“All I remember is this vague sense of a child lying next to me, breathing into my face and whispering, ‘Mommy, Mommy, wake up.’”

In her semiconscious state Kathy had believed it was her daughter, come to take her to heaven at last. Had longed for it to be so. But then she heard Joey calling out, from another corner of the property, and knew in her heart that his had been the voice begging her to wake up. She was injured but alive.

“He must have helped me get behind the hedges, out of sight. I can’t remember that part. All I know is, I woke up to the sound of Joey’s voice, from the opposite side of the yard. I almost called out to him. But something stopped me. Some instinct, I guess, because I certainly wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Whatever made her hesitate, silence had saved her. From her hiding place under the hedges she had seen Kidder stagger by—it was daybreak, how had that happened?—and then she heard him howl in rage, a horrible animal sound, and she had tried to crawl out, anything to distract him from Joey. Because she knew with a terrible sickening thud exactly what the boy was doing. By calling out he was offering himself, saving her from Kidder, like a little bird drawing a predator away from the nest.

“It was almost as bad as Stacy dying, watching that monster grab Joey and take him back into the house and shut the door behind him.”

She had stayed there under the hedge, regaining her strength, and had managed to crawl to one of the windows, but could see nothing of Kidder or the boy—he must have taken him back down into the basement. Scrabbling back under the hedge she’d rooted around in the dirt until she uncovered a fist-size rock.

“Killing size,” she tells Shane, with no inflection in her voice. “I intended to kill him when I got the chance, which is what I should have done in the first place, to protect Joey.”

Except it hadn’t happened that way. As she waited, poised to strike, a van had pulled into the driveway and Kidder had come out through the garage and she was powerless to act, all she could do was watch and listen as Kidder and a younger man had argued, and then the younger man had gone into the house and emerged with Joey, the precious child unconscious but with his little hands and feet twitching in a way that convinced her he was still alive, and the new man had put the boy into the van and driven away.

Her eyes burning with the intensity of her need, Kathy says, “That’s when I put the license plate number on my arm. Because I might forget it, and then we’d never find Joey.”

Shane winces, aware that she scratched the tag number directly into the burned area on her arm, where it shows up white against the singed flesh.

“A few minutes later Kidder drove away and I started to run back into the house—I was going to call 911—and that’s when the house exploded.”

Some sort of incendiary device had been detonated—possibly something as simple as a natural gas line—and Kathy had fled through the open gate before the fire engines arrived, and made her way down the beach to the next big oceanfront estate where, miracle of miracles—she took it as a sign from God—she had found a silver Volkswagen Beetle in the garage of an unoccupied mansion, the ignition keys hanging on a hook inside the garage door, and she had driven the miracle car into Boston and found him where he lay in his hospital bed, the only man in the world who could help her put things right.

Shane is not a man of faith, not her kind of faith anyhow, with its certainty of heaven, but he knows that whatever is keeping this woman alive depends on recovering Joey Keener. Not because she intends to keep him—the only child she has ever wanted is the one she can no longer have—but because she needs to return the boy to his rightful mother, restoring balance to the world, and that portion of her soul that has been torn from her by grief.

He’s got a few things he wants to even up, too. After that there will be time enough to treat physical maladies like burned arms and ankles bruised by tearing away electronic monitors. Bodies heal with time. Souls require something else again.

“There’s a Best Buy at the mall,” he tells her. “First exit off the traffic circle. Buy the cheapest laptop they have in stock. Just make sure it has Wi-Fi. I’d do it myself but I’m, ah, more noticeable.”

There will be a manhunt under way, he’s sure of that. His description and image will already be circulating, but there’s a chance that she hasn’t yet been connected to his escape. It’s a chance they’ll have to take.

“I’ll have to use my card,” she warns him, standing up. “We’re out of cash.”

“The card will be fine. By the time it’s posted you’ll be out of the mall, back on the road. If the owners weren’t in residence at that estate you stumbled into, there’s a good chance the car hasn’t been reported as stolen yet. There’s nothing to connect you to the vehicle.”

“But they’ll know we’re here, in this area. The card will tell them.”

“They’ll already know that much. If the cops haven’t figured it out, Naomi Nantz has. Whatever happens will be in the next twenty-four hours. That’s all we need. One last day.”

Chapter Fifty-Three

Too Many Guns

When the whole thing blew up with my fake husband—not that I knew he was fake at the time—I had to resort to sleeping pills. There was no way I could run the office of a busy dental practice without sufficient sleep, and no way I could stop the mad whirl of self-recrimination in my head whenever it hit the pillow, not without assistance from those helpful little pills. Fortunately the brand my doctor prescribed were not physically addictive, but even so I’m not really a pill popper by nature, and threw away the bottle soon after taking the job with Naomi and moving into the residence. Something about the 1200-thread-count bedding must have worked, because I’m almost always able to sleep, no matter how tense and involving the case.

Not tonight. I know it without even trying. And there’s no way I’m going to take a pill and risk being groggy in the morning. So that’s why I’m once again wandering around the residence after midnight, still fully dressed, and wishing I could take a stroll around the block to settle my nerves. That’s not a possibility, not with half the Boston cops and probably the FBI parked outside our door. A nighttime tour of the residence always involves a visit to Naomi’s Zen garden, which exudes peace even to us nonbelievers. The cool shadows of the room, with its vaulted ceiling and subdued lighting, have always appealed, even if I would never dare draw a rake through the sand like Naomi is doing at the very moment I enter, aware that I’m intruding on her privacy.

“Join me,” she says.

“You’re raking,” I say. “That means you’re thinking.”

Her shoulders lift. “I’m always thinking. This is just another way of getting there. Sit, relax.”

I sit. Relaxing is not an option.

“Meditation might help,” she suggests.

“No, thank you.”

“I wasn’t offering to teach you. Although I could put you in touch with an excellent instructor.”

I turn to her, puzzled. “Don’t you mean like a monk or something?”

She chuckles softly. “I’m not a Buddhist, Alice. But I do find meditation useful, and I have great respect for certain aspects of the religion.”

“Oh,” I say, flummoxed. Just when I think I know what she’s thinking, it turns out she’s thinking something else. “What aspects?”

Naomi is considering her reply when a window explodes.

We’re both on our feet almost before the sound stops echoing. There was no gunshot, only the sound of bullet-resistant glass shattering, pretty much exactly as it did the night before, and I’m up and running, heading upstairs because that’s where the safe room is located, and there’s nothing like the noise of high-powered ammo to make you want a nice safe place to hide.