Johanna lived with New York City's only attack cat.

She guessed that her apartment had been cleaned late in the day, for Mugs was still angry and up for a fight. The formidable hotel maid always came armed with a water pistol to keep the cat at bay. Johanna had no such defenses, only denim jeans to protect her legs from the needle-sharp claws. She edged past the animal. Mugs followed her down the short hallway to the spacious front room with an armchair in front of the fireplace – so inviting – but before she even removed her coat, she quickly entered the kitchen. The cat would be hungry, and food would buy her a small respite from his attentions. On the days when she was feeling fragile, Mugs was locked in a bathroom, but most of the time he roamed free, rubbing up against her legs, purring, then clawing her when he felt the agony of close association. A nerve along the cat's spine had been damaged long before she found him, and any physical contact caused him excruciating pain. Yet Mugs came looking for love each time she walked into a room.

While he was distracted by his bowl of gourmet cat food, she inspected the doors to a maple armoire, one of the few pieces of custom-made furniture that she had brought with her from Chicago. The cat hair in the lock opening had not been disturbed in her absence. She inserted the key, and the paneled doors opened to rows of shelves, cubbyholes and a desktop littered with newspaper clippings on the men and women who had died in fear and violence and those who were still in the game. Her journal lay open to a blank page, and she penned a few lines about Bunny's message from the late Timothy Kidd. Then she tidied up the desktop, sorting papers for the jurors who had survived. Material on the dead was consigned to the drawers below the desktop, and Timothy had a drawer all to himself.

She was so in tune with him tonight, almost paranoid enough. Johanna slowly revolved, taking in the entire room. Everything was in neat order, no objects added or taken away, no obvious signs of trespass. The only disturbance was a pile of mail knocked to the floor, and she credited this to the cat's revenge on the maid and her water pistol. All was as it should be, but she could never lose the sense of something tall and wobbly teetering on the verge of a crash. Even within the perfect silence of these thick walls, peace was a rare thing. She lived every day in a heightened state of readiness – waiting.

Mugs padded away from his empty bowl and paused to stretch on the way to his basket, where he completed three turns on a red pillow, never fewer, never more, then curled up for a postprandial nap. His eyes closed on an expression of sweetness which lured strangers into the deception that he could be petted and stroked. Johanna lay back in a reclining chair, dry-mouthing pain pills and watching the evening news on television.

All the major networks had developed the macabre murder spree into a miniseries format, replete with original theme music for the Reaper's segment. The serial killer, not trusting his name and fame to the vagaries of tabloid reporters, had christened himself with the crude sketch of a scythe drawn in blood on the walls of every crime scene. It was also his habit to write the score in blood, keeping the tally of murdered jurors current. His last message had figured nine down -

" – and three to go," said the smiling broadcaster on the screen.

His guest for the evening was a retired federal judge railing against the incompetence of the FBI to stop this assault on the American judicial system. "If we cannot guarantee the safety of every juror, then the law becomes impotent."

The broadcaster listened with mock sympathy, then broke in on the judge's tirade to complain that "It's been nearly a month since the last murder – "

And his story was getting stale. Tonight's program gave Johanna no new information. It was rather like a tired rerun, repeating old encounters with the bereaved friends and families of the dead. Some of these people had become inadvertent players, giving up clues to the whereabouts of runaway jurors, and others had taken money for this information. Several family members had settled for fame as payment, becoming media personalities over the past six months, always good for an interview on a slow news day.

Johanna closed her tired eyes for a brief nap, one of the most underrated luxuries of life. Soon she would be delivered from angst and pain. Her concept of heaven was not a place of eternal peace, but a small window in time, a few tranquil moments between consciousness and sleep, blessed sleep.

Mallory's present was tucked under one arm as Riker strolled past the old men's social club, a small gathering that convened in Ned's parking lot every night. Four old fellows with their folding chairs sat in a circle with a jug of wine to fortify them against the cold air. They nodded to him in passing, then turned up the volume of a portable radio and rocked their chair legs to a Spanish rhythm. Riker's feet weighed less and less, then nothing at all, walking him back to a warmer season.

The summer of his seventeenth birthday, he had left his father's house and run two thousand miles. He had made it all the way to Mexico, past the tourist traps of the borderland and farther south along roads that had no names or signposts, only piles of sand to trap the rusty old Volkswagen van. He had bought the vehicle for next to nothing, a necessary expense: in those days, he would go nowhere without the giant amplifiers for his electric guitar. Every ten miles, he had climbed out of the van to dig his bald tires out of foreign sand, every ten miles all the way to Cholla Bay. He had found that place under a sky of a billion brilliant stars. Until that moment, he had not known that they were up there, for the stars of city skies had been stingy and few. By the close of that summer, the Brooklyn boy, barefoot and sun brown, had learned some new words and another kind of music that went into his blood, swimming backward to the heart, and lying there in wait for a day like today.

He had spent the best part of his life trying to forget that place – or was it a time? – when he had been happy. Riker walked on in dreams of Mexico, knowing that he would never get back to Cholla Bay. Happiness had not been on his wish list when he had decided to become a cop.

Could he ever make his way back to the police force?

The Latin beat of the old men's social club was blocks behind him when he stopped to look up at the sky.

No stars.

He turned left instead of right, taking a different route home, one that would lead him by a bar where he could run a tab, drink all night and clear his head of music.

It seemed that only seconds had passed before Johanna Apollo started awake. Mugs's front paws were kneading her chest as he licked her face with a sandpaper tongue. She looked past the cat to the clock on the mantelpiece. So much time had been lost, hours and hours. She rose from her chair to switch off the television set, and Mugs was dumped from her lap to the floor. Deeply offended and tail held high, he returned to his basket pillow.

Johanna reached out to the radio by her chair and tuned in to the familiar voice of Ian Zachary. The game master was recapping the life-and-death plight of twelve human beings. The surviving jurors had fled from Chicago, where their verdict had been so unpopular that three of them had been put to death within the city limits. The rest had peeled away from their government bodyguards after a fourth juror had died while under the protection of the FBI. The fifth kill had occurred on an isolated farm in Kansas. Other jurors had gone to hide among family in small towns, and now only three of them remained alive and at large. One of the shock-jock's callers had sighted a live one hiding in San Francisco, but no contest prize had been awarded for lack of photographic evidence. The game had strict rules.