2.

"I figure we head up the West Side, catch the Saw Mill, cross the Tappan Zee, and continue up the thruway," Jack said as he put the Taurus in gear. The dashboard clock read 10:33. The morning rush hour would be petering out about now. "Unless you know a better way."

Alicia shrugged. "Whatever gets us there."

Jack looked at her. He'd never figured her for a barrel of laughs, but this morning she seemed more down, more subdued than usual.

"You okay with this?" he said.

"Yeah," she said with a too-vigorous nod. "I'm fine. I'm just…" She let the word hang.

"Just what?"

She sighed. "Just sorry you had to get stuck listening to me yesterday. That wasn't in the job description."

Tell me about it, he thought, but said, "It's okay. Don't give it another thought."

"That's just it—I can't stop thinking about it. I've spent too many years not thinking about those pictures, or at least trying my damnedest not to. I sealed up that little girl and the reality of what happened to her behind an inner wall, but try as I might I couldn't forget. Knowing those pictures existed, knowing that I was still being passed from one pervert's grubby hands to another's sickened me. I was damned if I was going to let that define me, but it sure as hell has haunted me. It's been a dissonant, ominous background music to my everyday life. But after all these years, last night was the first time I was able to talk about it. And I know it made you uncomfortable."

"Well… yeah."

Sexual abuse of a child… hearing about it from the victim… uncomfortable barely touched how something so awful and so wrenchingly intimate made him feel.

"But you've got to understand, Jack, that I've never been able to share this with another soul. I've never had close friends because I never felt I could be honest with them. To tell the truth, I couldn't bear to hear them talk about their families, especially about the fathers who were so special to them. Every time I heard somebody talk lovingly about their 'daddy,' I wanted to scream. Even now, when I think of how this flesh is half his, I want to rip it off my bones. I kept asking myself, why couldn't I have had a father like theirs, one who cherished me, who would have willingly died protecting me? But you've seen the pictures, Jack—" , "Some of them," he said quickly. "Just a few."

"Even one was enough. It meant you knew. And everything I've been holding back broke free. As I said, I'm sorry."

"And as I said, it's okay. I hope it helped."

"It did. For a while. For a few moments last night as the negatives were going through the shredder, and later as the collection was dropping into the fire, I felt free. It was a… wonderful sensation. But Thomas's Parthain shot about the Internet brought me back to reality. I see now I'll never be free."

"Never is a long time," Jack said, cringing at his triteness, but not knowing what else to say. He wasn't a therapist, and he didn't know how to stop Alicia from going where she was headed.

"Well, as long as copies of those pictures are being traded back and forth along the pedophile networks, either through the mails or zapped through the Internet as GIFs and JPEGs, as long as I know that a single picture of me is circulating, it will never be over. Sure, easy to say 'get over it' or 'get past it' or 'let it go'… but how can I do that when I know that even as we speak some slimy pervert could be ogling images of me doing… those things? How can I leave the events in the past when the pictures remain in the present?"

Jack could only nod. She was right. Those images were an ongoing violation that would continue even after she was dead.

"He still has power over me, damn him!" she said, her voice rising. "How do I break that? How?"

That was a problem Jack had no idea how to fix.

"Speaking of him," Jack said, hoping to steer the subject back to the purpose of their trip, "why do you think he left the technology to you? Could he have been trying to"… how did he say this?… "make it up to you in some way?"

A soft bark of a laugh, then: "Not a chance. That would require remorse. Ronald Clayton didn't know the meaning of the word. No, leaving me the house and the clue to the technology was as self-serving as everything else he did in his life. He knew that Thomas would bury it, and he didn't want that. So he put it in my hands, absolutely certain that I wouldn't go along with Thomas." She slammed her fist on the dashboard. "You see? He's still doing it. Still using me, damn him! Damn him!"

3.

"What's wrong?" Alicia said. "Why are we stopping?"

They'd cruised north on the thruway with no problems, and no sign—at least so far as she could tell—of anyone following them. Most of the trip since they'd left the city had passed in silence.

My doing, she thought. She'd awakened this morning feeling tired and drained, and didn't feel much better now. She didn't feel like talking anymore, and she was pretty sure that was okay by Jack.

So now they'd just paid the toll at the New Paltz exit, and Jack was pulling over to one of the phones in the plaza past the toll booths.

"Want to get my bearings," he said. "And I want to make sure no one's on our tail."

Alicia sat in the car while Jack faked a phone call and scratched hurried notes on a small spiral pad as he watched the cars pulling away from the toll booths. Not much traffic this time of day on a Thursday in December.

Finally, after a good fifteen minutes, Jack hung up and returned to the car. He nodded with satisfaction as he stuck his head in the door.

"All right. Didn't see anyone I know. How about you?"

"No one. What are you writing?"

"Makes, models, color, license plates. I see one of those cars again, I'm going to want to know why. Now… one more thing and we'll get rolling again."

He reached into the backseat and came up with the Land Rover—fully reassembled now with its black plastic body snapped into place. He took it out to the shoulder and watched it run along the pavement. His dark eyes were bright with excitement when he returned to the car.

"You know, the thing's running almost due west now. I think we're close."

Low gray clouds slid across the sky, obscuring the timid winter sun as Jack drove on into the hills of Ulster County. From a distance the denuded trees lent the surrounding hills a hazy look, a light brown fuzz broken here and there by dark green patches of pines.

At every major fork in the road, Jack would stop and watch the traffic for a while, then he'd take out the truck, see which way it ran, and choose their path accordingly.

The Rover led them farther and farther into the hills. As the pavement gave way to a hard-packed dirt road, Alicia felt a growing sense of anticipation seeping through her. She fought it for a while—she didn't want to look forward to anything connected to that man—but finally she gave in. Up ahead, perhaps over the next rise or around the next bend in the road, on one of these leafless wooded slopes, something momentous waited.

But as her anticipation grew, she noticed an increased edginess in Jack.

"Is something bothering you?" she said.

He shrugged. "All this wide-open space." He gestured to an expanse of hills and valleys visible through a break in the trees. "Not my kind of place. I like my roads paved, preferably with the option of traveling under them, and I like my trees growing in evenly spaced holes in the sidewalk."

Just then the tires began to spin and slip on the steep upgrade.

"Should have rented a Jeep," Jack said. He seemed annoyed with himself. "Should have thought of that."

But the tires finally caught and propelled the car up to where the rutted dirt road leveled out a little.