Shrinkwrap’s farm served as both a cover operation and a base, providing physical needs and a closer link to civilization. The mountain camp was for the elite-the training place for the few who were selected to be maquis and brides. Everything was kept scrupulously legal on the surface-taxes paid, no obvious drug use or welfare fraud, or any other reason for authorities to come around. As the logging truck driver had told Monks, people in the area knew that the group was there and didn’t much like it, but everybody left everybody else alone.

Days of careful searching through the camp’s wreckage had revealed little. The fire had destroyed almost everything. Computers found in an underground bunker had been stripped of their hard drives, and explosives had turned what was left into a chaos of junk. Police had done their best to track down the fugitives, but the fugitives had vanished. The identities of some were traced, but with no results-they were drifters, runaways, throwaways. Others, like Taxman, remained wild cards, their legal names still unknown.

It seemed that Freeboot’s boastful intentions about righting social injustices and changing history had gone up with the smoke. Now he was a fallen idol, an ex-con on the run, wanted for a host of crimes that would put him back in prison for life. But even here, he had provided for himself with alarming foresight. He had acquired power of attorney over Motherlode’s inheritance, dismissing the outraged trustees that her parents had put in charge. Investigators had discovered that roughly twelve million dollars of that money then had been siphoned off, apparently into numbered overseas bank accounts.

Now Motherlode was dead and Freeboot was rich.

Much as Monks had tried to write him off, he had not been able to. Freeboot’s level of organization, together with his personal power, were too disturbing. Now he seemed to be turning up in Monks’s imagination-getting into his head, as Freeboot’s devotees claimed he could. All of Monks’s scientific training scorned any such notion. But he recalled uneasily two separate instances when he could almost have sworn that people had made psychic contact with him. Both of them had been trying to kill him at the time.

The coffee water was boiling. He ground up a cup’s worth of French roast, dumped it into a filter, and poured the steaming water slowly through, in stages. The result was strong and bitter, the way he liked it.

He was starting to think about making breakfast when he heard a car door slam outside. There was no reason for anyone to be coming here at this hour.

He stepped to a window away from the kitchen light just in time to see the vehicle’s taillights as it pulled away, leaving a thin white plume of exhaust in the chilly night. It looked like an older-model van, the kind that were popular in the 1970s. Someone was walking toward the house, shouldering a backpack.

Monks got a dizzying lurch in his gut, like when flying and the airliner dropped suddenly in rough weather.

It was Lia.

Sara hadn’t said anything about her coming home. He was quite sure that Sara didn’t know-and that this was a violation of Lia’s probation. He unlocked the door and opened it.

“I knew somebody that was coming up here and I caught a ride,” she said, stepping past him and unslinging her pack onto the floor. “We drove all night.” She seemed neither glad to see him nor surprised. She knew from phone talks with her mother that he had been staying here sometimes, and his Bronco was parked in the driveway. Her movements were jittery and her pupils seemed dilated. He wondered if she had been using meth-another probation offense.

“Welcome home,” he said. “I’ll get your mom.”

Sara was already hurrying down the hall, tying the belt of her robe. She must have heard the car, too. She gave Monks a quick, distraught look, but then put on a big smile as she came into the living room.

The two women embraced, with Sara murmuring, “Oh, baby, it’s so good to see you.” She stepped back, clasping Lia’s shoulders, still smiling but looking perplexed.

“But you’re not supposed to be here,” Sara said.

Lia pulled away. “Don’t start, okay, Mom?” she said sharply. “There’s just no way I can live in that straight world.”

“What are you telling me?” Sara said. “You’re not going back?”

“No way,” Lia repeated emphatically.

Monks stayed in the background, silent. Lia hadn’t been happy about going to Phoenix; but, then, she hadn’t been happy about anything. He waited, expecting Sara to remind her of her probation terms. Leaving Phoenix was not her decision to make.

Instead, Sara said, “Okay, we’ll work it out. What about Joe and Ellie?” Those were the relatives that Lia had been staying with.

“What about them?” Lia retorted.

“Do they know about this?”

“What do you think, they’d have let me go? I told them I was going to spend the weekend at a girlfriend’s.”

Sara sighed. “I’d better call them.”

Monks was taken aback by her swift acquiescence. He told himself that it was none of his business, but that wasn’t true. When he had lobbied to get Lia the deal, he had implicitly staked his word that she would stick to it. And allowing her to stay here would constitute something like harboring a fugitive, even if in a very small way.

But now was not the time to bring it up.

“I was about to make breakfast,” Monks said. “How about it, Lia? You hungry?”

She swung around to face him, with her edgy, defiant gaze.

“Call me Marguerite,” she said. “You know that’s my real name.”

26

Monks’s relationship with Gail, his ex-wife and Glenn’s mother, had become distant over the years, but it had intensified during the past three months-since their son had once again become a focus of their lives. In fact, they hadn’t had so much interaction since finalizing their divorce.

This afternoon, Monks had agreed to meet her for lunch. There was no news of Glenn, no aspect of the incident that they hadn’t already discussed dozens of times. But she needed to take her anxieties out on Monks, and while he usually received an emotional beating, in a twisted way he got some satisfaction, too. It was somewhat like giving blood.

Gail had a pleasant face and an athletic figure, a little on the big-boned side, like their daughter, Stephanie’s. Her hair was short and gingery, like Glenn’s. She kept herself trim by playing tennis and taking treks to remote places around the globe with her second husband, Sawyer, an environmental-sciences professor at UC Davis. She was intelligent, goodhearted, politically correct, and vaguely hostile to abstract thought.

“I think the police aren’t looking hard enough,” she said.

The fact was that Freeboot, with his illicit wealth, could be anywhere in the world. Monks answered with a noncommittal “Hmh,” chewing on a club sandwich. The restaurant was in Sonoma, at the corner of the old town square. It wasn’t the kind of place that he particularly cared for-it was small and cramped, with a sort of forced chichi ambience, and passers-by gaping into the big plate-glass windows made him feel like an animal in a zoo. But Gail had chosen it.

“Every time the phone rings, I jump,” she said. Her gaze was reproachful, as if he were to blame.

He nodded empathetically. Only since the fire had she confessed that before then, Glenn had been calling her regularly-and that she had frequently wired him money, to whatever bank he specified. She knew that he had moved from Seattle to northern California about two years ago, but he had refused to tell her exactly where. She kept sending money anyway. Monks had long since realized that the relationship between mother and son-especially an only son-was of a profundity beyond his grasp. And he suspected that Glenn’s emotional problems only made Gail’s attachment stronger.