The trial had been a fast-moving media circus. He was shocked at how incriminating the evidence against him was. In hindsight he felt it should have been obvious that he was being set up-Lanthrop urging him to secrecy. And then there were the things he had no knowledge of that crucified him. The files on his computer. Lists and corporate documents, all digitally shredded-but incompletely. A passport under the fictitious name Michael Corvus. The travels of that fictitious name, establishing offshore bank accounts and corporations. The credit card purchases and corporate officerships. The offshore payments and records of phone calls to Pavlos and Singh. The e-mail accounts detailing a convenient, media-friendly conspiracy.

Everyone believed that Sebeck was responsible for the deaths of all those people-and of Aaron Larson. He recalled the several times Larson sought guidance from him. Sebeck had refused the role of mentor. Being a father figure to anyone was the last thing he wanted.

Sebeck could hardly blame the public for hating him. The evidence was wide and deep. The clincher was that Sebeck did, indeed, have an affair with Cheryl Lanthrop. What they did together seemed merely kinky and strange at the time-but when combined with the mountain of evidence against him, it revealed a person quite different from the public face of Detective Sergeant Peter Sebeck, decorated officer and dedicated family man. So different that he had begun to question it himself.

His wife, Laura, surprised him, though. He thought she would be glad to be rid of him.

Strange. After all this time, he couldn't recall whether she goaded him into marriage or whether he had volunteered as a means of doing the right thing by her. It never even occurred to him at the time that she might not want to marry him. The pregnancy had been something that happened to him-at least in his own mind. Perhaps she had married him because she also thought that was the right thing to do.

After his arrest, when everyone abandoned him, she was there for him. The press pilloried her as a guileless moron, but she knew him. Tears welled in Sebeck's eyes remembering it. She knew he could not have done these things, even when he doubted it himself. She had kept him sane, or near enough to sane.

They were just two people who got lost somewhere early in life.

Chris, their son, had come to see Sebeck only once and stared at the floor almost the entire time. When he did look up, there was a glare of utter malevolence through the glass that stung Sebeck worse than anything the federal prosecutor could say. It still stung.

Sebeck curled up on his cot around a pain so deep that he longed for it all to end. There was no clearing this up-even if proof of his innocence were found. His name had been too thoroughly dragged through the mud. Some taint would always remain. Some doubt would always exist in the minds of those around him. Death would be welcome, if it weren't for the fact that almost everyone he cared about considered him evil. That his passing would be seen as justice. He was thankful his parents hadn't lived to see this day.

But his deepest despair came from the knowledge that no one believed that the Daemon existed. From the outset it was clear that both the prosecution and the defense would be arguing not about the Daemon, but about whether Sebeck had been involved in the conspiracy to defraud Sobol's estate and murder federal officers. The judge refused to hear testimony about the Daemon-largely because there was no evidence it existed. But it had to exist. Sebeck was convinced of it.

They were appealing his conviction to a higher federal court, but his lawyer didn't hold out much hope. The government was clearly making an example out of Sebeck. His trial had been fast-tracked in response to public outrage, and failing the introduction of new evidence, there was little chance his guilty verdicts would be overturned on appeal.

Sebeck tried to remember a time when he was last truly happy. He had to think back all the way to high school, sitting on the roof of his neighbor's garage with his buddies. That was the night before he found out Laura was pregnant. But was that true? Now the idea of coming home and seeing Chris and Laura laughing at the kitchen table was a treasured memory. The laughter stopped as he arrived, but that wasn't their fault. It was his fault. He had purposefully distanced himself from them. Without this disaster, would Sebeck ever have realized what he had?

Sebeck's mind turned to that voice on the phone at Sobol's funeral. Experts proved it wasn't Sobol, but Sebeck realized that was the whole point of it. It had to notbe Sobol, and provably so. Nonetheless, that voice had actually warned him about what was to come.

I must destroy you.

He contemplated it emptily. Without hope or purpose.

But there was something else the voice had said. Sebeck tried hard to remember, buried as it was under months of pretrial testimony, interrogations, and hard evidence. But then it came to him.

They will require a sacrifice, Sergeant.

And so they had. Sebeck sat up and stared into nothingness, straining to recall the exact words of the voice.

Before you die…invoke the Daemon.

Somewhere there was a surveillance tape that showed Sebeck silently nodding to himself in the stillness of his empty cell. Because he now realized what he had to do.

Chapter 30:// Offering

A white van raised a cloud of dust as it approached from a distance, wavering like a phantom in the summer heat. On either side of the dirt road, California grasslands stretched brown and dry, rolling up into the barren hills at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Every fold and furrow of the land was shadowed in the afternoon sun, like the wrinkles of some timeworn face. The topography was naked and enormously wide. Forty miles of nothing stretched to the horizon, starkly beautiful to anyone with a reliable car.

The van inched across the gargantuan landscape, progressing toward a ring of asphalt set in the bottom of a forgotten canyon. The van slowed as it reached the track, then turned, revealing the car-carrying trailer it pulled behind it. A black Lincoln Town Car sat on the bed.

The van stopped, and a moment later the doors swung open, disgorging Kurt Voelker on the passenger side. He wearily stretched. Tingit Khan and Rob McCruder exited the far side of the van and did likewise. They were all in their early twenties, but while Voelker looked dressed for a Christian Fellowship meeting-with khakis and a button-down shirt-Khan and McCruder bore the piercings, tats, and severe hair that once indicated disaffected youth but that now only meant they weren't interviewing yet.

Voelker checked his GPS unit. He looked to his two companions. "We're in the box."

"It's about fucking time." Khan held up his hand to shade his face. His eyes scanned the terrain. "What is this? A racetrack?"

"Pretty damned small for a racetrack."

Voelker spoke from the far side of the van. "I'm guessing a test track."

"It's not banked or anything." Khan held up his other hand to block the sun. "What's it feel like? A hundred degrees out here?"

McCruder checked his watch. "A hundred and six."

"You have a thermometer on your watch?"

"Yeah. So what?"

Khan looked through the van windows to Voelker on the other side. "Kurt. Rob has a thermometer on his watch."

"So?"

"Well, at some point, the thing you add to the watch is more significant than the watch. I'd argue he's wearing a thermometer with a clock on it."

McCruder scowled; he was a veteran of Khan's observations. "Fuck off."

"Why do you need to know the precise temperature where you are? It's not like a weather report; it's too fucking late-you're already here."