"I'm out," she said.

"Looks good," Maret said. "Perfect." SEPARATING THE TWINS was not a matter of simply cutting bone and then snapping them apart. The venous drainage inside the skull had to be carefully managed, or blood pressure would build in the babies' skulls and damage their brains, and likely kill them.

The brains themselves were covered by a sheath of thin, tough tissue called the dura mater, which acted like a seal between the brain and the skull, and channeled the blood away from the brain. The dura mater, in most places, was thick enough that it could actually be split apart-like pulling a self-stick stamp off its backing-leaving each brain covered with a sheet of dura mater.

However, the imaging had shown that there were a number of veins that penetrated the dura mater, and rather than returning to the original twin, instead drained to the other twin. Those veins had to be tied off, and, in the case of several of the larger ones, redirected and spliced into other veins that drained to the appropriate twin.

To get inside, Hanson would fit a custom-made jig, or template, around the join between the twins' skulls. During the course of the operation, he would cut out a ring of bone, with what amounted to a tiny electric jigsaw. When the twins were taken apart, the holes in their skulls should be precisely the shape and thickness of pre-made skull pieces made of a plastic composite material.

Before that could happen, Hanson had to take out the bone, and then Maret, a neurosurgeon, and a couple of associates, would probe the physiology right at the brain, to make sure there was no entanglement of the brains themselves. Imaging said that there was not; if there had been, the shorter operation would have been impossible. When they'd confirmed the imaging, and that the dura mater stretched across the defect, they would begin separating the tissue, and splicing veins.

Weather's surgical tech started giggling at the scrub sink and said, "I was so scared. I did three little things and I was completely freaked out."

"I was a little nervous myself," Weather said. "Are you okay?"

"Oh, sure. It's just that everybody's up there watching. Everybody important. What if I dropped a scalpel on your foot?"

"I'd have to have you killed," Weather said.

The nurse started giggling again, and it was infectious, and Weather started, though it was unsurgeon-like. They'd just stopped when Weather said, "Couldn't you see it? Sticking out from between a couple toes? What would I say? Ouch?"

They started again. WEATHER STRIPPED out of the sterile gown, head-covering, shoe covers, and surgical gloves, and tossed it all into disposal baskets and walked down to the lounge where the twins' parents were waiting.

They both stood up when Weather walked in, and she smiled and said, "It's going. I made the first incisions, and Hanson is getting started on the entry."

"How are the girls?" Larry asked.

"They're strong. Sara's heart is fine. This next part will take a while…" The parents nodded. They had a time line, knew about what each procedure would take. The bone-cutter would be working for a couple of hours, followed by the neurosurgeons.

After talking with the parents, Weather left them in the lounge and walked down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a roll. Several members of the team were there, called or waved to her when she came in; she went to the line for a roll, then joined them.

Barakat had come in well behind her, watching, got a slice of pizza and a cup of coffee, careful to keep his back turned when she might look his way. When she was seated, he carried his tray to a table behind her, his back to her. A few minutes later, after some chatter about the twins, she was telling her friends about doing an artist sketch for the police, of the man coming out of the parking structure.

Barakat finished his coffee, checked the time. Too early for a civilized call, but the Macks weren't civilized, and Lyle Mack said to call as soon as he knew who she was. WEATHER WAS IN the gallery when the operation started going sour. The first indication was simple enough, when the anesthesiologist said, "We're looking at a little thing with Sara's heart, here."

Maret nodded to an associate and backed away from the table. "What can we do?"

He and the anesthesiologist began talking about it, and the cardiologist came in and looked at all the numbers on all the machines. He wasn't sterile, so he stayed back, watching.

The anomalies continued to develop. The cardiologist ordered medication to steady the rhythm of Sara's heart, but the medication began to slow Ellen's, and finally the cardiologist told Maret that they needed to move the children to intensive care, where they could be taken off the anesthesia and treated for the heart problems.

"You see no alternative?" Maret asked.

"We could go a little longer, but then, if Sara really gets into trouble, it could take longer to bring them both back… we could wind up with an emergency." An emergency most likely meant Sara would die.

"Damnit." But Maret acceded, looked up: "Weather, we'll need to close up here." "ANOTHER FIVE THOUSAND, and all you have to do is make the one ride," Lyle Mack told Cappy. They were back in Cherries, Cappy an hour out of bed. "We've got a bike spotted for you, a Yamaha sports bike. Almost new, perfect condition. Owner keeps a spare key in a magnet box shoved up under a flap behind the seat. Joe will drop you at his garage. The guy doesn't come home until eight o'clock. You ditch the bike after the ride, Joe'll pick you up. Clean, quick."

Cappy's eyes slid over to Joe Mack. "Saw your picture on TV Like you used to look."

"I saw it; it don't look like me. Like I used to look," Joe Mack said.

"Not exactly, but it had all the right parts in the right place," Cappy said.

"Once this woman's gone, it's no problem. Can't identify somebody on the basis of a drawing-thing if the witness is gone," Lyle Mack said.

"The thing that bothers me, a little bit, is the spotter," Cappy said. "You know… that's another guy. I thought we were cutting down on the number of guys who know."

"Well… maybe we can talk about that sometime," Lyle Mack said.

Cappy smiled his minimalist smile, a slight widening of his narrow lips. "I was thinking about it at work. This could be like a job. I could be, like, you know, one of those eliminators."

"You could be," Lyle Mack said. He scratched his head, and like any small-business man, got thinking about the bureaucracy of it. Nobody ever thought about the bureaucracy, but that's most of what any small business was. He said, "I don't know how you'd set it up. You know, find guys who need the work. If any one of them folded up, you'd go down with them. But we ought to think about it. If there was some way to do it, you could sure make some bucks."

"I wish…" Joe began. Then, "I'm not sure we oughta be doing this. This is like, remember that Walt Disney cartoon with the tar baby? It's like we're getting more stuck in the tar baby."

Lyle Mack took a quick circular pace, his jowls shaking, and he said, "Joe… She saw ya, goddamnit. We gotta do something about it, while we got the chance." He looked at Cappy: "By the way, I got a question. That goddamn shotgun, even cut down… how you gonna manage that?"

"Not using the shotgun," Cappy said. He took a revolver from his pocket, wrapped in Saran Wrap, turned it sideways so the Macks could look at it. "Got it in Berdoo. Perfect bike gun. Can't touch it, because I wiped it."

"What the hell is that?" Lyle Mack asked.

"It's the Judge," Cappy said. "Three.410 shells with Four-O buckshot, that's five pellets the size of a.38 in each shell. And two.45 Colts in the other two chambers. Gotta get close, but I won't do it unless the barrel's touching her window glass."