Hack left a small shoe box, per Maura's instructions, at the Holiday Inn reception desk. He knew David well and had no trouble honoring her request. Once inside her car, Maura transferred the loaded.38 special to her jacket pocket. Hack, always slightly paranoid and as eccentric as he was brilliant, had a small arsenal hidden around his apartment. In addition to the gun, he had information in the form of printouts regarding Alec Meadows.

Meadows had no actual studio or warehouse in his own name or the name of his company, and his office in downtown L.A. didn't sound like a place David would be kept. Also included was a list of twenty properties in southern California owned by people named A. Meadows. One of them, Hack had circled-per-haps a cabin of some sort, he noted, in the Los Padres National Forest north of Ventura. It was owned by an A. R. Meadows-

Alec's initials. She checked a map and estimated the drive there and back would be five hours. There were eight left before the surgery.

Dr. Simon Rubenstein had an unlisted home number, but Hack was working on finding it and his home address. Meanwhile, Maura went to the shrink's office in Hollywood, only a few blocks from George's surgicenter. The building was locked. She could hang around and wait for Rubenstein, or go with the only lead she had-the place in the mountains.

She called George at home, at the office and on his cell, but got only machines. Dr. George Hill, plastic surgeon to the stars, was never out of touch. He was avoiding her, and that meant he was still ambivalent as to what he would do when the moment of truth came. She left testy messages on each of his phones, letting him know in no uncertain terms what his life would be like if anything happened to their son because of him. Then she filled up the tank of her Camry and headed toward the freeway.

It took a stop at a Los Padres Forest ranger station, and some blind luck, but finally, nearly two and a half hours after she left L.A., she pulled onto Eagle's Nest Road, two miles west of Fra-zier Park. She had just four and a half hours to find David.

Number 14 was painted on a piece of wood nailed to a tree. The house, a cabin, just as Hack had suspected, was a tiny, ramshackle place with junk in the dirt yard-hardly the sort of property the Meadows were likely to own. Maura parked down the drive and approached through the woods. At the edge of the clearing, she took the.38 from her pocket. At almost the same moment, she felt a gun barrel pressed firmly against the back of her neck.

"Drop it!" a bass voice growled. "Now, turn around. Slowly!"

The gun was a hunting rifle with a telescopic site. The man was huge-six-six at least, with a dense red beard. Maura looked up at him defiantly.

"Where's my son?" she demanded.

"Lady, the only son you'll find around here is mine. Luanne?"

A frumpy woman came into the yard, hand in hand with an unkempt two-year-old. Maura felt ill.

"Is your name Meadows?" she asked, her voice hoarse and shaky.

"Ambrose Meadows if it's any business of yours. Now, what'n the heck are you doin' here?"

One hour.

Devastated that she had rolled the dice with her drive to Los Padres and lost, Maura drove back to L.A. in heavy traffic. Her pistol was back in her jacket pocket. Calls to her ex-husband's various lines brought no response except the answering service.

"Perhaps you forgot," the operator said firmly, "but Dr. Hill doesn't allow any calls to the surgicenter while he is operating."

Maura groaned. It was the great doctor's crowd-pleasing policy that every patient was his only patient. She made no attempt to threaten the woman, but instead cut into the breakdown lane and sped back to Simon Rubenstein's office building and ran up three floors to his office. A man she assumed was Rubenstein, squat and egg bald with a kind, wise face, was just locking the door behind him.

"Dr. Rubenstein?"

"Yes?"

"I have a gun. Please step back into your office or I swear I'll shoot."

If the psychiatrist was the least bit frightened, it didn't show. He turned the key the other way and held the door open for her. Maura escorted him to his back office and closed the door behind them.

Thirty minutes.

"I don't want to hurt you," she said, "but I need help." "I don't carry any drugs, but you don't look as if that's your problem."

Maura took out the letter from the kidnappers and handed it to him. He read it thoughtfully.

"I snuck into the Meadows estate and found prescriptions with your name on them. But before that, I was in hiding when Alec Meadows raped his wife. He's behind this. Either he wants to hurt his wife or discredit my ex-husband. She's due to be operated on in just a few minutes, and I don't know where my son is."

She had begun to cry.

"Please put the gun down," Rubenstein said with calm force.

"Have you gone to the police?"

"It said not to. I.I thought I could find David before-" "And do you know if Dr. Hill will disfigure Audra as this note demands?"

"I.I don't know, I really don't. Now, please, the surgery's scheduled to begin in just a few minutes."

"I believe I can help you," Rubenstein said, "but first you must trust me and somehow stop the operation. How fast can you cover four blocks?"

Maura knew that George was as meticulous about his surgical schedule as he was about everything else. Stunned by what Rubenstein had shared with her, Maura vaulted down the stairs of his office three at a time, and out onto the street, dodging through dense pedestrian traffic like a halfback.

It was exactly four when she reached the gleaming glass-and-white-brick surgicenter. The doors were locked, the foyer dark. Without hesitating, she kicked in a plate-glass window, punched out the shards and clambered inside. The operating rooms were at the rear. One was in action.

"Mrs. Hill, you can't go in there," a nurse said as Maura rammed through the O.R. door. It was 4:05. Audra Meadows lay draped on a brilliantly lit table, her face prepped with antiseptic.

George, the Emperor, gowned, masked and gloved, stood beside her, a large syringe poised in his hand. There was another, similar syringe on the stainless-steel instrument tray. One of them probably contained some sort of anesthetic. The other? "Maura!" he cried. "What the-?"

Ignoring him, she raced over to Audra. The woman's eyes were rheumy from pre-op medication.

"Maura, you can't be in here," George said.

Ignoring him, Maura bent low beside his patient.

"You poor baby," she whispered. "I know what's been happening, Audra. I know and I'm going to help you. Everything is going to be all right. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand."

"Okay. Now tell me, where are you keeping my son?" George shook his head in disbelief.

"I can't believe Audra Meadows would want to do this to herself."

The police had called with reassurance that a SWAT team had picked up David exactly where Audra said he was being held- in a friend's little-used cottage in the hills above Malibu. The man she hired to do the kidnapping and guard David was under arrest, as was Audra, herself, although a judge had already promised Dr. Rubenstein she would be remanded to his service for a full evaluation.

"Her psychiatrist called it complex post-traumatic stress disorder," Maura explained. "Since well before her marriage she's had a pathologic love/hate relationship with her sadistic husband. He's the one who forced her into having all those surgeries. I guess the years of sexual and mental abuse finally pushed her over the edge. She believed if she were disfigured, Alec would reject her, and then she'd be free. Maybe she just couldn't deal with cutting her own face or even hiring someone to do it, or maybe she thought that with your skill, no scar was permanent."