59

Lauren was in a white cloud, unseeing, with the storm blinding the night and the lake as big and open as the ocean itself. The wheels of the Lexus churned silently at a hundred miles an hour across the ice. She could have been flying.

She had no illusions of escape. She was dying. You could only lose so much blood and stay alive. Her heart kept pumping, and the red river soaked into her blue shirt and turned it purple and puddled on the leather seats of the Lexus. Dan would hate that. He could forgive almost everything else, but he'd be standing over her grave asking why she couldn't have died in the snow and spared the custom interior. That was Dan. Love was sex to him, but money was love.

It didn't matter to her to die out here. The infuriating part was that no one would understand. It was never about money or power or exposure. She didn't swing the flashlight into Tanjy's head because she was afraid of the truth coming out. She did it because Dan was in love with Tanjy.

Lauren willed the knowledge of Dan's other affairs out of her mind, because in the end, he came home to her and relied on her for everything. If he wanted to sleep with trophy girls who thought they had a chance of displacing her, she didn't care; she just didn't want to know about it. Sex was never of much interest to her, so she let Dan do what he wanted. She was the one who loved him, who created him. Their partnership was more important than anything else.

Until Tanjy.

Until that perverted, beautiful bitch destroyed their lives.

She didn't understand how Tanjy and her vile fantasies turned Dan inside out and made him forget what Lauren had done for him. People called Lauren an ice queen and made jokes about the cold face she showed everyone else, but they were so wrong. When that huge, awful blackmailer named Billy Deed showed her what was going on between Tanjy and Dan, she became obsessed with punishing Tanjy. Erasing her. Obliterating her.

It wasn't just the photographs, although she couldn't believe Dan would be so reckless. Any one of those photos would have brought their world tumbling down, ruining everything. But there was more. Blue Dog had e-mails, too. Those were the things that scared and enraged her. Dan telling Tanjy how much he loved her. How she aroused him. How he never stopped thinking about her.

How he was talking to a lawyer about divorce.

No lie. She checked his calls and his calendar. He was meeting with a divorce lawyer in the Cities. Divorce. To throw over someone like Lauren, who had made him everything he was, who had built her entire life around his career, for a deranged child like Tanjy Powell. Lauren wasn't going to accept that.

If Tanjy thought rape was so exciting, let her see what it was really like.

She felt like a stone watching Tanjy suffer in the park, her naked body strapped to the fence. Later, as Tanjy was crucified in the media, Dan finally broke off the affair, and Lauren was exultant. She was in control of the world again. She ramped up her efforts to land Dan a lucrative job far away from Duluth and far away from Tanjy Powell.

Everything was going perfectly until Tanjy called that night. Begging to talk to Dan. Claiming to know who raped her.

Lauren became deadly calm. She was at a crossroads. She wasn't going to let the truth come out, and she wasn't going to let Tanjy lure Dan back under her spell. She told Tanjy that Dan was at their lake house, and she knew Tanjy would drive out there that night, to talk to him, to seduce him. Lauren went to meet her instead.

To kill her. Not just to keep the secret, but to wipe her from Dan's mind once and for all. She knew she could do it.

Tanjy. That young, stupid little fool. The irony of it all was that Tanjy was wrong, but when she saw Billy Deed pulling up in the Byte Patrol van behind them, it was too late to go back.

So Lauren told her.

"It was me, you sick bitch."

As Tanjy turned to run, Lauren let out all her rage with one swing. Just one, that was all it took. Tanjy dropped and died. Cold-blooded? Never. She was on fire.

But there was always a price to pay. That was what her father told her. Her father knew about cutting corners, making deals with the devil. Justice always found a way to even the scales.

Like now.

At least she felt no pain. Not anymore. The doctors would say it was a rush of endorphins as the body got itself ready for death, but the peace as she drove was almost blissful.

She didn't feel anything even as the Lexus sped past the warning flags onto one of the hot spots on the lake, didn't feel anything as the nose of the car broke through the thinning ice and the car jerked and spun to a stop and the air bag deployed. Nothing.

She noticed that as the air bag deflated, it was stained burgundy, as if she had poured a bottle of red wine over it.

The Lexus settled lazily into the water. It was virtually soundproof, and she could barely hear the ice spindling into fragments, giving way. Near-freezing water seeped in at her feet, and she didn't feel that either. She knew she should open the car door, but the signals from her brain didn't travel to her limbs anymore. It occurred to her that Tanjy had come out of the lake, and now she was going into it. Balancing the scales. Body for body.

The water reached her waist. Her stomach. Her breasts. Her neck. She was floating. The car dipped below the surface, and the lake and the storm and the snow disappeared from view, and there was nothing but the cold, wet hands of the devil taking hold of her. Her lungs rebelled, as if wondering why they should die just because the rest of her was lost, but soon enough, they gave up to the inevitable, too, and she took a breath that was no breath at all.

She had a fleeting thought that the ice would close over the top of her by morning, and she wondered if anyone would ever know what happened to her. She would simply be gone.

Poor Dan. He would miss the car.

PART FOUR. THE LADY IN ME

60

The prison doctors made the police wait three days before interviewing Blue Dog. Stride himself spent a day in the hospital, treated for hypothermia and minor burns. Serena would be hospitalized for several more days, maybe weeks, as the doctors dealt with smoke inhalation and the more serious burns, mostly on her legs. She would need skin grafts where the burns were worst and for the cuts in her abdomen. It was too early to tell about the long-term pulmonary effects of the smoke. Even so, she was lucky. Lucky to be alive, lucky that the damage wasn't more severe.

Stride stared at Blue Dog through the window before going inside, feeling his muscles clench into knots. Raw hatred coursed through his veins.

Teitscher, who was standing next to him, saw his reaction. "This is personal to you. You shouldn't be in the room."

"I want to be there," Stride insisted.

He pushed the door open before Teitscher could lodge any more protests, and the two men went inside. The room was painted in institutional gray and smelled of disinfectant. The bedsheets were bleached white. Teitscher folded his arms and stood beside the bed, looking down at Blue Dog. Stride leaned against the wall and shoved his hands in his pockets.

Blue Dog's legs were manacled to the bed frame. So was his right arm, which was inked over with tattoos. The doctors had amputated his left arm when he was brought in from the lake. He had suffered too much damage from the shotgun wound to save it. He was hooked up to intravenous drips of morphine and antibiotics. His long hair had been chopped off, leaving him with a black-and-gray buzz cut. The stubble on his chin was thick, and his skin was pale under the fluorescent light. His barrel chest was naked.