Aloud, to the empty cabin, Gabe had asked, “Is it too late for me, Kit?”

The snow made a sighing sound. Or maybe he did. He wasn’t sure.

For five months, he had been sober. It had been hell at first, and most days, only by occupying himself with shoveling snow and other exhausting activities did he wear himself down enough to cope with it.

He had grown thinner. The clothes Kit had left here fit Gabe loosely now.

He shaved his hair off and grew a beard. He hiked to the store if he needed anything perishable.

He hadn’t turned the television on much, but he started watching the news, in part to see if Kevin Delacourt had been caught.

Kevin had been the leader. There had been four of them involved in the crime that November day. It was supposed to have been a burglary, no violence. It wouldn’t have been Gabe’s first burglary, and not his first one with Kevin. Kevin, as always, had come up with the idea. It seemed so easy. An isolated home in the wine country, an estate owned by a retired movie mogul who fancied himself a vintner. An old man in his fifties who had married some hottie starlet who was thirty years his junior and had three kids with her. They lived away from Los Angeles because the old man didn’t want to keep meeting friends who would ask him what he was working on these days.

Kevin said the owners of the home were away on vacation.

He had been wrong.

All of Gabe’s nightmares were about just how wrong Kevin had been. Most of what he thought about during any given day was the same.

None of the family had survived. Of the four robbers, one had been killed by the old man, one had been captured by police, and Gabe and Kevin had escaped. Farrell, the man who was caught, had apparently named Gabe as both the planner and the shooter, although Gabe hadn’t even carried a gun that day. Farrell never mentioned Kevin. Gabe ended up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Farrell was undoubtedly too afraid of what Kevin might do to him if he ratted him out. That night, Kevin had surprised them all with what he might do.

Until he had seen the press conference, Gabe had remained somewhat philosophic about the possibility of his own capture. He had decided that he wouldn’t offer resistance, but he probably wouldn’t surrender. He’d let fate decide the issue and hope that Kevin was caught and linked to the killings. If Farrell knew that Kevin was locked up, maybe he’d tell the truth about what happened.

But Kevin wasn’t on the FBI’s list. His face wasn’t on the newscast that followed the L.A. County Sheriff’s press conference, like Gabe’s was. The three victims of the vigilantes were shown with big X’s across their faces. Like they were items on a “to do” list, rather than human beings. How long before someone put an X over his face?

He listened to the newscaster, a woman named Diana Ontora, talk about the other criminals. He cringed to see himself ranked as one of them, to hear himself described in terms of what happened on one awful night.

He wondered if these vigilantes, who seemed to know more than the best law enforcement agencies, had some way of finding him.

He tried to turn his thoughts away from his fear.

He thought a lot about Meghan, as he often did, and-as always-with a deep sense of shame over what this must all be doing to her.

He also thought about Kit. Among the many books in the cabin, he had found a volume of English poetry. He picked it up again now, and opened it to a page that Kit apparently bookmarked long ago. Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” Two lines especially caught his attention, because he remembered what Kit had said, so long ago-

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

“I’m so used to being in a fine and private place,” Kit had said. But what could he have meant?

No matter how hard he thought about it, Gabe couldn’t understand the reference. It occurred to him that he knew little or nothing at all about Kit Logan’s past, other than the fact that Kit had killed his stepfather, that Kit’s stepfather had killed some women, and one of those women had been Kit’s mom. Over all the years, it had been Gabe coming to Kit with his problems, never the other way around. Kit had protected him. Kit was protecting him now, though he doubted Kit knew that.

And even Kit’s protection could go only so far.

The news that someone was killing off the FBI’s ten most wanted had scared him. Now, thinking about it, he couldn’t see that it was any different than worrying about a shoot-out with police or fearing that his former partner in crime would catch up with him. Maybe these vigilante guys, whoever they were, were heroes.

Meghan would be worried, though. He wondered if he should call her. He hoped she would call Kit-he knew she often talked to him about her wayward brother.

But none, I think, do there embrace.

The line kept running through his head.

14

Los Angeles, California

Monday, May 19, 7:20 P.M.

Alex felt the drag brought on by a lack of sleep, the urge to call it a day, but decided not to delay talking to Ty Serault’s former employees. Other than looking for matches to the climbing rope, and the work Ciara was doing on Catalina, they had too little to go on to ignore this possible link.

He tried calling the former Crimesolvers USA employees. Dwight Neuly was in and willing to talk to him if he could make it soon-at eight-thirty, Neuly needed to meet with the editor of the student film he had directed. Alex looked at Eric Grady’s address. It was closer, but Neuly was available now, so he made the drive to USC, where Neuly had agreed to meet him. He called ahead to the campus police, and after meeting with them briefly, parked off Jefferson, near the halls that Star Wars built.

Neuly was as cooperative as any student at the end of a term was likely to be. After talking to him, Alex was fairly sure he had no connection to the murders. He would check further into his financial health, but to all appearances, he was not in need of money. Neuly claimed that he had spent the last week trying to finish a project for a film class. He had pulled out a Palm PDA and beamed the names and phone numbers of five members of his postproduction crew to Alex’s own Palm-telling him that any time they couldn’t vouch for, his roommate could.

When he got back to his car, Alex called in and checked his messages. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times wanted to know if he would verify that anticoagulants were injected into the three victims discussed at the press conference today. Alex swore. On top of everything else, they’d have to figure out who was leaking information to the press.

He looked through the files again, resisting the idea of driving back to the Santa Monica area, where Eric Grady lived. He studied Grady’s employee ID photo. Grady had mugged for it-Nola had said he was a clown, and apparently he took the role on from the beginning. Most of the other employees had posed with serious expressions bordering on grim, but Grady’s face was close to the lens and grinning.

He called the phone number in the file and learned that the number was no longer in service. He started to thumb back through the file to see if another contact was listed on Grady’s application. He paused as he came to the copy of Grady’s driver’s license photo, attached to his Immigration and Naturalization Service I-9 form, which required proof of citizenship.

The man in the photo on the license was not Grady.

Or, more probably, the man on the employee ID badge wasn’t.

There was some resemblance-thin faces, dark hair cut in an identical style, dark eyes-but Alex immediately noticed that even in the employee photo, taken at its odd angle, the differences were readily apparent-the jaw-line, the shape of the earlobes, the noses.