And it had been torture, unremitting agony hanging around that rest stop, scrutinizing every traveler hurrying to the bathrooms or buying a yogurt, hating everyone who used a phone in case the kidnappers might be trying to call on one of them.

And with each passing hour, his hope fading, progressing from growing uncertainty to devastating conviction that Katie wasn’t coming back to him.

And he’d been so sure. That woman who’d called had seemed genuinely concerned about Katie. Had she changed her mind? Or worse—one person connected with the plot was already dead… had something else gone wrong?

And even if something hadn’t, even if Katie and this woman were sitting safe and sound in another house in another town, Katie had no Tegretol.

The pill count from the bottle found in Falls Church showed only a few missing. John sighed. One more thing he’d kept from Nana, but it yawned before him like a bottomless pit: Right now, as they sat here in their desolate cocoons, Katie could be having a seizure.

The phone rang and John leapt to get it. Good news? Bad news? No news? The phone had become a loaded weapon; answering it, placing it to his ear, a form of Russian roulette.

“Good news, Doc. I think.” Bob Decker’s voice. John guessed he was supposed to ask who was talking if he didn’t recognize it. Decker tended to be deficient in the social amenities, but John appreciated his no-nonsense approach.

“You ‘think’?”

“Yeah. It’s about the toe.” Decker seemed a little unsure, and that couldn’t be good. John glanced at his mother who had straightened in her chair, listening. He waved off her questioning look and covered the receiver.

“Just an update,” he told her. “Nothing new.” She still didn’t know about the toe. He wanted to keep it than way.

As casually as he could, he stretched the phone cord and slipped around the corner into the hall. Then he leaned against the wall, bracing himself.

“What about it?”

“It’s not your daughter’s.”

“What?” John didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “How… ? I don’t…”

“Damnedest thing. I’ve already been on the phone twice to the Bureau crime lab. They say the toe you gave us is full of embalming fluid.”

“Embalming?” He had to keep his voice low—a whisper. “But there was fresh blood. I saw it.”

“That’s right. And the type matches your daughter’s, but—”

“Wait. How do you know her blood type?”

“Her hospital records—when she had that head injury.”

“Oh. Right.” Of course they’d have done an in-depth background check on Katie, trying to find out everything about her.

“Anyway, the lab is a hundred percent certain the blood on the toe didn’t come from the toe. That toe’s been dead for days.”

John took a breath. Thank God he’d spoken to Katie yesterday. If he hadn’t, he’d be convinced right now that she was dead.

“This makes no sense!”

“Tell me about it. But it gets weirder. The toe belongs to a little boy.”

“A boy? How on earth did they figure that out?”

“Did some DNA thing. Found a Y chromosome.”

John tried to slow his whirling thoughts, tried to snatch bits of coherency from the maelstrom.

A Y chromosome; females didn’t have one, so the toe couldn’t be Katie’s.

“There’s no mistake?” John said.

“That’s what I’m told. The lab boys say they’ve checked and rechecked: double X on the blood, but the cells of the toe itself are XY.”

John bit his lip. He wanted to pound the wall and shout. But confusion blunted his relief.

Why send a dead boy’s toe? The kidnappers were obviously murderous thugs—the bloody corpse in the Falls Church house was testament to that—and yet they’d sent a bogus toe rather than cut off Katie’s…

“Any of this make sense to you. Doc?”

“No. I can’t imagine…”

“Neither can I. Are you sure you can’t help us out on this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Anything you haven’t told us?”

John stiffened. Did they suspect that he’d been contacted? Had they followed him last night? He was tempted to tell Decker about speaking to Katie yesterday, but the woman had been worried about being caught. Suppose someone on Decker’s team had followed him and scared her off?

Damn you if that’s true, he thought. I might not get another chance.

“No. I told you everything I knew. And I haven’t heard a word from Snake.” That much at least was true.

A pause before Decker responded. “All right. But let us know the instant you hear anything. Every little scrap is important.”

“Of course. But what happens next?”

“I meet with our little task force in about an hour. I’ll keep you informed.”

As John hung up, he wondered: Was it just his imagination, or had Decker put extra emphasis on the “you?” Who gave a good goddamn? He was worried about Katie. Where was she? What were they doing to her?

2

“But I want to go home! I want to see my Daddy!” Poppy watched Katie’s lower lip push out. She looked like she was going to cry. Poppy couldn’t bear the thought that she’d caused that.

“You will, honey,” she said, giving Katie a one-armed hug. “It’s like I told you: You fell asleep last night and I didn’t want to wake you. But you know what? We’ll call him again today and you can talk to him. Okay?” Katie nodded.

“ ‘Kay.”

“Great. How you feeling?”

“Fine.”

The poor little thing had had a bit of a Valium hangover this morning. Good thing Katie had been zonked out last night because after getting into bed beside her, Poppy had got to thinking about Paulie, and Katie would have had to listen to a ton of crying. Paulie was like the best thing that ever happened to her. And now he was dead. And it was her fault because she’d got him to break Mac’s rules. If she’d kept her damn mouth shut…

But then what would have happened to Katie? Why couldn’t life be simple?

Yeah, well, maybe it could have been simple if they hadn’t got involved with Mac.

She’d clung to Katie all night. Poppy didn’t know how she’d have made it to the morning without her.

Dawn had broken gray and cloudy, but they’d both perked up after a stack of waffles at the Denny’s across the highway. And now, back in the room, she wished she could find some cartoons to distract Katie, but the tube was like totally filled with talking heads, and if they weren’t blabbing about legalized drugs they were speculating about like why the President was in the hospital.

As if anybody cared.

“How come your hands are all red?” Katie said.

Poppy looked down at her hands. Black fingernails and blood-red fingers.

Very weird.

She stood and stepped toward the window. “C’mere and I’ll show you.” She pulled back the curtain. “Check out the truck.”

Katie pressed her face against the window. “It’s red!”

“Sure is. Did it myself last night.”

She’d pulled the truck around the back of the motel and parked near a storage shed. There, out of sight of pretty much the whole parking lot, she’d emptied like can after can of spray paint. Her fingers still ached from pressing those nozzles. Sure as hell wasn’t pretty, but anyone scanning the freeways for a white panel truck would probably skip right over this one. She hoped.

Poppy dropped the curtain and turned back to the motel room. They couldn’t stay here. She’d charged it on Mac’s bogus plastic, thinking he was dead. But Mac wasn’t dead. And what if he had a way to trace her through the card?

They had to get out of here.

But first they had to make some changes.

“Good,” Poppy said. “Let’s play a game, then. How about”—she made a show of trying to decide—“oh, I don’t know… how about a game of let’s pretend?” Katie’s pout of a moment ago seemed to be history.

“What are we going to pretend?”

“Let’s see… why don’t we pretend we’re boys? Won’t that be fun?”