air behind them. She appeared to be slim and fairly tall, with long, dark hair tucked behind her ears and a soft fringe of bangs. She wore a simple red dress that rose high on her neck but was sliced away at the shoulders, halter-style. Like several others in the picture, she was holding up a glass of wine in an apparent toast to the nation’s two hundredth birthday. But where other faces were laughing or animated, her expression was relatively sober as she stared, clear-eyed, at the camera, only a hint of a smile—superior? sardonic?—at the edge of her lips. Twomey was in the group, too, Cruz noted, holding his glass up distractedly to the camera, his gaze focused…where?

On Jillian Meade.

CHAPTER 3

Montrose, Minnesota

Wednesday, January 10, 1979

Something clattered, faintly melodic, like wooden wind chimes or a handful of pencils dropped on a floor. The sound pulled her out of the drifting, soundless, seamless place in which she’d been floating. Jillian lay still, her senses on alert, afraid to open her eyes. She wanted to go back to that quiet place, but it was like trying to hold smoke in your hand. It slipped away on a wisp of air.

Whatever sound had awoken her was gone, too, before she could identify it. She heard only a low murmuring, like voices whispering from the bottom of a well, subdued and just beyond the range of the audible. She let the hum carry her along, until at last she felt herself floating again, drifting, back into the comfort of the white void. Stay here, the murmuring voices seemed to say. Stay here with us where it’s safe.

Fine with her. There was nothing for her outside that formless place. She was content to drift there forever, a shade without substance. Anything else was too hard.

“Jillian?”

She felt a hand at her shoulder, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through her, as if she’d been touched by a cattle prod. Her body contorted, folding in on itself. The hand closed over her shoulder, a squeeze of reassurance, and then a light shake.

“It’s time to wake up. Open your eyes now.”

She was terrified, but she had no will of her own. The dead are like that, aren’t they? Jillian thought.

She opened her eyes on horizontal bands of silver. She was supposed to be dead, but those looked like guardrails made of brushed steel, just inches from her face. They seemed very real. So did the wall beyond, solid-looking, a flat, dull green not found in nature. Her fingers slid tentatively across a field of bleached cotton to test the rails. Sure enough, they were hard and cold to the touch.

“How are you feeling, Jillian?” The voice came from behind her, a woman’s voice, vaguely familiar and yet not. “I’m Dr. Kandinsky. I’ve been in to see you before. Do you remember?”

A doctor? And so…guardrails…a hospital bed. She was in a hospital bed. Was she sick? Or had she been in an accident? A car accident? When? How long had she been here? Obviously long enough, Jillian realized, for this doctor to have been to see her more than once. She stared at the wall, terrified to move. Terrified to breathe. If she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, she wouldn’t feel pain.

But she was breathing and every inhalation hurt. She took a quick survey of the rest of her body. She could see, she could hear. She could smell—antiseptic, a plastic smell, and… smoke? She could feel air blowing gently into her nostrils. Could feel the soft mattress under the right side of her face, and a tiny, line-like hump along her cheekbone. A hose. She was hooked up to a thin plastic hose pumping air…no, oxygen, probably, into rasping lungs that hurt with every breath.

All right, she calculated, she was lying on her right side in a hospital bed looking through guardrails at a green wall, breathing air that hurt. What was wrong with her? She didn’t feel particularly sick or feverish, though she was very groggy. Carefully, she flexed her muscles, group by group, without moving her limbs, an isometric test of a body that hadn’t even seemed corporeal until just moments ago. All she wanted was to go back to that soft, quiet, safe place, but the voice wouldn’t let her.

“Jillian? Come on now, it’s time to wake up,” it said again, kindly but firmly.

Arms, hands, legs, feet, neck, spine. Everything there, everything working. No pain, except for a dull headache and, when she inhaled, the sensation that her lungs were full of sand. She also had a sick, terrified feeling in the pit of her stomach that something was very, very wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be there. If she could only go back to the quiet place.

Leave me alone!

“Jillian, how about if you roll over and sit up? Can you do that?”

The pressure increased on her shoulder, trying to force her onto her back, pulling her toward the voice.

No!

Jillian’s left hand shot out, and she gripped the steel rail tightly, fighting to slow the spinning of her body and her mind. She felt a stinging pain in her left arm. She looked at it and froze. There was a bandage just inside the elbow, a thick white square of gauze anchored in place with adhesive tape that pulled at her skin. A small, red stain showed in the center of the gauze where blood had seeped through.

I thought I dreamt it….

Was it possible it had really happened? She’d had a dream about sirens and an ambulance, about being in an emergency room under blinding lights with people hovering and holding her down while she cried and tried to get away from them. She’d fought them, hard, until someone had stuck something into her right arm. She’d cried out—or maybe she only thought she had, because then everything had faded and she’d fallen into the quiet place.

Later, she dreamed she’d awakened and found herself lying on a gurney, only now there was no one around and the lights were dimmed. In the dream, she pulled herself groggily up to a sitting position, confused and frightened, because she knew there was somewhere else she needed to be. They’d taken her clothes, but she climbed off the gurney, anyway, naked except for the sheet she held around her, and started looking for something to put on so she could leave. That was when she found a drawer with paper-wrapped packages labeled Syringe. And suddenly, somehow, she’d known there was a faster way to get to where she needed to be.

She’d ripped open one of the packages and withdrawn a syringe, pulled back the plunger and slipped the plastic cap off the needle. The tip was in her arm and her thumb was on the plunger when the room had erupted in shouting and blinding light. Someone had knocked her to the ground and ripped the needle out of her arm. She’d cried out in pain, her blood streaming onto the floor as she fought them again, until finally, they’d stuck yet another needle into her and she’d tumbled into the quiet place once more.

She’d thought it was a dream, but that blood-stained bandage on her arm was only too real, and so she knew it was true. She had failed.

CHAPTER 4

Havenwood, Minnesota

Thursday, January 11, 1979

The billboard at the side of the highway was hand-painted with a lurid depiction of white-capped waves, a thick stand of towering evergreens, and some kind of huge fish devouring a lure.

WELCOME TO HAVENWOOD,ANGLING CAPITAL OF MINNESOTA!YOUR 4-SEASON PLAYGROUND!

What Cruz knew about fishing would fit on a toothpick wrapper, so he was in no position to argue with that municipal claim to fame. But he did wonder about those painted trees. For the entire eighty-mile drive from the airport, he’d seen nothing but rolling prairie landscape, bleak, barren and mostly snow-covered under a massive gray winter sky that stretched from horizon to horizon—scarcely a hill or a tree to be seen, except for the occasional spindly shelter belt planted by some farmer to keep the wind from carrying off all the rich agricultural topsoil.

He’d started out that morning with a sense of liberation, like a kid playing hooky. The feeling of well-being had lasted through his arrival in Minneapolis. But then, as he drove out of the city, northeast along an interstate that hugged the upper reaches of the Mississippi, the cold began to settle into his bones and the scenery grew monotonous, broken only by a few small, colorless towns with weathered grain elevators and balloon-shaped water towers. He asked himself why he couldn’t have managed to wangle an assignment someplace a little more exciting and a whole lot warmer. Minnesota in January was nobody’s idea of a holiday.

When he’d left Haddon Twomey’s office at the National Museum of American History the previous afternoon, he’d had no intention of jumping on a plane and flying out to Minnesota in his quest to track down the elusive Jillian Meade. Instead, he’d returned to the office with little to show for his morning’s efforts. The one good piece of news when he got back to the office was that Sean Finney, thankfully, had gotten off his duff for a change and gone out to do some actual legwork in the field. Cruz had settled in to enjoy an afternoon of relative peace at his desk, in spite of the jangling phones and noisy conversations all around him. Pulling out the list of interview questions that had come in with the blue alert from ScotlandYard, he’d put in a long-distance call to the Minnesota number Haddon Twomey had given him. If he couldn’t find Jillian Meade in the flesh, he’d track her down by phone, ask her about her recent travels, and then decide whether to leave it at that or follow up with a more in-depth interview once she returned to the capital.

But three tries later, he was still receiving the same recorded message telling him the number was not in service. He’d called the long distance operator, who was able to confirm that the number he had was a good one, as far as she could tell from her listings, and was assigned to a party by the name of Meade, Grace S., residing at 34 Lakeshore Road in Havenwood, Minnesota. The operator had tried to put the call through for him, but she’d had no more luck than Cruz. The line, she said, seemed to be down. Cruz asked if a winter storm was the problem, but the operator said no, she was right there in the Twin Cities, and the weather across the state was cold but sunny—had been all week, except for some light flurries, and as far as she knew, no other problems with phone lines had been reported in the vicinity of Havenwood. The problem seemed to be at that one location only.

Cruz’s next move, after consulting his nationwide directory of local police forces, was to put in a call to the Haven-wood Police Department. Chief Wilf Lunders came across as hearty and friendly, a relative old-timer by the sound of his voice, pleased to be of service, though a little mystified to be getting a call from the FBI. But he was a great admirer of the late J. Edgar Hoover, the chief said, so he’d be pleased to help out in any way he could.

“You say you’re looking for Jillian Meade? Oh yeah, she’s in town, all right.”

“You’re sure of that? You’ve seen her yourself?”

“Yep. Watched her being loaded into an ambulance last night. My own deputy pulled her out of her mom’s house just before it burned to the ground.”

Suddenly, Cruz felt every hair on the back of his neck standing on end. “Her mother’s house burned down? How did that happen?”

“Well, now, I guess that would be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Coulda been an electrical fire, I don’t know, or it coulda been a problem with the gas lines. Our volunteer fire chief was heading over there to have a look-see by the light of day, along with my deputy and a couple of our men. Couldn’t tell much last night. Fire wasn’t even really burned out till around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., by the time they gave everything a really good soaking. Make sure we didn’t get another flare-up, you know.”

“Chief Lunders? I don’t want to tell you folks how to do your job there, sir, but I think you may have cause to suspect criminal arson.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, you got that right. We do. But how would you know that, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Instead of answering, Cruz sat back, pen tapping out a nervous beat on his knee. “What about the mother?”

“Well, now, as far as Grace goes, that’s the real tragedy. I’m sorry to say she didn’t make it. Sixty-years old and a real lady, she was. A pillar of the community, you know? Lord almighty, even as I’m telling you this, I can hardly believe it myself. You know, that family has had its share of sadness. And as for Grace…well, she will be sorely missed in this town, is all I can say.”

“Has the body been taken out?”

“Yes, they went back in and located it this morning.”

“There’s going to be an autopsy, I hope, to determine the cause of death?”

“Oh, yeah, for sure. There has to be, naturally. Always have to have an autopsy when there’s an unexplained death, don’t you? Mind you, poor Grace’s body was burned up real bad, so I’m not sure what the coroner’s going to be able to determine from it. My deputy was able to confirm that she was already dead at the time the fire got out of control, though.”

“She was dead how?”

Lunders started to answer but was overtaken by a sudden fit of coughing. He excused himself, half-choking, and seemed to set the phone aside for a few moments, but Cruz was able to hear the kind of wheezy, deep-chested congestion that told him the chief was probably a smoker, probably over-weight, and probably moving slowly these days.

A mental image of his own father suddenly flashed through his mind: barrel-chested, gruff and stubbornly refusing to have anything to do with doctors. The old man was still laying bricks and tile in fancy new houses, any one of which probably cost more than he’d made in his entire lifetime. Cruz had seen the old man only briefly at Christmas, although he’d tried to spend a little more time with him last year after he’d resigned his Army commission. He’d taken a few weeks off before starting the Bureau job and flown to California to pull his old Harley out from under its tarp in his father’s garage in Santa Ana. See if the thing still had the muscle to make one more cross-country trip. See, too, if enough time had passed that he and his old man might actually be able to sit down over a beer and have something like a reasonable conversation. Neither of them was getting any younger, after all. Hadn’t happened, though. His father had just shuffled around behind him for the entire three days he was there, grumbling and complaining and dogging his steps, like he thought his son had come back to steal the nonexistent family jewels. Finally, Cruz had given up, thrown the tarp back over the Harley, bought a plane ticket and headed for D.C.

Chief Lunders hawked wetly one last time, then came back on the line. “Sorry about that. Got this thing I just can’t seem to shake. What were we saying?”

“You said your deputy found Mrs. Meade dead when he got to the house, and I was asking how she died.”

“That’s the thing. My guy wasn’t sure. The place was full of smoke. He’s a good man, is Nils, and when he found the body, he wanted to examine it in situ, as it were, see what he could tell based on where he found it and in what condition and all. But he said it was tough to see anything in all that smoke. All he really knew for sure is that she was dead and there was a fair amount of blood. Before he got a chance to figure out what the source of it was, though, Jillian, who he’d already gotten outta there once, came back in, took one look at her mom, dead like that, and went off the deep end. At that point, my guy’s main worry was to get her out alive before the whole place went up. His hands were full, and by the time he got her squared away, there was no going back inside for Grace. The place was an inferno.”

“So, what did the daughter say happened?”

“She hasn’t said anything yet. We weren’t able to get a statement out of her last night. She had real bad smoke inhalation. A concussion, too, they said at the clinic. And then, of course, there was the emotional strain of seeing her mother dead like that. In the end, she had to be sedated. I’m sure she’ll be okay, mind, once she’s had a little time to get over the initial shock. Jillian’s always been a very sensible young woman, so I’m sure she’ll be able to give us a pretty good idea what happened there. Matter of fact, I was just getting ready to go over to the clinic and see if she was up to giving a statement when you called.”

“You’ve got a hospital there in Havenwood? Is that where she is?”

“You betcha. It’s just a little eight-bed job, mind you. Big cases go on over to Montrose, or into the Twin Cities, if it’s real major. But for what Jillian had, they could handle her just fine right here.”

“You mind if I come on up there and talk to her myself?” It was impulse more than rational decision-making, but Cruz’s gut told him this was all far too coincidental. After more than a decade on a homicide beat, he always mistrusted coincidence, and he always listened to his gut. If nothing else, he wanted to see for himself this spinster bookworm with no apparent life outside the dusty back rooms of a museum who had, out of the blue, become the subject of an international police inquiry—only to have her own mother suddenly expire in a manner that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the cases outlined in the British alert.

“What do you think of the idea that Jillian Meade killed her mother and then set the fire to cover her tracks?” he asked Chief Lunders.

“Jillian?” A snort of incredulity whistled down the line. “That girl grew up in this town, Agent Cruz. I’ve known her all her life, and so has everyone else around here. She’s always been a quiet little thing. She’s not hardly capable of something like this, believe me. It wouldn’t be in her nature.”

“That’s probably what people said about Lizzie Borden, too.”

“Well, now, I don’t know about that, but I do know the Meade family. They’ve been living in this town for, oh, I don’t know…several generations, anyway. Trust me, no daughter of Grace and Joe Meade would be capable of something like that. No, I’ll tell you what I’m really thinking, just between you and me and the gate post. Don’t want to say it too loud till we’ve gathered more evidence, but I’m thinking it was a break-in and attempted theft gone bad—somebody from away, you know. Some hippie probably drifted in off the interstate looking for quick cash to buy drugs down in Minneapolis. Grace’s place is on the lake, a real nice spot—on the town side, whereas the summer places are over on the other side. But maybe this drifter saw it, figured it was empty. Or, even if he spotted Grace and Jill, maybe he figured two women like that, all alone in the house, he could overpower ’em, get what he wanted, then skedaddle.”

“I don’t know, Chief,” Cruz said, head shaking.

“Look, keep in mind that Jillian got hurt, too. She had a concussion. Nils, my deputy, said she’d been knocked out, woke up on the kitchen floor. Who knows what might have happened if the neighbors hadn’t called in the fire, and if my deputy hadn’t gotten there fast as he did? She’d have died, too.”

“Fair enough,” Cruz conceded. There was no point in alienating a local police chief until he had more information. That said, he’d want a lot more information before he was prepared to rule out Jillian Meade as a suspect. “Chief Lunders, I’d like to make another request.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d like to ask you to seal off the scene. With all due respect to your volunteer fire chief and your men, sir, I think a professional arson team should go in and cover the ground with a fine-tooth comb. I can set it up through our regional office out there, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Of course, Cruz thought grimly, the local guys had already been tramping around in there when they went back to find the body, and who knew how many other pairs of boots had been in messing up the evidence since. But, with luck, the arson team would find enough of it intact to determine if the fire had had multiple start points or if accelerants had been used, either one a dead giveaway for criminal action.

“Well, no, I guess that might not be a bad idea at that,” Lunders said. “Sure, you go ahead and do that. I’ll get our boys to rope it off and make sure nobody goes in till your arson team gets here. But do you mind telling me what this is all about? Why are you folks taking an interest in this?”

“It’s a little complicated to go into over the phone. How about if I make arrangements to get that arson investigation going, and then I’ll get on a plane and be out there myself, tonight or tomorrow at the latest. I’ll tell you as much as I can then about where we’re coming from on this.”

“If you think that’s necessary…”

“Yes, sir, I do think it’s very necessary.”

Once past the garish billboard with the fish and the trees, Cruz drove up a small incline in the highway and found himself gazing down on a sweeping vista overlooking a picturesque little town that backed up against an evergreen forest, as advertised, one that extended right to the distant horizon. The town was wedged between the woods and a lake that bulged out from the western bank of the Mississippi, as if the river had sprung a leak in its headlong rush to reach the Gulf of Mexico. The map Cruz had picked up at the rent-a-car counter at the airport said this was Lost Arrow Lake. So maybe the angling claim on the billboard wasn’t such a stretch, he thought. Unless he was up to a lesson in the finer points of ice-fishing, he’d have to take the boast at face value.

The official town marker appeared on the right shoulder of the road and declared his entry into Havenwood, population 2,012. Another blue sign beyond it directed him to take the next right for local police headquarters. His tires kicked up stones as he pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Havenwood Police Department a couple of minutes later. It was a squat, tan building with a prefab look, the kind of utilitarian structure thrown up by cost-conscious municipal councils all across the country. Cruz predicted a drafty squad room, a flimsy two-cell lock-up and a thin-walled office for the chief.

Parking next to a couple of black-and-white cruisers, he climbed out of the overheated rental, his lungs contracting in shock at the contact with air that was at least forty degrees colder than the balmy weather he’d left behind in D.C. Cruz flipped up the collar of his overcoat, wishing he’d remembered to put in the winter liner he scarcely used in Washington. His California-bred bones wondered, as they always did in places like this, what in hell possessed people to settle in such cold climates.

Inside the small lobby, a heavyset, gray-haired woman in a fuzzy pink cardigan sat behind a reception desk. She held a paperback novel in her hand, her arm extended across the black Formica countertop. As Cruz walked in, he saw her lick the tip of her forefinger, turn the page, then read on, her eyes furrowed in a deep squint. The wind whistled as he struggled to close the door behind him, and she glanced up at the sound, then did a double take.

“Hi, there!” Her face softened into a friendly smile as he crossed the speckled linoleum and came up to the counter. Squinting back at her book—a murder mystery, by the look of the cover—she folded over the corner of the page to mark her place, then closed it. “Can I help you?”

Cruz reached into his inside pocket and withdrew the leather case containing his identification badge and photo. “I’m Special Agent Cruz with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said. “Chief Lunders is expecting me.”

The woman set the book aside and took his ID, extending her arm back and forth until she found a comfortable focal length. “Forgot my darn reading glasses on the kitchen table this morning,” she said, shooting an embarrassed glance in his direction. “Let’s see now…Alejandro Cruz.”

“You speak Spanish,” he said. Her pronunciation was pretty near dead-on, including substituting an aspirated “h” for the “j,” instead of the soft “g” that had long ago made him abandon “Alejandro” for “Alex.”

She blushed. “Oh, no, hon, not a word, unless you count ‘una margarita, por favor.’ I got that one pretty much down pat when I won a trip to Acapulco few years back.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s an important phrase to know.”

“I’m Verna Rasmussen,” she said, extending her hand. “Just call me Verna.”

“Nice to meet you, Verna. And you did say the name exactly right, by the way.”

“Well, good. I try. I figure a person’s name is special, so we should make a little effort to get it right, don’t you think? My dad was a ‘Bjorn,’ and he got so fed up with people calling him ‘Ba-jorn’ that he gave up and went by ‘Bub,’ if you can believe it. And, anyway, Alejandro’s an easy one. Like Alejandro Rey, the actor. Right?”

He nodded. “I guess so. Most people call me Alex. And as I say, the chief’s expecting me. Could you tell him I’m here?”

Her gray pin curls gave a regretful shake as she handed him back the ID. “’Fraid he’s not in today, hon.”

“I spoke to him by phone just yesterday afternoon. He knew I was coming.”

“You came out from Minneapolis?”

“No, ma’am, from Washington.”

“D.C.?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, my, all the way from Washington, D.C.”

Cruz tucked the ID away. “So, what do you think, Verna? Could you give him a call, remind him I’m here?”

“Well, I would, but there’s just no way. Chief Lunders is in the hospital, and he’s not going to be back for a while, I don’t think.” One of her eyebrows rose.

That and her grimace told Cruz there was a long story there that Verna was probably quite prepared to tell him if given half a chance. But, he noted, glancing at his watch, it was past noon. In another couple of hours, the winter sun would start sinking fast before he’d had a chance to get a look at the site of the fire. The arson team was supposed to have gone over the ground this morning and were to have left their initial findings with the chief, but Cruz wanted his own clear picture to go with the team’s findings.

He glanced over Verna’s head to the glass window behind her. It opened into what appeared to be the squad room, with four steel desks facing one another in the center and a bank of file cabinets on the far wall. There was only one officer inside, as far as he could see from his vantage point. A khaki-uniformed officer, with buzzed hair nearly as white as the paper in his typewriter, sat at one of desks, and he appeared to be engaged in the familiar, endless and thankless task of typing up police reports on the ancient Olivetti in front of him. He looked too young to be out of high school.

“Who’s in command while Chief Lunders is laid up?”

“That’d be Nils Berglund, the deputy chief.”

“Could you—”

“—but he’s out on a call right now.”

“Can you get in touch with him?”

“Oh, sure thing!” she said, brightening. She cocked her thumb at the dispatch unit behind her. “I can call him up on the car radio.”

“Would you do that?”

“Sure. Why don’t you have a seat?” She pointed to a row of padded arm chars hugging one wall. “Oh! And here,” she added, pulling out a Tupperware box from a ledge behind her chair and peeling back the plastic lid. “Have a Toll House cookie while you’re waiting. I baked these myself for the guys. Forgot to put ’em in the squad room.”

Cruz took one of her cookies, then headed over to the waiting area while she put out the call. Instead of sitting, something he’d already spent far too much time doing that day, he headed for the bulletin board on the wall opposite, opening his overcoat which suddenly felt oppressively heavy in the heated building. Hot and cold, hot and cold.

He made short work of Verna’s cookie as he scanned the notices on the cork board. In one corner hung a familiar notice, the FBI Ten Most Wanted list, a gimmick J. Edgar Hoover had dreamed up in one of his more creative PR moments back in his early days as Director. Now, the list hung in half the federal, state and municipal offices in the country. Mostly, though, the bulletin board featured local notices about septic tanks, fishing and boating licenses, and the burning of household trash. A clipboard hanging on a peg contained minutes of town council meetings, while a hand-drawn sign down in one corner of the board, covered in turquoise rabbits and colorful eggs, asked for volunteers to help organize the 1979 Havenwood Easter Parade and Egg Roll.

Cruz heard Verna put out the call over the radio to the deputy chief, and a deep voice, broken by static, came back in response. He was just turning to eavesdrop when the last line on the Easter announcement caught his eye.

For more information, please contact:

Grace Meade

Chairlady, Havenwood Easter Parade Committee

Grace Meade, recently deceased pillar of the community and mother of his quarry, Jillian Meade. Now who would the town turn to organize its official Easter celebration? Cruz wondered, as behind him, the deputy’s crackled, baritone voice announced over the radio that he was on his way in.

CHAPTER 5

Montrose, Minnesota

Thursday, January 11, 1979

It was that woman’s voice again, firm but friendly—the kind of voice that wants you to know it intends no threat, but which commands your attention, nevertheless. Jillian lay still, feigning sleep—which wasn’t hard because sleep was never very far away. Hoping it would be enough to discourage the voice. Willing it to just leave her alone.

“It’s Dr. Kandinsky, Jillian. Do you remember? I was in to see you a couple of times yesterday and then again last night.”

Yesterday? Last night? What time was it? What day was it? When she’d opened her eyes a while back—when was that?—Jillian had noticed her watch was missing, taken along with the rest of her things, she supposed. The windows in the room were high and small, and all she’d been able to see out of them was a pale sliver of frigid-looking sky. There’d been daylight, but the shadows were long and blue-tinged, the way they get on cold winter days when the sun over the prairie is brilliant but without any heat in it.

“How are you feeling today?” the voice asked. “You’re looking a little better.”

Better than what? How long had she been there? If this doctor said she’d been in last night…well, fine. It could have been last week or last month for all Jillian knew. She did remember that voice, though, warm and reassuring. Seductive, like a promise of mercy. Or absolution, maybe, for what she’d done.

Her eyes snapped opened. The guardrails were still there, and the green wall. What did I do?

“You’re safe now,” the doctor said. “No one is going to hurt you here. I thought you might like to get cleaned up a little today. You’d feel much better if you did.”

Cleaned up? What happened? She stared at her hand lying outstretched on the crisp white mattress. She recalled someone washing blood off her when she was first brought in, but there was still some under her bitten nails, crusted, brown and guilty looking. She must look godawful, Jillian thought. Her hair was hanging loose and unbrushed, sticky mats clinging to her cheeks and neck and shoulders, and the long bangs flicking against her lashes felt bristled at the ends. Singed, she realized suddenly. Singed like her lungs, which hurt with every breath she took. And she could smell the sour, dusky odor of charred wood. It seemed permanently etched in her nasal passages….

And then, suddenly, it all came back. She remembered the fire. She remembered Nils, and the ambulance, and what had happened after they had examined her in the ER and left her sedated and alone to try to sleep off the shock of the fire. Of what she’d seen in her mother’s house.

She pulled in her arm and curled into a tight ball. Mother! Her mother was dead. Why wasn’t she dead, too? A clipped voice in her head snapped a reply: Because you’re weak!

It was true. She was weak. Twice now, she’d gone to the brink, only to let herself be pulled back. She should have died with her mother. She’d wanted to. She’d wanted to crouch down on the floor next to that small body, take it in her arms and hold it close to her breast, a full-circle reversal of their earliest roles—she and her mother alone at the end as they were at the beginning, finally at peace with one another and with the past, waiting for the purifying flames. But at the last minute, she’d allowed herself to be saved. She’d never had her mother’s iron will.

And then, in the ER…she’d been so close! The needle had been in her arm. All she’d had to do was push down on the plunger and let herself be swept to freedom on a tiny, merciful bubble of air. This could all have been over by now, but instead, she’d hesitated a split second too long and the decision had been taken out of her hands.

Now, here she was…where? Not on the emergency room gurney anymore, that much was certain. Lying in a bed, after having been moved to one of the wards probably. How long had she been here? She vaguely recalled they’d given her something after her stunt with the hypodermic, another tranquilizer, much stronger than the first, which had obviously kept her heavily sedated. For how long she didn’t know, but long enough that she had no memory of being moved to this room. It was obvious she had no tolerance for drugs. Not surprising, she thought grimly. Even in college, at the height of the psychedelic Sixties, she’d never taken anything stronger than an aspirin. The ever-well-behaved daughter of Grace Meade.

She closed her eyes, and immediately, gratefully, found herself sinking once more. The mattress seemed to be absorbing her like some great, downy mouth swallowing her whole. She was Jonah in the belly of a feather tick whale, floating on soft cotton waves, content to go where the flow carried her.

After her stunt in the ER she felt as if she had viscous muck flowing through her veins instead of blood. She didn’t care, as long as she didn’t have to think or remember. Maybe it was more than the drugs. Maybe it was some primitive instinct driving her to shut down rather than face the unbearable. Playing possum in the face of horror.

Her mother would be appalled to see her lying here like this, mute, stupid and filthy. Grace Meade was always at her best, turned out to perfection. In her entire life, she’d never so much as answered a knock at the door without first glancing in the mirror to check her lipstick, pat her hair and smooth down her dress. She’d tried to make her daughter into a miniature replica of herself, but it was hopeless, of course. Jillian had lost the genetic lottery. Had failed to inherit any of her mother’s fine features: her golden hair, her striking blue eyes, or her peaches-and-cream English skin. She was olive-skinned and brunette, like her father, apparently, growing taller and bonier than her mother had ever been.

Still, Jillian thought, she would have given anything, just for once, not to hear the note of hopelessness that always accompanied her mother’s chirpy words of encouragement. “Well, we just have to work with what we’ve been given, don’t we, dear?”

“What do you think, Jillian? Wouldn’t it feel good to get up and take a hot shower? Have a little lunch, maybe sit and talk awhile?”

It was the doctor again, Jillian realized with a start, not her mother. She opened her eyes. She was trying to please, but this was about as much as she could manage. Her mother would definitely have disapproved. Grace was unfailingly poised and polite in any public venue, no matter how trying the circumstances. She would have at least sat up when the doctor came in. But, frankly, Jillian thought, she just couldn’t be bothered. She didn’t mean to be rude, but she had nothing to say to this woman.

The doctor, in any case, seemed content to wait her out. The minutes ticked by. Jillian could feel her presence, but she remained silent—watching, perhaps. Observing. And what does she see? Jillian wondered. What kind of monster is this before her?

Suddenly, she felt the bed vibrate. She cringed as a hand reached across her, a hand at the end of a white sleeve. A soft gust of air brushed her cheek as the doctor laid something on the mattress next to her head. It was a notebook, Jillian saw. A thick notebook with a stiff, nubbled black cardboard cover. Then, the white-coated arm withdrew again and the bed was still.

“If you’re not ready to talk yet, Jillian, it’s all right. I’ll be here when you are. But I’m told you’re a writer and historian,” the doctor added—unnecessarily, Jillian thought. She wasn’t that far gone. She knew who she was. That was the problem, wasn’t it? “You know how to arrange facts into an understandable flow. I know you feel confused right now, but maybe it would help to sort out your thoughts if you wrote down what’s going through your mind.”

Oh, God…what’s going through my mind?

Jillian’s eyes closed once more, shutting out the light, praying for a miracle to shut out the sound of that woman’s voice and, mostly, to drown out the screaming of her own guilty thoughts.

What does she want me to say? That I’m haunted by the memory of my mother, her lifeless blue eyes staring up at me from the kitchen floor, as accusatory in death as they were in the moments before it arrived? That I don’t want to be alive anymore? That I don’t deserve to be? My mother won’t let me be. Her beautiful, dreadful face is an image I’ll carry to my death—which will come soon, if courage doesn’t fail me again.

62

CHAPTER 6

Havenwood, Minnesota

Thursday, January 11, 1979

Deputy Chief of Police Nils Berglund turned out to be one of those massively built Scandinavians who makes every man around him feel puny. From the moment Berglund finally showed up at headquarters and extended a reluctant hand, Cruz felt inclined to keep his distance, less out of intimidation (he hoped) than for a clearer view of this human mountain. He himself was five-eleven, but Berglund both overshadowed and outweighed him by quite a bit. Nor did anything about the deputy’s taciturn manner spell welcome, despite the easy goodwill Cruz had sensed over the phone from the chief of police. Berglund’s square features seemed permanently corrugated into a frown, and his pale, icy eyes defied reading.

“Guess we’ll use the chief’s office,” he grunted, directing Cruz around the reception desk and through the door that led into the squad room beyond.

“Verna here tells me he’s in the hospital,” Cruz said.

Berglund was holding the door open, but his gaze shifted to the reception desk, where Verna had gone back to squinting at her mystery novel. His frown deepened, and it was impossible to tell which annoyed him more, her on-the-job reading or the fact that she’d been gossiping with a stranger. Verna, in any case, seemed oblivious. Cruz had a feeling she was more than capable of handling Deputy Berglund and anything else that came her way.

The deputy waved him into a corner office, then shut the door behind them. Shrugging out of his green nylon bomber jacket, he flung it over a chair. “Take your coat?”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“Suit yourself. Have a seat.” Berglund moved around behind the big steel desk and settled into a brown, imitation leather chair that squeaked in protest at the sudden load.

“What happened?” Cruz asked. “To the chief, I mean.”

“He’s been feeling rough for a while, having tests. Doc called him last night, told him to check into hospital first thing this morning.”

“Which hospital?” Cruz asked, remembering how the chief had ranked the area’s medical options according to the severity of the patient’s condition.

“The Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis.” From that news and from Berglund’s tone, there wasn’t much doubt the diagnosis was serious, the prognosis iffy, and the deputy looking at imminent promotion.

“Sorry to hear it,” Cruz said. “He sounds like a good man.”

“Yeah, he is. Anyway,” Berglund said, “he told me you called. He also told me it was you who arranged for that arson team that’s crawling around over there at the fire scene.”

“They’re in town right now?”

“Working the scene as we speak. That’s where I was when Verna called up on the radio.”

“Maybe we should head over,” Cruz said. “I wouldn’t mind taking a look myself before I talk to Jillian Meade. I’d like to hear what those guys have to say about the cause of the fire.”

“Just hold on a minute,” Berglund said as Cruz made moves to get up. “We can do that, but first, I want to know why you called them in, to begin with, and why it is you flew out here all the way from Washington.”

Cruz settled back into his chair. “I’d been trying to track down Jillian Meade back in D.C. when I heard she was here visiting her mother. I tried to phone but the line was down. That’s when I put in the call to Chief Lunders.”

“Who told you she was at her mother’s?”

“Her boss at the Smithsonian.”

“And why are you looking for her?”

“Her name came up in an alert from Scotland Yard. I work in a section of the Bureau that liaises with foreign police forces on cross-border criminal investigations.”

“And…what? You think Jillian Meade’s some kind of international jewel thief or something?” Berglund snorted. “Get serious.”

“You know her well, do you?”

Berglund shrugged. “She grew up here. It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody. So what is Scotland Yard claiming she did?”

“I don’t know that they necessarily think she’s done anything at all. She was over in England last month around the time some stuff went down, and—”

“What kind of ‘stuff’?” Berglund interrupted.

“A couple of homicides, as a matter of fact.”

“And they think Jillian had something to do with them?” The deputy’s expression was so incredulous that Cruz was beginning to feel a little foolish for even suggesting it, except that Jillian Meade’s mother had now turned up dead, too. At the very least, the woman was in danger of turning into the human equivalent of the Black Death, given the pernicious effect she seemed to have on those she visited. Berglund appeared intent on giving her the benefit of the doubt, however, and Cruz decided he could do the same, at least until he’d gotten the lay of the land.

“They’re not necessarily saying she had anything to do with the murders, but Miss Meade was in the vicinity at the time and had apparently been in contact with the victims. Scotland Yard was thinking she might have seen or heard something that would bear on their investigation. As far as I know, they simply see her as a potential witness at this point.”

“So you’re looking to ask her some questions, nothing more?”

“That’s right.”

“If that’s the case, how come you arranged for this arson team to come out? And,” Berglund added, “how come you asked Chief Lunders if he thought Jillian had murdered her mother?”

“I guess because it’s in my nature to play devil’s advocate. It may be coincidence, but there were fires set after those murders in the U.K., too. Look at it from my perspective. I talk to her boss, he tells me she’s here in Havenwood, then I talk to your boss, and he tells me about the fire. It does tend to raise a few questions in a person’s mind, you have to admit.”

“Humph.”

“So can you tell me exactly what happened here?”

Berglund threw open his hands in a “why not” gesture. “Tuesday night, we got a call about a fire out at Grace Meade’s place. I was the first to arrive on the scene, ahead of the fire trucks. The fire was going strong by then. I found Mrs. Meade and Jillian still inside the house, although Grace was already dead. I got Jillian out, but then the fire spread so fast we couldn’t get her mother’s body out till yesterday.”

“The Chief said you examined Mrs. Meade’s body at the scene before you took the daughter out.”

“Uh-huh. I found it lying in the hall, just outside the kitchen.”

“What did you see as far as signs of trauma, anything like that?”

“There was a fair amount of blood on the front of her sweater, but that was about it. No bruising or any other sign of battery that I could see, although it was pretty dark in there, so I wouldn’t swear to anything. The only light I had to go by was the fire burning in the living room, which was pretty much out of control by then.”

“What was the source of the blood?”

“It looked like she’d taken a wound to the chest. Like I say, it was dark, so I was going half by feel. I noticed her sweater had a tear in it, just here.” Berglund put his fingertips to his furnacesized chest, high and just off-center. “The tear was right in the middle of the blood stain, which I could see clearly because she had on a light-colored sweater and the blood showed up dark.”

“So she was down for pretty much the whole time she bled,” Cruz said, thinking aloud. “If she’d been upright, the entry wound, if that’s what it was, would have been at the top of the stain and the blood would have run down. Was it an entry wound, by the way? Did you turn her over?”

Berglund nodded. “Sort of. The fire was spreading fast, and I knew I needed to get her out of there, so I picked her up and put her over my shoulder to carry her out. Her back was soaked with blood, and when I put my hand there to steady the body, it felt pretty pulpy. Her sweater back was also shredded.” Berglund seemed to shudder at the memory.

Poor guy, Cruz thought. His actions had been pretty heroic, when you came down to it, going into the burning house like that to rescue the women. Like most heroes, he’d probably acted on sheer instinct and adrenaline, revulsion at the ugliness of what he’d found only hitting him afterward, when the initial shock wore off.

“Chief Lunders told me you weren’t able to get the body out, in the end, though.”

“No. I’d already left Jill on the porch when I went back inside to look for Grace. I was trying to get a closer look at the wound when I realized Jill was back and standing right behind me. I didn’t want her to see her mother like that.” Cruz was startled by Berglund’s fist suddenly smacking his thigh. “I had her, dammit! I’d picked her up and I had her. She was sixty-years old, for chrissake, and just a little thing. Even with Jillian to worry about, I could have gotten her out. I could have managed them both.”

Cruz had no doubt the deputy could have easily carried two women out of a burning building. “So what happened?”

“Jillian wouldn’t leave! I tried to drag her out with my free hand, but she kept fighting me. She was disoriented—she’d taken a blow to the head herself, we found out later. And she was half crazy with panic and grief, screaming for her mother.”

“But the mother was definitely dead?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure she was. I didn’t have time to try for a pulse before Jill came back in and flipped out on me, but by the way Grace looked…” His cropped blond head gave a grim shake. “As it was, I had to put her down again and leave her there while I dragged Jillian out a second time. By the time I handed her off to the paramedics, the fire had gotten out of control and I couldn’t get back inside the house. It was only when the ashes finally cooled down that we were able to get in and locate the body. It was in the rubble just off the kitchen, right where I’d left her.”

“Chief Lunders said there was going to be an autopsy.”

Berglund nodded. “It was this morning. County coroner took the body over to Montrose yesterday, but given how badly charred it was, he decided to call in a medical examiner from the State Bureau of Investigation. They’ve got more experience dealing with cases like this.”

“Were they able to determine a cause of death?”

Berglund shook his head. “Not with any degree of certainty. All the flesh and most of the organs were toast.”

“What about all the blood you’d found, and the entry and exit wounds? That would suggest a gunshot wound, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, although, like I said, the body was burned beyond recognition, and they couldn’t find much trajectory evidence. A couple of the interior organs were partly intact—the collapse of the roof eventually smothered some of the fire—but it wasn’t enough to get a clear picture of whether or not she’d been shot. We haven’t found any bullets or spent cartridges at the scene, although your arson guys are keeping an eye out for them. The ME did find a fracture on the breastbone, though, and taken together with what I was able to tell them about the holes in her sweater, he thought it was consistent with the theory that she’d been shot, probably with a fairly large caliber weapon.”

“That would also explain the injury on her back, larger than the entry, which is what you’d expect to find with an exit wound,” Cruz pointed out.

Berglund nodded. “The medical examiner said the position of the fracture on her breastbone was such that the bullet probably hit her left lung, maybe even the heart, although I doubt it, personally.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because there was a hell of a lot of blood. I would have thought that if she’d taken it in the heart, it would have stopped pumping and she wouldn’t have bled out like she did.”

“Not necessarily,” Cruz said. “It would depend on the damage. It might take a few seconds or even minutes for her heart to stop beating completely. And if a bullet’s large caliber, it’ll often make a bloody mess regardless of whether or not the victim dies instantly.” He watched Berglund’s dour expression as the deputy scraped a smear of mud off his pant leg. “Are you beating yourself up here because you think you could have saved Mrs. Meade?” Cruz asked him.

Berglund looked up, then away, self-consciously. “Yeah, maybe, although I guess I knew there wasn’t really a hope in hell. At the autopsy, the ME found that part of the right lung was more or less intact, and he said there was no sign of smoke inhalation in the air sacs.”

“All right then, that’s something, isn’t it? It means Grace Meade had drawn her last breath before the fire even started.”

Berglund frowned. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“And that being the case, it wouldn’t have made any difference whether or not you’d gotten her out.”

Berglund seemed unconvinced. “Maybe. But there’s no saying how long she’d been down. Maybe she could’ve been revived…or something. I don’t know. It just feels like I could’ve handled it better.”

Cruz shifted forward in his seat, elbows on his knees. “Look, Deputy, it seems to me you did plenty. You went into that house and you saved Jillian Meade’s life—not once, but twice. I think you should let yourself off the hook and just focus on your investigation. If Grace Meade was dead before the fire broke out, it means she was murdered and the fire was probably set to cover tracks. I imagine this has to be tough on a lot of people around here, but the evidence is what you need to be focusing on. And it’s your investigation, obviously. I don’t mean to come riding in like some bounty hunter, okay? I asked for the arson team to look things over to make sure there was no confusion about what went down, but I’m not here to step on your toes. All I really want to do is speak to Jillian Meade and clear up some questions about what happened while she was over in England. She gives me her statement, I’m outta here. I’ll send it off to the Brits and that’ll probably be that. Is that okay with you?”

Berglund nodded wearily, like a man who was both exhausted and in over his head. How many murder investigations had he even handled? Cruz wondered. In a town this size, it was a distinct possibility this was his first.

“Talking to Jillian, though,” Berglund said, “that could be a problem.”

“How so? She’s in the hospital here in town, right?”

“Not anymore. They moved her to the regional hospital over in Montrose. The local clinic isn’t equipped to handle a case like hers.”

“I thought she wasn’t that badly hurt.”

“She had a concussion, like I said, but it wasn’t too bad. Mostly it was smoke inhalation they were worried about, but they figured she’d recover fully from that, too. Her mental state is something else, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“She tried to kill herself in the ER in Havenwood.”

Cruz pulled up short. “Chief Lunders never mentioned that.”

“He hadn’t heard about it yet when you talked to him yesterday. Happened early Wednesday morning. The chief was under the weather, and he didn’t get in till after noon. Jill had spent the night in the ER here so they could keep an eye on her breathing. I was there myself till around four in the morning, but she seemed to be resting comfortably. Sometime around dawn, though, when nobody was watching, she apparently woke up and found a syringe in a drawer or something. They said she had it in an artery with her thumb on the plunger when an orderly happened to walk by and spot her. The guy thought fast, luckily. If he hadn’t tackled her, she’d be dead.”

“And now?” Cruz asked.

Berglund’s big hands rubbed his face wearily. “Now they’ve got her locked down on twenty-four-hour suicide watch in the psych ward at Montrose. They kept her heavily sedated for the first twenty-four hours, but they’re trying to back her off the meds now. We can go over later, after we check back with the arson guys, but I wouldn’t count on getting much out of her today if I were you. They say she hasn’t said a word since all this happened.”

Evil never sleeps. It creeps in the night, appearing where it’s least expected, Cruz thought. There’s no sanctuary behind locked doors or the solid edifice of the law. Sooner or later, it finds the vulnerability in any hiding place and worms its way in. All it takes is a small point of weakness, a tiny chink in the wall of social order, a minuscule tear in the fabric of human decency. Even in a small prairie town that dared to tempt the gods and call itself Havenwood, there was no refuge.

“This is it.” Berglund rolled the police cruiser to a stop before the blackened remains of what must have been, if neighboring houses were any indication, a pleasant family home in an pretty neighborhood before it had been put to the torch two nights earlier. Another black-and-white cruiser and a beige Ford Fairlane with the Minnesota state crest on the door were parked in the wide, sweeping driveway.

“I don’t know as you’ll see much,” Berglund said. “Things are pretty raked over by now, but this gives you an idea of how bad the fire was.”

The sour odor of soot was already insinuating its way in through the car’s air vents. Cruz climbed out of the cruiser, moving off to the side, out of the direct path of the sunlight to get a better view of the burned-out shell. He cupped a hand over his eyes, squinting against the sun that was beginning to sink toward the western horizon, setting up a blinding glare of ice and snow on Lost Arrow Lake. From this vantage point, he could see little except the uneven silhouette of what remained of the Meade home.

The scene looked as the fire had rendered it, for the most part, bordered and contained by a band of yellow plastic crime scene tape. The house had mostly collapsed in on itself. All that remained standing were the sooty red bricks of a large hearth and chimney, rising like a sentinel above the cracked and blackened cement foundation. A few charred timbers lay tipped at odd angles, crusted over with a thick layer of ice from the soaking of the fire hoses.

The yard sloped down to a wooden dock that extended out to the frozen lake. On the opposite shore, a few snow-capped cottages and a dense line of pine trees stood in stark relief against the brilliant sky. The view was impressive, Cruz thought, like a Currier and Ives Christmas fantasy. In summer, the place would no doubt be a water sport paradise. Right now, he could make out the tracks of dozens of skis and snowmobiles crisscrossing the lake’s frozen surface. Out in the middle of it, narrow gray plumes rose from makeshift chimneys poking through the roofs of small plywood huts, evidence of heartier souls than he sport fishing through the thick ice.

The cruiser rocked as Berglund climbed out on his side and slammed the door. His green nylon police parka was unzipped, despite the frigid temperature, and the brass buttons of his khaki uniform strained across his chest as he came around the car to join Cruz. Like many very large men, Berglund moved slowly and with great precision, as if worried about accidentally bowling someone over.

Two men wearing orange coveralls over their clothing were poking around the site, taking measurements by the look of it. A couple of local cops in uniforms like Berglund’s stood just outside the tape, watching them work and standing guard over a large, articulated metal toolbox and what looked to be a pile of plastic and paper evidence bags.

“Pretty bad,” Cruz observed, as they watched the men working over the grim scene.

“Pretty bad,” the deputy agreed—both of them masters at understatement.

A silence settled over them, a quiet more profound than any Cruz could remember for a very long time. There were no automobile noises, no commuter planes, no traffic helicopters droning overhead. No hum of the heavy machinery that is a city’s living, beating heart. He might have expected a few chirping birds, at least, but any that were wintering here had obviously had the sense to flee this place of death.

Cruz would have welcomed the opportunity to fly away himself. His stomach turned at the acrid odor of wet, charred wood and the toxic stench of melted plastic, rubber and paint.

He took a step forward and heard a brittle crunching sound under his shoe. He looked down to see that he was standing on broken shards of glass, maybe a piece of shattered window pane. He kicked it aside, then stopped to pick out a small fragment that had become wedged into the hard rubber of his left heel.

“Winds were high the night of the fire,” Berglund said. “Flames jumped from treetop to treetop, and it looked like they might cross the lot line. We were worried we’d lose half the street.”

Cruz followed the direction of the burly man’s cocked thumb to the white birch and silver maples standing between the destroyed house and the property to the north of it. Several were scorched and fire-capped. On the neighbor’s garage, maybe sixty feet away, the wood siding was visibly blistered and peeling in a couple of spots, mute testimony to the intensity of the blaze.

“We’ve only got two pumper trucks,” Berglund said. His deep voice doled out words sparingly, Cruz noted, like someone unaccustomed to strangers or long explanations. “It’s just a volunteer force, and fighting the wind like we were…” The frown deepened on his square face and his white-blond eyebrows were almost linked now by the two vertical creases above his nose. “If it hadn’t been for the wind, we might have been able to get it under control, save more evidence. Once we realized there was no way of saving the house or pulling Mrs. Meade out, though, we made the decision to save the neighbor’s place.”

He said it defensively, Cruz noted, like he thought this D.C. hotshot might be getting ready to ream out the locals for their ineptitude. “Makes sense,” he agreed.

A cold wind blew up off the lake and Cruz felt the damp cut through him. He turned up the collar of his overcoat, wishing once again that he’d worn something warmer. Back in D.C., they were just weeks away from cherry blossom time, when the air would turn humid and ripe, but that kind of weather was a long way off here. There was no point in looking for warmth in these ice-crusted coals, either.

Suddenly, he recoiled, picking up a trace scent through the pervasive stink of charred wood, a smell that was both familiar and unforgettable—the terrifying odor of roasted human flesh. It was just his imagination messing with his head, he tried to tell himself. Grace Meade’s charred body had long since been removed.

Logic carried no weight, however, because what he was seeing in his mind’s eye was not this scene, but another fire long ago—another murder victim’s body torched in a deliberate bid to destroy evidence, only this victim hadn’t been a stranger, and Cruz hadn’t been some impartial investigator arriving after the fact.

“You want to take a closer look?” Berglund asked, stepping up to the ribbon of yellow plastic crime scene tape that circumnavigated the lot. He reached out and lifted it, holding it up for Cruz to pass under. All the professional courtesies.

God almighty, no, he didn’t want to get any closer, Cruz thought, revulsion springing from the deepest recesses of his brain, that primitive part that deals in instinctive fear and the impulse to flee. He managed to hold his ground—just.

“I can see all I need to from here,” he said. “I’ll just wait till those guys get done. I don’t want to be trampling over evidence.”

He turned his back to the site, looking up and down the road as if recreating in his mind the scenario as it had played out two nights earlier. All along the curving lakefront road, well-tended houses with two-car garages nestled into wooded lots that flowed, unfenced and unbroken, from one into the other. They were a custom-built mix of ranch-style bunga lows, Cape Cod salt boxes and sprawling split-levels with sand-colored prairie limestone facades. The lots were large, none smaller than a half acre, Cruz estimated, space beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest of urban dwellers. Even in a small town, this had to be prime real estate. Cruz saw snowmobiles parked in several of the driveways, and a couple of tarp-covered powerboats jacked up on trailers for the winter.

When his heartbeat had finally slowed to a normal pace, he allowed himself to turn back toward the destroyed house, where the two jumpsuited investigators seemed to be finishing their work. They picked their way across the rubble, stopping to lay down a few evidence bags in the tool case. One of the men was carrying a long-handled spade, and he jammed it upright in a pile of ash. Clapping the dust off their hands, they ducked under the tape and walked over to where Cruz and Berglund were standing. One was gray-haired, balding, but fit-looking under his orange jumpsuit. The other was younger, heavyset and perspiring, despite the cold, so that his black-framed glasses kept slipping down the slick incline of his nose, which was black from the repetition of his sooty hand pushing them back.

“This is Agent Cruz from the FBI,” Berglund told them.

They nodded, and the older of the two men held out a dirty hand. He then thought better of it and transformed the shake to a quick wave. “I don’t think you want to touch this hand,” he said. “I’m Don Beadle from the State Bureau of Investigation. This is Bill Oppenhalt from the Arson Investigation Unit. I guess it was you who originated the request for us to come out here and take a look, Agent Cruz?”

Cruz nodded. “That’s right. Appreciate the cooperation.”

“No problem. That’s why we’re here.”

“So, how does it look? Do you think this was deliberately set?”

Beadle deferred to Oppenhalt, who pushed his heavy glasses up his nose once more and nodded. “Oh, yeah, not much question of that, I’d say. Things were a little stirred around before we got here, mind you, but we were able to spot a fair number of physical indicators just the same.”

“Like what?” Berglund asked.

“Well, you got your multiple high burn points and several localized heavy burn patterns indicating that there was more than one point of origin. Some spalling in the concrete foundation, too, which some would say indicates an accelerant, although it’s not a real reliable indicator, in my experience. We took some carpet and underpad samples, though, and those were a little more conclusive. I’ll want to run them through a gas chromatograph back at the lab just to be sure, but in the end,” he said, tapping the side of his blackened nose before pushing his glasses up yet again, “the nose knows.”

“What do you mean?”

Oppenhalt grunted as he bent to scoop a sample of dirt, which he rubbed between his fingers, then held under his nostrils. “Gasoline,” he said. “On a cold day like this, it’s real easy to pick it up. You guys don’t smell it? It’s all over the place here.”

Berglund shook his head. “I can’t smell anything except charcoal, and that’s been stuck in my nostrils since the night of the fire. And anyway,” he added, nodding to the gravel driveway beneath their feet, “what you’re smelling here is probably several years worth of dripping oil from all the cars that have been parked in this drive.”

“Well, sure, but it’s not just in the drive, Deputy,” Beadle said, cocking his thumb back over his shoulder. “It’s all over the scene. Really strong in the carpet samples we found, like Bill here said. Even I picked it up, and my nose isn’t nearly as well trained as his is.”

The broad shoulders of Berglund’s green parka hefted, sending a shower of what looked at first glance to be dandruff flying to the ground, until Cruz realized it was actually a fine layer of ash that was still settling almost forty-eight hours after the blaze.

“You guys happen to come across any spent cartridges or slugs while you were sifting through the ash?” Cruz asked. “Deputy Berglund says the autopsy on the lady who died here indicates she may have taken a shot to the chest from a fairly large-caliber weapon, like maybe a forty-five or a nine millimeter.”

Beadle shook his head. “No, we were on the lookout for it, but nothing showed up. If your killer was the careful sort, he might have picked up his spent cartridges before he left the scene.”

“That would make him one very careful drug-crazed hippie drifter looking for a quick score,” Cruz said dryly, glancing at Berglund.

“I never said that was the only explanation for what went down here,” the deputy said irritably. “That was the chief’s thought, and it’s as good as any other at the moment. On the other hand, somebody that calculating…” His voice drifted off.

Berglund’s face was drawn and showing signs of weariness and strain. It was obvious he was also ticked off at being second-guessed by meddling strangers. Fair enough, Cruz thought. If it was him in the deputy’s place and some stranger had dropped into the middle of one if his cases, pulling rank and calling in outside investigators, he’d probably be just as pissed. But that didn’t change the fact that, frankly, the guy needed the help.

“You seen all you need to here?” Berglund asked.

Cruz glanced back at the rubble and nodded. “I guess I have. You guys?”

Beadle also nodded. “We’ll get our preliminary report out to you both within a couple of days. Final has to wait for the chemical tests on the samples we took, but like Bill said, our view is that you’ve definitely got an arson case on your hands here, guys, so you’ll want to bear that in mind as your investigation proceeds. Anything else you need from us?”

“Not for now. I’ll let you know if I do,” Berglund said glumly.

CHAPTER 7

That doctor stopped by to see me again—a couple of hours ago, I think. I wasn’t quite as doped up as I’ve been the last few times she was in. (And how many times is that, I wonder? I have no idea.) But it’s quiet now. No one has been in for quite a while. They seem to have decided to leave me with nothing but this notebook for company. That’s fine with me. I just want to be left alone.

I hear the murmur of voices out in the hall, sounding low and disapproving as they pause occasionally at the window of this room. They consider me stark raving mad, I suppose, and dangerous to boot.

The doctor never actually came out and said so, but I suspect she’s a psychiatrist. It makes sense, after what I tried to do in the ER—after everything else, too. Maybe she really does want to help. But it’s more likely, I think, that this is part of the process they’re going through now—determining my competency before they decide what to do with me. I’m beyond help, in any case. Though I’m sure I will be judged, it won’t be in this lifetime.

I never even looked at the doctor, although she did her best to engage me in conversation. She’s good, too. Pulled out all the tricks—open-ended questions. Empathy. Those long, pregnant silences that normal people feel obliged to fill with nervous chatter. She seemed disappointed when I didn’t respond.

“Perhaps you’ll feel like talking tomorrow, Jillian,” she said just before she left.

Well, no, I could have told her, I won’t. It may be her business, if she is a shrink, to get people to talk about their deepest feelings, but I can’t do that. She’s a stranger to me. I’m not the kind of person who confides, even to people I’ve known for many years. I never was. I know there are those who see it as evidence that I feel somehow superior, but the truth is just the opposite. I’ve always been embarrassed to talk about myself. I can’t imagine a duller subject, or why anyone would be interested. I’m a good listener, though. I suppose it’s why I chose to do the work I do, gathering oral histories, recording the reminiscences of mostly older people about the great events they’ve lived through. Their lives are so much more exciting than mine.

This doctor is stubborn, though. I can tell. I know she’ll be back. To be honest, she seems like a very nice person. I feel guilty about ignoring her, but I simply don’t want what she has to offer. How can I convince her I’m a waste of her time and skills? That she’d be better served expending her energies elsewhere, on someone who wants—deserves—to be saved? That I am beyond redemption?

She was careful before she went out to catch the door before it slammed, easing it gently shut. Still, there was no mistaking the sound of the dead bolt ramming home. Obviously, they’re taking no more chances with me. Maybe they think I’ll try to run, but what would be the point, when my thoughts would only come along for the ride?

No, there’s only one escape for me.

In any event, even if I did want to walk out of here, they’ve taken my clothes—destroyed them, I suppose, since they’d have been ruined, what with all the blood, and then blackened from the fire….

Oh, Jillian! What are you thinking? Of course they wouldn’t destroy them. Far from it. Every item would have been painstakingly preserved. Some criminal investigator is no doubt examining them at this very moment, lifting hairs, microscopic bits of lint and drops of my mother’s blood, accumulating the mountain of evidence they’ll be building against me. But that, too, is a waste of time and resources.

In place of my ruined things, they’ve given me a short blue hospital gown and white cotton socks. There’s also a terry robe lying at the end of the bed—beltless. I’ve already checked. Nor is there anything else in here remotely long enough to be used as a rope, not even a sheet on the mattress. There’s just a quilted pad and a thick down duvet to keep me warm. It hardly matters. Even if there were something to make into a noose, there’s no place to hang it. The half-globe light fixture seems firmly anchored to the ceiling, and there are no convenient bars on those high windows. That mesh-reinforced glass looks unbreakable, too, and the room is devoid of any other sharp objects. Even the food trays they bring in and carry out, untouched, hold only round, stainless steel spoons and melamine plates and cups. No breakable plastic or lovely glass shards with which to slash those wrists today, dearie!

Amazing how they think of everything.

The doctor left another parting gift along with this notebook—a box of fine-tipped colored markers. I almost smiled. She’s no fool, this woman. There’s no chance she’d leave me sharp lead pencils or ball point steel suitable for ramming into eager arteries. It’s pretty hard to kill yourself with fuzzy felt Crayolas.

She wants me to write down my thoughts. How cruel is that? My mind wanders between stupor, rage and grief, and sometimes, for a few minutes, I forget. Then suddenly it comes back, slamming into the center of my chest like a sledgehammer—these awful, monstrous memories clawing at my brain—and I remember where I am and why I’m here.

I can hardly bring myself to believe it—my mother is dead….

My mother is dead and I have no business being alive. That’s the fundamental truth here. But maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I have inherited just a tiny measure of her indomitable willpower, after all.

It occurs to me, though, that perhaps I owe society an explanation. If I do that, will I find the courage then to do what I have to do?

I know there are those who will resent justice being cheated in this way. All I can say to them is that I don’t want or expect forgiveness. It’s not even that I’m afraid to face the consequences of what I might have done. I just can’t live with the knowledge of what I am.

They say confession is good for the soul, but I don’t believe it for a minute. Nothing will take away this burden of guilt and shame. And the idea that people will look on me as an object of curiosity, disgust or (God forbid) pity is so insufferable that it gives me pause even now. It’s horrible enough to have the truth here inside me, eating at my soul like a malignancy, but to bring it out into the open for all the world to see? Why would I do that, when it would be so easy to let this all die with my mother—with us both?

Except, what have I learned in my life, and my work, if not that we human beings are doomed to repeat those atrocities we don’t take the time to understand? But before there can be understanding, someone has to bear witness. The innocent deserve that.

Oh, yes, there are innocents in this tale. Maybe I owe it to them to tell this story. For their sake, then, I should set the record down now while I can—while these people are leaving me in peace. I can’t imagine it will last for long. The authorities are bound to show up with their questions sooner or later, and I’ll probably be arrested as soon as I’m deemed fit to walk out of here. But if I can lull this doctor into believing I’m making some sort of therapeutic progress with this notebook, maybe she’ll hold them at bay long enough for me to get it all down.

These gifts of hers—this notebook, this quiet time, and these markers in their ridiculously cheerful hues of wild cherry, magenta and indigo—maybe they’re Fate’s way of offering me a chance to atone for my sins. Mine and my mother’s. We owe a vast debt, she and I, and while nothing can ever repay it, a full confession is the very least we can offer.

Then, once I’ve finished, I’ll look for my chance. Because it’s a sure bet that, sooner or later, the attention of these caretakers will flag, however briefly. And when it does, I’ll seize the opportunity to end a life that never should have been and submit to whatever judgment lies waiting for me in the next.

CHAPTER 8

Montrose, Minnesota

Thursday, January 11, 1979

Cruz and Berglund pulled into the parking lot of the Montrose Regional Hospital, sixteen miles northwest of Havenwood. In an area reserved for official vehicles, Berglund nestled the black-and-white cruiser into a parking spot just opposite the emergency entrance ramp.

The three-story hospital looked new, with fresh, brightly painted signs in orange and blue, and sidewalks and roadways still untouched by the frost heave of unrelenting winters that turned every paved surface into a spiderweb of cracks, fissures and potholes. But, Cruz thought, the hospital could have been in Tallahassee, Florida or Missoula, Montana, for all the uniqueness of its institutional tan and stucco exterior.

“Do you really think Jillian Meade intended to kill herself?” he asked, as he and Berglund climbed out of the cruiser and headed up the walkway.

“No question. They said she had that needle in her arm, and that she fought like hell with the orderly who tackled her, just like she fought me when I wouldn’t let her stay in that burning house. They doubled up on her tranquilizers after that. Even then, the doc on call said he thought she was serious enough about doing herself in that he had her put in full restraints before they transferred her over here to the psych ward.”

Cruz said nothing, but the cynic in him had his doubts. Just because the woman was in the loony bin didn’t mean she wasn’t crazy like a fox.

He drew a deep breath of piney air just before they passed through the sliding glass front doors, girding himself. He’d visited more than his share of psychiatric units. In the course of eleven years as a U.S. Army criminal investigator, he’d run into every conceivable mental quirk, malady and trauma that could erupt in violence. He’d personally witnessed his first murder on June 11, 1965, a day that had changed the course of his life forever. Since then, he’d investigated more than three hundred others. Most of them had sprung from stupid rage and momentary loss of self-control, senseless acts committed in a blur of drugs or booze. A few had been meticulously planned, the murder itself secondary to an insatiable desire for something else—money, a woman, revenge.

And then, there were the tragedies, pure and simple. Even normally decent, sane people had their triggers, and under the right amount of pressure, anyone could buckle. Cruz had seen that fourteen years earlier, on a June day out in a swampy delta north of Da Nang. His faith in humanity had been on shaky ground ever since.

Berglund looked grim, as if he was dreading this as much as Cruz was. “Ready?”

Cruz nodded.

So what was Jillian Meade’s story? How coincidental was it that three women linked to her had now died under suspicious circumstances within the span of a month? Was she some kind of uncontrolled psychopath, or a smart faker with some obscure and twisted motive? If the latter, they weren’t going to do anything for her in here. Drugs and therapy might unkink a mildly bent psyche, but there was no curing a killer who was genuinely psychotic or very clever—and they were often one and the same. He’d seen thieves, rapists and serial killers who could mimic an entire catalogue of clinical symptoms in a bid to dodge criminal responsibility for their acts, trying to cop a “not guilty by reason of insanity” plea. Was that Jillian Meade’s game?

Inside, the hospital had the cookie-cutter look of medical institutes all over the country, with scrubbable white walls, industrial carpeted floors, and utilitarian, charm-free furnishings. A few garish splashes had been added in the form of wide racing stripes in the hallways, but even these were resolutely functional, color-coded by department. Cruz and Berglund followed a blue stripe to the main reception, where the deputy approached the desk to ask for directions. The stripes leading back to the ER were red, Cruz noted. Green was apparently for obstetrics, orange for pediatrics. And the psych ward?

Berglund turned to him and nodded at the bank of elevators on the opposite wall. “She says go to three, then follow the purple stripe.”

At the elevator doors, as they stood in silence watching the lights overhead dance down to one, Cruz thought about possible links between Grace Meade and the other victims. Mrs. Meade had been English by birth, so maybe the two female victims in Britain had been friends of hers, which might explain Jillian Meade’s calling on them. One of the women had been a semi-retired civil servant of some sort, his Scotland Yard contact had said. The other, a retired hospital “tea cart lady.” Both of them elderly, both of them living alone when they died, brutally attacked and killed in their homes, which had subsequently been torched. Why?

Both of them visited by Jillian Meade only a short time earlier. Why?

At the third floor, Cruz followed Berglund to a thick glass window under a plaque that read: “Reception—Please Sign In.” On the other side of the glass, a guy in green scrubs sat in a swivel chair with his back to the window, his white sneakers propped on a credenza behind. Coffee cup in one hand, he was reading a newspaper that he held awkwardly folded in his free hand, shaking it back open from time to time when it occasionally collapsed on itself. The comics page, Cruz noted, peering over his shoulder.

Berglund tapped on the window and he started, splashing coffee on his pants, the paper and his arm. A muffled curse sounded through the double-plate glass as his feet dropped to the floor. The chair pivoted and he looked up, peeved, but at the sight of the burly man in uniform bearing down on him, he prudently swallowed his protest.

“Help you?” he asked, shaking splattered coffee from his hands. His voice came out of a round, slatted steel disc in the glass sounding tinny and crackled, like every drive-in movie speaker Cruz had ever encountered in his misspent youth.

Berglund planted his hands on the counter. “I’m Deputy Chief of Police Berglund with the Havenwood Police Department. This is Federal Agent Cruz. We’re here to speak to Jillian Meade.”

“I’m just an orderly. I’m filling in while the head nurse is on her coffee break, but lemme see…” He slid a clipboard in front of him and ran a finger down the page. “Meade, Meade…nope. Can’t help you right now.”

“What do you mean? I just spoke to the front office by phone a couple of hours ago. I know she’s here.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s here all right, but she’s still being evaluated. No visitors.”

“This is official business.”

The orderly shrugged. “Her doctor would have to clear it.”

“Fine,” Berglund said, “we’d like to speak to him.”

The reply was a one-syllable pop.

“Pardon?” Berglund asked.

“Her,” the orderly replied. “The psychiatrist is a woman, Dr. Kandinsky.”

“Her, then. Could you get her, please?”

The speaker crackled once more. “I think she was on the ward a while back, but I’m not sure if she’s still there. Take a seat. I’ll page her.”

Cruz had already moved over to a window that overlooked the parking lot and the broad, frozen prairie beyond. The hospital stood at the very edge of the town of Montrose. Beyond was a flat expanse of open farmland broken only by a grid of shelterbelts, poplar and spruce mostly. The fields were dark and dead-looking, blackened by stubble burned off after the harvest, only occasional patches of snow here and there. What snow there was had piled up in drifts that littered the shade of the shelterbelts, like beach debris left behind after a receding tide. Cruz had seen places like this at the height of the growing season, though, when they were transformed into a vast, swaying sea of golden wheat. During those restless months after his first tour of duty in Vietnam, before he’d decided to re-up and go back, he’d ridden his old Harley down back roads from one end of the country to the other, drifting aimlessly, keeping mostly to himself. Trying to come to terms with what he’d seen and done over there. Trying to come to terms with himself.

Berglund’s massive frame moved beside him. The deputy gave the view out the window a glance, but it was probably as familiar to him as his own face in the bathroom mirror. He turned back to the waiting room, hooking his thumbs in his belt as he leaned against the window ledge, the typical stance of a brawny man unconsciously compensating for the unfortunate tendency of his arms to swing, gorilla-like, away from his overbuilt body.

“Let’s hope this lady shrink’s around, or we’ve made the drive for nothing,” Berglund said, his fingers drumming against his thick leather gun belt as they listened to the soft hum of the building, the ping of the elevators, and the singsong tone of pages going out over the hospital’s PA system. “Not much snow out there,” he added conversationally, giving the view behind them another glance. “Almanac says it’s going to be a hot, dry summer.”

“Guess the farmers won’t like that.”

“No. It’s typical, though. Feast or famine. Last spring, the fields were so saturated it was nearly June before we could get machinery out onto them. Finally get a crop in, and the next thing you know, summer drought sets in and the ground dries up harder than cement.”

Cruz gave him a sideways look. “You farm yourself?”

Berglund shrugged. “A little. Work my father-in-law’s old place. Got a few fields in barley and winter wheat.”

“Must keep you pretty busy, between that and the police work.”

“It can get hectic. Summertime’s when the town fills up with tourists and cottage people. Population jumps from a couple thousand to nearly ten.”

“You’re going to be really stretched this year if your chief’s still off the board.”

Berglund paused, as if that realization were just sinking in, and he passed a weary hand over his square, lined face—a man with too much to do and not enough to do it with. “I guess we will. What about you? You live in Washington?”

“These days, yeah, since I took this Bureau job.”

“Wouldn’t be my cup of tea, living in a big city like that. Where were you before the Bureau?”

“All over the place. Thailand, the Philippines, England, Germany. A tour in the Pentagon, a stint at Fort Gordon, Georgia.”

“Military, huh? Air force?”

“Army.”

“That a fact?”

They stopped, listening, as a page for Dr. Kandinsky finally went out over the PA system.

Berglund turned back to Cruz. “So where’s home?”

“Southern California. Santa Ana.”

“Oh, yeah. I know where that is. Near Disneyland, right? Wife and I took the kids there a couple of years ago. ‘Happiest Place on Earth.’”

Cruz nodded. “So they say. Haven’t lived there myself since the draft, back in ’65.”

Berglund glanced around, but the waiting room was empty. “Were you in ’Nam?” he asked quietly.

That was how vets talked amongst themselves these days, Cruz reflected grimly—in low voices and in safe places. Nobody spat at them and called them “baby-killers” anymore, but nobody wanted to hear about what happened to them, either. How kids got sent to fight an enemy they couldn’t see for a cause nobody believed in. How it messed with their heads, turning too many of them into burnout cases. “I did two tours,” he told Berglund.

“Two? Christ, one was enough for me. Why’d you go back?”

“Unfinished business. Then the Army turned into a career. What about you? Ex-grunt?”

“No, Navy man. Crazy, huh? Landlocked guy like me, ends up swabbing a deck? I didn’t even wait for my letter from the draft. Figured they were going to get me, anyway, so I volunteered to have my pick of services. Coming from a dust bowl like this, the idea of the ocean just appealed, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess I can see that.”

“So, you reenlisted, then stayed on? What kind of work did you do?”

Cruz hesitated, loathe to give details. He’d re-upped as penance for his sins, and penance it had turned out to be when word leaked out that he’d testified against those involved in a murder and subsequent cover-up conspiracy in his old unit. Being the guy who sent four former buddies to Leavenworth had earned him no points with his new outfit. On the contrary. He’d already endured two savage beatings he refused to talk about by the time the Criminal Investigation Division finally moved in and yanked him out of there. When they’d seen he’d taken a couple of criminology courses during his college days, they’d offered to train him as a professional investigator. It had been an offer he knew he couldn’t refuse. The only alternative was to return to a front-line unit and the near certainty of being taken out sooner or later by some hothead’s “friendly fire.”

He wasn’t about to tell Berglund that, though, and not just because the deputy, like so many others, would probably think he should have kept his mouth shut and not testified. No one in the service liked the CID, just like no city cop had anything good to say about internal affairs divisions. Cops who policed other cops and soldiers who investigated other soldiers learned to stick to their own kind and watch their backs.

“It was mostly field work I did,” he told Berglund. “Army life appealed, I guess.”

“Humph. Well, you’ve seen some places, I guess. Me, I did the run between San Diego and Cam Ranh Bay when I was in the Navy. Had a furlough in Bangkok once, attended police academy in St. Paul. Took that vacation in California with the wife and kids. Period. Rest of the time, I’ve been right here.”

“Havenwood seems like a nice town.”

“Yeah, it is. Some people might find it a little slow-moving for their taste, but I never wanted to live anywhere else.” He paused for a moment, as something flashed across his features, like a bad memory or an image of ghosts walking on his grave. “This thing with Grace Meade and the fire and all, though…stuff like that doesn’t happen around here, you know? You get your Saturday night bar fights and too many drunk kids wiping themselves out on the highway every year, but a murder….”

It happened everywhere, Cruz wanted to tell him, but he just nodded.

“How long are you planning to stick around?” Berglund asked.

“Only as long as it takes.”

“You just need a statement from Jillian, right.”

“Pretty much. I wouldn’t mind talking to a few people who know her, too, just to round out the report I have to make back to Scotland Yard. You know, the usual background stuff. Can you suggest some names?”

Berglund seemed non-committal. “I can’t think who, at this point. She’s been gone a long time. She left right after high school. Went to college out east and hasn’t been back here much since. Drops in to see her mother once in a while, that’s about it.”

“What about family and friends?”

“Her mother was the last of her family. Jillian was an only child. Her grandparents helped raise her, but they’ve been gone for years. As for friends…” Berglund shrugged. “You know how it is. You lose touch. Seventeen years is a long time.”

A long time, Cruz noted, but a very precise number—one that Berglund hadn’t even paused to calculate. Was that only because Jillian’s whereabouts had been on his mind since this business with the fire and her mother’s death? Or was there more to it than that? He studied the deputy out of the corner of his eye. Berglund couldn’t be much older than Jillian Meade, and like the man said, it was a small town. They had to have known each other since they were kids. How well? Obviously well enough for Berglund to have counted every year since she’d been gone.

“What about her father?” he asked.

“She never knew him. He was a flyer, killed during the war. Her mother was English. They met over there. Apparently she was working for British special ops, and Joe Meade was flying for the OSS. You know what that was?”

Cruz nodded. “The Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA.”

“That’s the one. They say Grace was quite the bombshell in those days, like some kind of Mata Hari, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, the Brits had sent her behind the lines into France, and Joe was flying secret supply missions to the Resistance. His plane got shot down and the Resistance hid him from the Germans for a couple of months or so while they looked for an opportunity to smuggle him out of the country. That’s how the two of them met. Kinda like a movie, you know. Got married in secret by a French priest and were together long enough that Grace got pregnant, but then they were separated. Joe Meade was killed trying to get back to England, and Grace got stuck in France till the end of the war.”

“So that’s how Jillian ended up being born there,” Cruz said. When Berglund gave him a curious look, he explained, “I saw it on the passport details that were sent over to the Bureau.”

“Oh, right. Anyway, that’s about it. Joe’s folks sent for Grace and the baby after the war, invited them to come and live here in Havenwood with them.”

“And Mrs. Meade never remarried?”

Berglund shook his head.

“You sure know a lot about the family’s history,” Cruz noted.

“Everybody in Havenwood knows that story. Joe Meade’s a local war hero. My kids go to Joseph Meade Elementary School. So did I, for that matter. As for Grace, well, she made her own mark on the town. It can’t have been easy for her, I guess, leaving everything and everyone she knew and coming out here to live. But by the time she died, there wasn’t a thing went on here she didn’t have a hand in. Ran half the town, for that matter. Her funeral’s probably going to be the biggest one the town’s ever seen. I can’t imagine many who won’t be there.”

Except her daughter, Cruz thought.

Muffled voices sounded behind the glassed-in reception area, and they looked over to see an older woman speaking to the orderly.

“This must be the psychiatrist,” Berglund said, pushing himself off the window ledge.

Cruz had to agree. The woman wore no white coat, just a long, belted navy cardigan and slacks, but there was no mistaking the authoritative bearing of someone used to having her way. Sure enough, the orderly nodded in the direction of the two men in the waiting room. The woman disappeared behind a partition, then reappeared, frowning and pushing her way though the heavy door that separated the waiting area from the ward beyond.

Tall and heavyset, she had frizzled, steel-gray hair coiled in a knot on top of her head.A pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses dangled from a chain slung around the collar of the brightly colored blouse she wore under the navy cardigan, a riotous Rorschach test pattern of pinks, white and oranges. As she strode toward them, hands jammed in the pockets of her sweater, the crepe soles of her brown Hush Puppies squeaked on the tiled floor.

“I’m Dr. Helen Kandinsky. What can I do for you gentlemen?”

Her irritable expression put Cruz in mind of Miss Nugent, his junior high English teacher, whose habit it was to send all the “Mexicans” in her classes to seats at the back of the room. They could do what they wanted back there, she said, as long as they kept quiet, because she had no intention of wasting her time on bean pickers. Somewhere in America, people were marching for civil rights, but Miss Nugent obviously hadn’t heard the news. The fact that Cruz’s family had been in California nearly two hundred years cut no ice with her, either. No amount of effort ever earned him more than the standard “C” she handed out to every student with a Spanish-sounding last name, the minimum required to ensure that there would be no repeat appearances in her class.

Berglund introduced himself and Cruz, explaining why they were there. The doctor pulled her hands out of her pockets to shake theirs in turn. When she turned her clear-eyed gaze on Cruz, she held on to his hand for an extended moment, her expression softening, less irritated now than curious. In that split second, Cruz saw Miss Nugent slink away into that dank mental corner where all his anger and self-doubt lived and festered.

“An FBI agent?” she said. “I can see why the deputy here would need to speak to my patient, but why would you people be taking an interest in a local tragedy like this?”

“I’m working on another case where Miss Meade may be a material witness,” he told her. “I’d been trying to track her down in Washington, and when I heard what had happened here, I decided to fly out.”

“I see. Well, I’m sorry to say you’ve probably made a trip for nothing. I doubt Jillian’s going to be in a position to answer your questions anytime soon. I’m trying to get her to open up and talk about what happened to her mother, but it’s slow going, and I think it could take a while.”

“Has she said anything at all about what happened that night?” Berglund asked.

“She hasn’t uttered a single word since being brought in, not about that or anything else. Mind you, she was heavily sedated for the first twenty-four hours. I’ve backed her off the meds today, but she’s still largely unresponsive. She seems to be in shock.”

“She hasn’t tried…you know, to hurt herself again or anything, has she?” Berglund asked.

“No. We’re monitoring her very closely, mind you, but she’s been quiet. Too quiet, in fact. I’m getting concerned about the fact that she’s not eating or drinking. If she doesn’t start taking something in the next few hours, I may have to put her on an intravenous line. I’m hoping to avoid that, because it’s bound to upset her. If she resists and has to be restrained, physically or chemically, then we’re going to end up right back at square one.”

“Are you saying she has made some progress since coming in?” Cruz asked.

“Maybe just a little. She was completely unresponsive at first. A lot of that was the drugs, of course. And while she still hasn’t spoken, she has taken a tentative step out of her self-isolation.”

“How so?”

“I was in to see her a little while ago. She’s still not talking, but she’s listening, I can tell. I left her with a notebook and some markers. It seemed like a worthwhile gambit. I was told she’s a historian by profession and that she’s written for publication. Some writers can’t resist a blank page.”

“And that worked?”

The doctor nodded. “I think so. Sure enough, when I peeked in on her just a few minutes ago, she was writing feverishly. It’s very strange. It almost looks as if she were undergoing some kind of exorcism. Frankly, though, it’s an encouraging sign. Something is bothering her deeply, and she’s trying to communicate in the way she’s most comfortable. If that’s all she can manage for now, it’s fine with me.”

“So, what’s she writing?” Cruz asked.

Dr. Kandinsky’s lower lip jutted as she lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I have no idea.”

“You haven’t read it?”

“No, I promised her privacy.”

“Then how do you know she’s not writing gibberish?”

“I don’t. But even if she is, it says something about her mental state. In the meantime, as long as she’s involved in some kind of external activity, she’s not trying to kill herself.”

“I’d like to try talking to her, Doctor,” Berglund said. “She and I…” He hesitated. “Jillian’s known me her whole life, that’s all, and she could probably use a familiar face right about now.”

The doctor studied him for a moment as she considered the request, but then shook her head. “I’m sorry, I have to say no. Not today, anyway. She’s at a very tricky juncture right now. She’s been severely traumatized, and in my professional opinion, she’s right on the cusp of total withdrawal.” Berglund started to protest but she held up a hand. “I have no doubt you mean well, Deputy, but to walk in now, wearing that uniform and asking questions about the fire and her mother’s death…well, it’s premature, I’m afraid.”

Berglund nodded, obviously resigned to wait, but Cruz shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“With all due respect, Doctor, I’m a little skeptical about how traumatized she really is. There’s some evidence Miss Meade may have pertinent knowledge on at least two other recent homicides—and her mother was murdered, by the way, in case you weren’t aware.”

“Is that true?” Dr. Kandinsky asked, turning to Berglund. He nodded.

“So that being the case,” Cruz went on, “I think we need to consider the possibility that she could be faking these symptoms of hers.”

“She wanted to die in that fire,” Berglund said. “I know. I was there. I practically had to coldcock her before I could carry her out of there.”

“And then there was the second suicide attempt in the Havenwood ER,” Dr. Kandinsky pointed out.

“Conveniently unsuccessful once more,” Cruz said. “Look, you have to admit, Doctor, there are clever people who sometimes act crazy in order to throw up a smoke screen to cover their actions. I know—I’ve seen it before.”

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I doubt it, in this case. And if you’re wrong and we push her too hard prematurely, Agent Cruz, we could very well do permanent damage. She could shut down for good, and then she might well succeed at her next attempt at suicide. Because make no mistake about it, gentlemen, the opportunity will arise sooner or later, and that wouldn’t suit your purposes or mine.”

Cruz was ready to argue it further, but her fighter’s stance and the shake of her gray head made it clear she was not about to back down.

“No. You can come back tomorrow and we’ll see where we’re at then. For now, my medical order stands—Jillian Meade is not to be disturbed. You can try for a court order, if you want, but I warn you, I’ll oppose it vigorously.”

Cruz would have been willing to take his chances with a judge, but Berglund’s set expression told him he’d be on his own. “One more day isn’t going to make any difference,” the deputy said. “We’ll wait.”

Kandinsky nodded. “I think that’s the best course.”

“Could we at least see her?” Berglund asked.

“I suppose that would be all right. I don’t see what harm it would do for you simply to look at her—from a distance, you understand. There’s a one-way observation window in her room. You can see her from there.”

They followed her over to the solid steel door next to the reception window and waited while the orderly at the desk buzzed them through. Dr. Kandinsky led them past a large common room just behind the reception desk, where eight or ten people in robes and hospital gowns, elderly for the most part, were sitting around card tables, or in recliners or wheel-chairs arranged in a circle in front of a television set.

“Our geriatric cases,” the doctor told them. “Dementia, mostly. We give them a little occupational therapy, but there’s not much potential for happy endings there.”

They continued down a long narrow hall, past rooms with heavy doors that stood open now, each room with a rectangular observation port, about two feet by three, set into the wall to allow a view of the inside. By the faintly shadowed look of the windows, Cruz knew they were mirrored on the other side, like the observation windows of the countless interrogation rooms in which he’d worked witnesses over the years. Most of the rooms were empty now, their occupants obviously those geriatric cases down the hall, but they passed one closed door, and through the observation window, they saw a lanky, long-haired boy lying in a knot of covers, his body twitching as if in response to a thousand small electric shocks.

“Drug overdose,” Kandinsky said, frowning at the boy’s spasms. “Sixteen years old. He’s three days into detox. This is his third time trying to get clean, and if he doesn’t straighten up and fly right this time, I don’t think he’s going to see seventeen.” She shook her head wearily. “A nice kid from a good home. Such a stupid, bloody waste. He’s the only other patient on total lock-down and round-the-clock watch.”

They moved on to the last room in the hall, and the doctor’s voice dropped to a murmur. “There she is.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Berglund breathed, his pale eyes gone wide.

Cruz turned to the window. He, too, was taken aback. He had Jillian Meade’s passport details, and from them, he’d begun to form a mental picture of her. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Height: 5'5". Weight: 110 pounds. Place of birth: Drancy, France, July 14, 1944.

All this information was contained in his battered briefcase in the trunk of the rental car, which was still parked back at Havenwood police headquarters. He’d also seen her in the Bicentennial group photograph hanging on Haddon Twomey’s wall, and there was another photo in his briefcase, as well, clipped to the corner of her file. The State Department had sent over a grainy copy of her passport photo, but it was clear enough to put some flesh on the bones of the other details he’d gathered. Hair not just brown, but very dark; long, below her shoulders at least, although she’d worn it center-parted and tied back conservatively for her passport picture. A wisp of long bangs, like a curtain, half concealing eyes that were large and slightly almond shaped. Her expression sober, chin tilted up slightly, as if she’d instinctively recoiled from the intrusive stare of the lens, the angle leaving the impression of someone looking down a nose that was unremarkable, neither too large nor too small. Her unsmiling mouth had been full, deeply colored, probably from lipstick, although it was hard to tell, since the picture was black and white. She wore small gold earrings and a simple gold necklace against a plain, rounded black neckline.

From those details and from the other information Cruz had gathered about her yesterday, as he’d gone from her apartment building to her workplace, he’d formed an image of a woman who was quiet, intellectual, buttoned-down and caught up in her work. Not unpleasant, but the kind who, as she approached middle age, rarely made eye contact, as if afraid of catching some fatal disease through the osmosis of social intercourse. A woman who might smile out of manners or nervousness, but who rarely laughed out loud. A thin woman with pale hands that never got dirty. A woman who haunted library stacks and hurried home each night from her museum job to a quiet, tidy apartment where she survived on yogurt, apples and three good books a week.

The problem was, that image didn’t mesh with the reality of a woman linked to three violent deaths. And it certainly didn’t fit with the image in the viewing port in front of them.

The room was painted a dull green color, furnished with a hospital bed, a steel chair and a rolling side table. Nothing more. The foot of the bed faced the window, so that although the woman lay on her side, propped on one elbow, they could see her in profile. She was wearing an oxygen feeder tube, and her breathing seemed raspy and labored. Her long legs were bare and bruised, tangled in the quilt but folded up in a near fetal position making her seem small, childlike and lost in the big institutional bed. Her face was strained and pale, eyes puffy, skin smeared with traces of soot. Her long hair was tangled and falling unheeded in her eyes. Thin arms poked from the short sleeves of a blue cotton hospital gown; like her legs, they seemed covered with bruises—although maybe, Cruz thought, it was only soot. There was, however, no mistaking the thick, gauze bandage on her left arm, just below the elbow, the aftermath, he presumed, of the incident with the air-filled hypodermic syringe.

Scattered on the mattress beside her were the spilled contents of a box of felt markers. Her right hand clenched one of the markers as she scribbled, rapidly and frantically, in a thick notebook, pausing only to flip pages. She was supporting herself on her left elbow as she lay on the bed, and that hand was compulsively kneading a corner of the quilt. Cruz watched the counterpoint movements, mesmerized by her left hand clawing at the covers while her right went on, scribbling and scribbling—down the notebook’s left-hand page, then flying to the top of the right, madly filling that one, and then flipping to the next. She worked with a frenzy that left him inclined to believe she was truly insane. And at that speed, he thought, she had to be writing gibberish.

So was she mad? Or too clever by half?

“She looks awful,” Berglund muttered. “Locked up in there, all alone. Isn’t there something…?”

“We’re doing all we can for her right now,” Kandinsky said. “At this point, the most important thing seems to be that she get down in that notebook whatever it is that she seems driven to put there. That and, hopefully, for her to sleep, and also to eat something. I might see if we can get her into a shower eventually, too. I know that would make her feel better. But right now,” she added, “this is what she needs to be doing.”

Berglund couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the crumpled figure on the bed. The doctor watched him for a moment, her face shifting to a puzzled frown, and then she reached out to touch him on the arm. “Deputy? Why don’t you and Agent Cruz go now? You can come back tomorrow and we’ll see where we stand then. She’s not going anywhere, and I’m sure you’ll find her much improved after a night’s sleep.”

Berglund snapped back to attention, pulling his gaze away from the window. “Right, that’s what we’ll do. I’d like to know right away if her condition changes, though,” he added, pulling out a business card, and then a pen that he used to scribble a number on the back. “These are my office and home telephone numbers. Would you tell her I was here, if you get a chance? And if she wants to talk, any time, no matter how late, call me?”

Kandinsky took the card he held, looked it over, and then slipped it into her sweater pocket. “I will, I promise.”

Berglund studied her for a second, then turned on his heel and headed up the hall without a backward glance.

Cruz took one last look at the figure on the other side of the glass. Jillian Meade’s one hand continued its frantic kneading of the bedclothes while, clenched in her other, the turquoise marker flew across the notebook pages.

CHAPTER 9

I don’t know where to begin to tell this story. I lie here, searching for meaning in what happened, finding none that makes any sense. At the very least, I need to lay this out in a logical sequence of events, but I’m so confused by guilt and anger I can hardly think straight.

How do I do this? How do I explain why a woman as admired as my mother had to come to the end she did? And how do I account for the sick, twisted fate that forced me, a daughter as fatally flawed as she was, to sit in judgment over her?

I want to scream out at the unfairness of it. My throat and chest ache with the pressure of unshed tears, the way a dam must ache as it holds back a flood. But I can’t indulge myself. I haven’t earned the right to cry.

One thing seems clear: if I’m going to get this all down, I’m going to have to try to muster up some kind of detachment. Treat Grace Meade as just another one of my research subjects, a minor historical figure upon whom a handful of fates turned. Ignore the emotion-laden tie that binds us even now—that soft, invisible umbilical cord that’s been wrapped around my neck since the day I was born, slowly strangling the life out of me.

And who knows? Maybe it strangled both of us. For years now, I’ve harbored the guilty feeling that my mother would have been happier if I’d never been born. That the burden of my childish needs forced her to abandon any thought of pursuing her own. That ensuring my security destroyed any chance she might have had to find a little happiness of her own.

She left her country and the life she knew to bring me here to live with my father’s parents. I can’t remember a time when my grandparents weren’t the most loving influence on my life, and I will always be grateful for the safe cocoon of their warmth. I’m certainly glad they’re not alive now to see how I’ve ended up.

In spite of my grandparents’ unswerving love and support, though, there was a sadness that permeated our home like a layer of fine dust. Now and then, it lifted a little, but inevitably it would soon settle back over us all.

My late father was Nana’s and Grandpa’s only child, and of course, no worse tragedy can befall a parent than to lose a child. Now, as I look back through adult eyes, I can see how my young life was marked by the faint shadow of grief behind their encouraging smiles. Every milestone I passed successfully must have reminded them of that other child they’d nurtured safely through the pitfalls of childhood, only to have him perish alone in a foreign land.

And my mother? His shadow seemed to hang over her, too, and I sometimes felt she could barely make me out in the gloom of those memories. When I was little, there were moments when I wanted to fly into a room and just crash into her—anything to break through, to get her to notice me. But fear or training or both held me back. I waited, watching and hoping she would turn on me the radiant, incredible smile that she bestowed like a blessing on so many others who came to love and admire her. She never did—at least, not when we were by ourselves and I could be absolutely certain that she meant it for me and me alone.

For years, I thought the problem was that I reminded her too much of my father, whose silver-framed photograph smiled down on us from the living room mantle. That my existence was a constant, aching reminder of his absence. In recent years, though, I resigned myself to the possibility that she might simply have been one of those women who didn’t enjoy motherhood. I even wonder whether she’d ever really wanted a child. She never said, but I can’t help thinking that I was an accident with which she simply coped, just as she coped with all the other setbacks and tragedies in her life. There is nothing worse than thinking your very existence is a mistake.

Mind you, I’m sure all of Havenwood would testify that she was a model parent, utterly conscientious. As a child, I adored her and lived in terror of losing her. But as I grew older, I began to realize that her life might have been so much more had she not sacrificed herself for my sake—buried herself alive in this tiny prairie town where her experience and skills would always be underutilized, her past little understood, no matter how much she was admired.

I knew—everyone knew, vaguely—how her life before coming to this country had been full of action, danger and passion, like something out of great fiction or the movies. Living on the front lines of World War II, plunged right into the action, she’d been part of one of the greatest struggles between good and evil the world has ever known. Lines were clearly drawn then, more so than at any time before or since. For my mother’s generation, there was the evil of fascism on one side and all those who opposed it on the other. As a partisan, she led a life of action and passion—and unthinkable tragedy. But when the battle for freedom was won, she retired with me, her infant daughter, to a remote and foreign place, the small hometown of the husband she’d found, then lost in the midst of that great struggle.

I can’t believe she wasn’t sometimes bored to utter despair here. Bored and lonely. And yet, to my knowledge, she never considered packing up and moving someplace else where she might at least attend a concert or a stage play from time to time, perhaps find someone—a friend, lover, or new husband—whose interests went beyond grain prices, TV shows, local gossip and the winter windchill factor. Someone to understand her and share her life.

I remember the first time it really dawned on me that my mother had once had a life beyond Havenwood. It was after both my grandparents had died; I must have been twelve or thirteen at the time. My mother and I were at home one evening, watching an old movie on television. I don’t remember which one. All I know is that it was set on one of those elegant British estates that hardly exist anymore and that the entire cast spoke like my mother. And it suddenly struck me there might actually be a place on this earth where Grace Meade didn’t stand out like a mink coat at Woolworth’s.

I remember, too, glancing over at her and being thunderstruck by the realization that she could cry.

“Mum? What’s wrong?” I asked her—panicked really, because this was so unlike her.

Her ivory linen handkerchief fluttered in an embarrassed little wave. “Oh, nothing, darling. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”

“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

She hesitated, glancing at the television, but Deborah Kerr (I think that’s who it was) had given way to Tony the Tiger and a Frosted Flakes commercial. My mother’s porcelain blue eyes, brimming with tears, turned back to me, two points of color standing out on her cheekbones, which were high and smoothly defined. Although her face became a little softer and rounder as she aged, she was beautiful right up to the day she died.

“It’s silly, really,” she said. “I suppose I was just feeling a little homesick.”

“Homesick? You were?”

I was dumbstruck. The thought had never occurred to me that she might wish to be anywhere but where we were. She did have an airmail subscription to the Daily Mail and the Times of London, of course, and she kept a short-wave radio in her bedroom so that she could listen to the BBC. We had a tradition in our house that on December 25, we had to wait until after the Queen’s Christmas message before my mother would come out and join my grandparents and me in opening our gifts around the tree.

But those were just my mother’s strange little quirks. I’d never thought of her as a particularly sentimental person. She almost never spoke of her life before coming to Minnesota. Like most overconfident Americans, I simply assumed that she was thrilled to be here.

As I grew older, though, it dawned on me that her reluctance to revisit the past mightn’t be lack of sentimentality as much as her way of coping. After all, she’d endured terrible losses in those years before I was born—her parents, a fiancé, my father, her home, not to mention God knows how many friends and comrades from her period of war service.

Was it any wonder, then, that the subject of the past would be painful for her.

“Do you miss England, Mum?”

“Sometimes, yes, I suppose I do,” she confessed.

“Are you sorry you left?”

“No, not really. There’d be no point in being sorry, would there? Always remember, Jillian, once you make a decision, you must never look back.”

“You could have stayed there,” I pointed out, intrigued at the idea that I might have had an entirely different life, one in which I went to a school that looked like an old castle and wore a school uniform with a kilt, knee socks and a crested blazer. Mentally, I tried on an English accent, picturing myself as a more gangly, less pretty (obviously) version of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.

But my mother’s head gave a firm shake. “No, darling. Coming here was the best option at the time. Things were terribly difficult at home when the war ended. You were a tiny baby, so you can’t remember what it was like, but I remember it very well, indeed. We were living in one cramped little room in an old house outside London. It was hardly big enough for a bed and a small table. Your cradle was an old bureau drawer. We needed a flat desperately, but there were simply none to be had. So many houses had been bombed by the Germans, and with all the men coming back from the front after 1945, there was a dreadful shortage of housing. Naturally, war veterans were at the top of the waiting list, so there was no telling how long we would have to live like that. It was no way to raise a child.”

“But that’s not fair! You should have been at the top of the list, too. You served in the war. So did my father.”

“Yes, but Daddy was an American, wasn’t he?”

“That shouldn’t have made any difference. We were allies and everybody was fighting for the same side. And what about you? You fought for England behind the lines in France just the same as if you’d been in a uniform. You should have gotten the same treatment as the soldiers coming back.”

“Well, perhaps, in theory. In practice, though, it wasn’t that simple. I’d worked for a very small, very secret part of the government. Even now, you know, Whitehall never publicly acknowledges the special services, even though everyone knows they exist. In any case, dear, we were a very few, and there were so many other needs to fill. They had to establish priorities somehow, and British servicemen and their families simply came first.”

I started to renew my protest against the unfairness of it all, but my mother held up her hand. “It wasn’t only the billeting problem. Food and clothing were in short supply, too. Rationing was still in force. You needed formula, nap-pies and, oh, so many things that just weren’t to be had. Really, darling, when your grandparents wrote and invited us to come and live with them here, I knew it was for the best. As for this…” She waved a neat, manicured hand at the TV screen, where Deborah Kerr had returned, dressed in a simple but elegant little black dress very much like one my mother owned. “…this is just Mummy being very silly, that’s all.”

In my heart of hearts, I was glad she had taken up my grandparents’ offer. They’d been wonderful, loving people, and through their stories and those of so many old friends and neighbors in Havenwood, I grew up feeling linked to a father I’d never known—a father about whom my mother, frankly, could tell me frustratingly little, so short had been their time together before he was killed.

That evening, though, I began to see my mother in a whole new light. To me then, a young girl on the brink of womanhood, there was great melodrama in the notion of this brave young English widow, a war heroine in her own right, clutching a tiny baby to her bosom as she hurried from one government office to another under a relentless English rain, pleading with harried and unsympathetic clerks for lodgings that just weren’t to be had.

“What about now?” I pressed.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you ever think of going back?”

“To England? And leave you here all alone? What an absurd idea!”

“No, I mean we could both go. It’d be neat. I could see where you grew up, and where you met Dad.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Jillian. It’s such a long trip, you have no idea.”

“We’d fly over.”

“That would be terribly expensive. And not at all feasible. The school systems are very different and…”

“Not for good. Just for a visit. Summer vacation, maybe. You could see old friends, take me to the white cliffs of Dover. Maybe we could go to France, too, look up those cousins.”

My mother had been born in Dover to an English father and a French mother. It was that combined heritage that had made her such a prize to the British secret service when the war broke out and finally landed her behind the lines in occupied France. But that night in front of the television, she displayed no interest whatsoever in a return visit.

“It would all be very different now, Jillian. So many places were bombed during the war, including the house I grew up in and my father’s print shop. Everything’s been rebuilt and changed, I’m sure. I don’t think I should enjoy seeing that. I’d rather remember it as it was.”

“What about people?”

“People?”

“Family, say? On your father’s side—or your mother’s?”

On her bedroom bureau she had a small, pewter-framed photo of her own mother, whose beauty she’d inherited. British sapper Albert Wickham had met young Sylvie Fournier in Normandy during the First World War and had utterly lost his heart to her. They’d married after the war, but sadly, my grandmother had died in an influenza epidemic when my mother was just a toddler. My mother, like me, had grown up an only child.

“There’s no one left to speak of on my father’s side,” she said. “He only had one sister, and she died years ago, never married. On the other side—your grandmaman’s family—well, there were the uncles in France, of course, but they’re gone now. As for les cousins,” she added, her French pronunciation flawless, her nose wrinkled in distaste, “I made very sure to lose touch with them the moment I grew up. A right obnoxious bunch, they were.”

I smiled. She’d told me once about the awful teasing she’d suffered at the hands of the horrible Norman cousins with whom she’d spent her summers as a child. They were the reason my mother spoke fluent French, however, heard first at her doomed mother’s breast, then fine-tuned during those childhood summers spent with the uncles and their families. And years later, in fact, when she was sent back into France to work with the Resistance, my mother adopted Grandmaman’s name, Sylvie Fournier, as her nom de guerre.

“What about old friends?” I pressed.

A small crease appeared on her high forehead. Her hair was probably already in the process of turning from its original honey-blond to silver-white at this period of her life, although I can’t remember clearly. But that evening, I’m sure, she would have been wearing it as she invariably did, smoothed back from her face and rolled into a neat chignon at the base of her skull. When she rose in the morning, it flowed like a soft, golden storm halfway down her back, but she would never have thought of leaving it down during the day.

Her tiny pearl stud earrings matched the single strand at her neck, and she was wearing a peach twin set, I remember, the cardigan draped around her shoulders, cape style. As she pondered my question, she crossed her wrists over her chest and tugged the cardigan closer, as if she’d felt a sudden chill. As the air between us shifted with her movement, I remember, a subtle hint of her perfume, Ma Griffe, wafted from her chair to my corner of the living room sofa.

“It’s been a long time, dear,” she said finally. “The war changed everything and there’s no going back. It’s better to leave some things locked away in memories.”

In my mother’s voice that night, I imagined I heard the whispering ghosts of all the people she’d lost to the war. Her beloved father, of course, killed in 1941 by the German bomb that destroyed his printing press in Dover. I also knew, because I’d only recently dragged it out of her, that she’d once been engaged to another man, long before she met my father—long before the U.S. had even entered the war. He’d been a British naval lieutenant, but he had died early on in the war.

There had to have been countless other friends and comrades, too, from her youth and from those nearly five long years of war, most of which she’d spent working as a British special agent, first in England, then in France. English spies. French Resistants. And, of course, Joe Meade, the dashing American flyer with whom she’d fallen in love, married and conceived a child, and then lost just weeks before I was born.

I can only imagine that the spirits of all those departed souls haunted my mother—that night and to the end of her days.

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