He studied Harper's quiet brown eyes. Wished he could face the man not as he now was, but as the old Jack Reed. He and Harper'd played poker together once in a while, killed a few beers when he, Jack, did some wiring up at Harper's place. Wired his little barn, four stalls facing each other across a covered alleyway. Put in lights in the alleyway and the one stall Harper used for a tack room, and floods outside.

That was the old Jack Reed, drinking beer with the police chief. Jack Reed with a beautiful wife and a beautiful little girl. Harper sat waiting. Jack looked back at him feeling nothing until Harper began with the questions. Started off talking soft and easy, then when Jack didn't say much, Harper shot the questions at him. Jack was answering as best he could, trying not to get mad, when a big gray cat came down the hall, stood looking in through the barred door. Big gray cat with white markings. When Harper turned to see what he was looking at, the cat slipped away, was gone like it had never been there.

Harper turned back, looking steadily at Jack. Jack couldn't tell if Harper knew Lori'd run off, but he started asking about Lori.

"It's the weekend, Jack. There's no school. She playing with friends? You want to tell me where?"

"They're out somewhere, a bunch of kids. I don't know where. They came by for her."

"Kids from school? You just let her run around in the village without telling you where she's going? Does she go to school every day?" Harper must know she didn't.

"What is this, Max? If you brought me down here to book me for Fenner, then get on with it." Though of course Harper would ask questions, seeing the windows all boarded up. As little as Jack cared anymore, he could see the tangle he was making. Maybe better just to lay it out for Harper, why the plywood over the windows, why he'd killed Fenner. He was going to burn anyway, if not for Hal, then, sure, for Fenner.

And then Lori would be alone and she'd have to go to child welfare, she'd have no choice. Well, they'd take care of her, state paid them to do that.

"Why the plywood, Jack? What's that all about?"

He was thinking where to start, how to start, when the cat appeared again pressing against the bars peering in. Gave him a shiver down his spine, that cat, so he found it hard to talk.

Reed doesn't want to talk in front of me, Joe thought. Was I staring? Made him nervous? Dulcie says I stare at people so hard they get shaky. Oh, right, one little cat can make a grown man shaky. Well, he's not going to talk with me watching him. Whatever the reason, the guy's tongue-tied. Backing away out of sight again, Joe lay down on the cold tile floor. He could hear, behind him up the hall, Mabel Farthy dispatching a patrol car to a drunk fight. No one needed a drunk fight in the middle of the day, in this village. It wasn't like they had any real bars, just restaurants that served drinks. He thought Mabel probably had Fenner and Harper on her monitor, maybe with the sound turned down.

In the other direction, on down the hall past the interrogation room in Dallas Garza's office, he could hear the faint echo of Harper's voice where Garza and Detective Davis were watching on the closed-circuit TV. Clyde would give a nickel to be here, Joe thought, would be as anxious to hear Reed's story as Joe himself.

It was only after Clyde was convinced there wouldn't be any shooting at Reed's place that he'd loosed his grip on Joe and let him out of the car-with the usual sigh of resignation. Clyde had had no way, though, to gracefully hang around, with cops all over the place; Joe guessed he'd gone on back to the shop to work on one of his vintage cars.

Well, Clyde could hear the story tonight when Max and Charlie came over for dinner. That was why Clyde had shown up at the station in the first place, when he'd snatched Joe up from outside the front door-to invite Max and Charlie to dinner because Charlie's new car had arrived.

Everyone but Charlie knew that Max was shopping for a new vehicle for her, one she could use for her cleaning business, for ranch work, or for hauling paintings to exhibits. Max was as anxious as a kid, wanting to surprise her. The small red SUV had been delivered yesterday to Clyde's shop, and would be sitting in Clyde's driveway when they got there for dinner.

Slipping to the bars of the interrogation room again, Joe peered in. Immediately Reed stopped talking and stared at him. Joe, even before Harper swung around to look, bolted away down the hall toward Garza's office and inside beneath the detective's printer stand, where he made himself comfortable on a small rug that Garza had brought from home and that smelled like dog. Both Garza and Davis had their backs to him, watching the monitor that was mounted high in the far corner.

Davis, curled up in the tweed easy chair, had her shoes off and her feet tucked under her. The chair had also come from Garza's house-the city of Molena Point didn't pay for luxuries; the chair, too, smelled like dog, the smell so immediate that it was as if the framed photographs of Garza's English pointers that hung on the walls had acquired an additional dimension. On the screen, Jack Reed was saying, "… almost from the time Fenner began that group in L.A. Don't know what it was about those people that drew Hal to their ideas. He was never strange, as a kid. Shy, maybe. A sort of misfit in school, a follower-"

"And that's why you killed Fenner, because he'd influenced Hal, involved Hal in the killings. And Hal…?"

"I killed Fenner to keep him away from Lori, keep him from killing Lori like he did the others. And Hal… that was rage. I saw that dead child, Hal standing over her… a black rage. I purely lost it.

"But I wasn't sorry afterward. I knew… felt like… there was more than one body down under that garden. I thought back about Hal's fishing trips, and was sure of it." Jack looked at Harper. "Fenner… I don't know if he was ever sane. I don't know why that L.A. judge didn't give him life. Lock him up or fry him, keep him off the street. Just because those others wouldn't testify against him, would never say he was involved… The cops knew he was."

Davis mumbled something to Garza, and shook her head. As if she agreed, as if LAPD or the DA should have tried harder. Maybe Fenner was free to kill Patty Rose because some squirming L.A. judge didn't have the balls to make the DA dig farther, and to lock Fenner up for life. Joe wondered how many more kidnapped children and young women were murdered because of an unrealistic attitude on the part of a few state and federal judges or inept juries.

Certainly neither detective looked like they were sorry that Jack Reed had done Fenner. Garza rose and poured two mugs of coffee, handed one to Juana, and sat down again. On the screen, Reed was describing, as best he knew, Irving Fenner's history, and Reed's view of Fenner's twisted motives. For over an hour, Joe lay beneath the printer table fitting Reed's story together with the facts he already knew.

To believe that extra-bright children would grow up to force the world into some kind of slavery dictated by geniuses was so twisted that it made Joe want to claw everything in sight. To believe those children should be eliminated or forcefully diverted from their intense interests made him wish he'd done Fenner himself. No one ever said Joe Grey was an altruistic do-gooder. In his view, the very children Fenner had killed might have accomplished great and wonderful things in the world.

He knew from his own metamorphosis, from ordinary cat to a speaking, sentient being, the value and wonder of clear and perceptive thought. To kill a child who had a sharper, clearer view of the world was to kill what life was all about. When the interrogation was finished, when Jack Reed was led away to be locked in a cell, Joe left the station still out of sorts. So grouchy that even that night as Clyde prepared dinner, he felt snappish and bad tempered.