"Where's Amy?"

"Blues is baby-sitting her-from a distance. As soon as I hear from Harry, I'm going to go see Amy."

"Why not just send the cops to pick her up?"

Mason shrugged. "They already arrested the wrong person once. I'd like to be sure this time."

It was Rachel's turn to smile. "You're better than I thought for someone with the wrong chromosomes. Keep me posted," she added before kissing him lightly on the cheek in the best tradition of sisters everywhere.

Harry called shortly after six o'clock. "You were right," he told Mason. "But there's more there than even you thought."

Mason listened as Harry outlined what he had found. "How do you want to play this?" Harry asked him.

"Carefully. She's the last witness."

Fifteen minutes later, Mason turned onto Amy's street. It was a neighborhood where garages were used for storage or spare bedrooms and people parked on the street. Every car had been plowed in, sandwiched between a three-foot snow wall and the curb. Some people had dug out, and others had simply gone back to bed until spring.

Mason slowly prowled down the block. Amy's house was the third one in from the corner. It was dark. There was no car parked in the driveway or on the street in front of the house. Nor was Blues anywhere in sight. He wasn't parked on the street or around the corner, and he wasn't hiding behind a shrub next to Amy's front porch.

Mason opened his cell phone and realized it was off. He turned it on and saw the digital readout informing him that he'd missed a call. He punched in the code for his voice mail. The message was from Blues. Amy was running.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Mason banged his fists on the steering wheel, nearly sending the Jeep into a figure eight spin before he pulled it back to the center of Amy's street. He drove out of her neighborhood, parked in front of a Circle K convenience store, and dialed Blues's cell phone certain that this time Blues wanted to be found.

"Where the hell have you been?" Blues demanded.

"Don't turn codependent on me," Mason snapped. "What happened?"

"I lost her."

Mason said, "I hope the story is better than the ending."

"About an hour ago, Amy started turning out the lights in her house. A little while later, she started loading suitcases into the trunk of her car. She drives a black Honda, probably a couple of years old."

"What? You were hiding in the garage?" Mason asked.

"No, boy genius. I was hiding in my car at the back of a driveway across the street. Amy's house has a detached garage. I had a clear shot."

"You don't think she noticed you sitting in her neighbor's driveway?"

"It's like this," Blues said. "The driveway had been plowed down to the concrete. That meant the people who lived there used a service. Newspapers from the last three days were lying on the driveway. That meant those people were out of town. The driveway curves around to a side entrance garage that is blocked off by tall evergreens. That meant I could see Amy but she couldn't see me. I waited until it got dark and drove up with my lights off. She never saw me."

"You are too good for words and you are my hero. So how did you lose her?"

"I was following her from a distance, about half a block, with a few cars in between us. I was in an intersection when one of the cars in front of me stopped suddenly and we had a chain-reaction collision. My new truck got sandwiched, and then I got T-boned by a car coming through the intersection."

"Are you all right?" Mason asked.

"I'm all right but we're fucked. Amy's in the wind, man."

Mason had brought Rachel's newspaper clippings with him. He fanned out the articles on the passenger seat, looking for the one he'd scanned a few hours ago without paying any real attention to it.

"Maybe not," he told Blues. "I'll call you later."

The Jeep's heater couldn't keep up with the cold, and Mason's breath crystallized and evaporated in quick, gray puffs as he found the article he was looking for. It was a human-interest piece on Memorial Day observances that featured a picture of Amy and Cheryl visiting their parents' graves at Forest Park Cemetery. The accompanying story recounted that Cheryl had suffered brain damage in a fall at home; that their father had been killed in an accidental shooting; and that their mother had passed away a short time later.

Amy had been quoted as saying that they always visited their parents' graves on Memorial Day. She had added that they also visited before going away for a long trip in keeping with a tradition started by Cheryl's guardian, Jack Cullan.

Mason couldn't imagine Cullan as a guardian of anything except a junkyard where he dumped people after he had used them up like rusted-out, stripped-down cars sitting up on blocks, their guts scattered to the four corners. He also couldn't picture Cullan taking the time to honor the dead, with the obvious exception of Tom Pendergast. Mason hoped that Amy had kept alive Cullan's curious tradition of visiting the dead before hitting the road.

A black wrought-iron gate normally barred access to Forest Park Cemetery after dark, according to the sign Mason saw mounted on the gate as it hung open, tapping against a stone wall with each gust of wind. He pulled up to the entrance, his headlights shooting bright streamers into the cemetery that spread out like buckshot before dropping harmlessly in the distant darkness. The entrance into the cemetery was wide enough for two cars. Mason parked the Jeep squarely in the middle, hoping to make it impossible for another car to pass on either side.

He found a padlock hanging from a chain looped through the gate. The lock had been smashed until it had given way. Though the lock was tarnished from years of exposure, it bore fresh scratches and dents, evidence of the pounding it had absorbed before yielding. There were also fresh scrapes on the rails of the gate, as if the assailant hadn't been able to stop after simply breaking the lock.

Mason found a woman's white cotton glove lying in the snow at the foot of the gate, stained with fresh blood. He got the message. Whoever had opened the gate was out of control, and anyone that got in the way was going to take a beating.

The main road through the cemetery had been scraped, leaving a bottom layer of packed snow and ice harder than the underlying asphalt. Mason stayed on foot, following tire tracks illuminated only by the moon. Snow had drifted against many of the tombstones, all but burying them. Some heirs and mourners had erected taller monuments to the deceased, capped by crosses that reached through the snow toward heaven.

Mason's footsteps slapped against the packed snow, a hollow sound in a silent theater, his shadow a poor accompaniment to a night owl passing overhead, its moonlit silhouette leading Mason deeper into the cemetery. A rasping, grating, fractious noise drew Mason off the main road along a winding path among the dead, until he crested a small rise and looked down on a pair of graves.

Amy White was bent over one of the headstones, her back to Mason, flailing at it with a hammer, cursing the rock, the ground, and the bones beneath. Her car was stuck nose down in the snow on an embankment opposite where Mason stood, its engine running, headlights glowing beneath the snow. A woman he assumed was Cheryl lay nearby on her back, making angel wings in the snow with her arms.

"Amy," Mason called to her.

Amy wheeled around, her face twisted with exhumed rage, her movement revealing Donald Ray White's name engraved on the stone. Her cold skin was paler than the moon, colored only by flecks of blood at the corners of her mouth.

Amy raised the hammer above her head as if to throw it at Mason, then spun back to her mad work, striking another blow against her dead father. The head of the hammer flew off, knifing into the snow as the handle shattered, spearing her hand with a jagged splinter. She clamped the splinter with her teeth, yanked it from her fleshy palm, and spat it out.