Her shoulder bag contained a can of Mace and a stun gun that could send a 20,000-volt charge through a man and leave him gasping and quivering on the ground like a stranded fish. While she had never fired her gun in anger, she had been forced to use the Mace on one occasion when an antiabortion protester had tried to force his way into her home. Later she recalled, with a twinge of shame, that Macing him had felt good. She had chosen her life-that she simply could not deny-but the fear and the anger at the restrictions it had imposed upon her and the hatred and animosity of those who despised her for what she did had affected her in ways she did not like to admit. That November evening, with the Mace in her hand and the short, bearded man howling and crying in her hallway, all of that tension and anger had exploded from her through the simple action of pressing a plastic button.

Alison Beck was a familiar figure, a public figure. Although based on a leafy street in Minneapolis, she traveled twice each month to South Dakota, where she conducted a clinic at Sioux Falls. She appeared regularly on local and national television, campaigning against what she perceived as the gradual erosion of women's right to choose. Clinics were closing, she had pointed out on the local NBC affiliate only the previous week, and now 83 percent of U.S. counties had no abortion services. Three dozen congressmen, a dozen senators, and four governors were openly anti-choice. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church was now the largest private health care provider in America, and access to abortion services, sterilization, birth control, and in vitro fertilization was becoming increasingly limited.

Yet faced with a pleasant, soft-spoken young woman from Right to Life of Minnesota, who concentrated on the health issues for women and the changing attitudes of a younger generation that could not remember the days before Roe v. Wade, Alison Beck had begun to feel that it was she, the campaigning doctor, who now sounded strident and intolerant, and that perhaps the tide was turning more than she realized. She admitted as much to friends in the days before she died.

But something else had given her cause to feel afraid. She had seen him again, the strange red-haired man, and she knew that he was closing in on her, that he intended to move against her and the others before they could complete their work.

But they can't know, Mercier had tried to reassure her. We've made no move against them yet.

I tell you, they know. I have seen him. And…

Yes?

I found something in my car this morning.

What? What did you find? A skin.

I found a spider skin. Spiders grow by shedding their old exoskeleton and replacing it with a larger, less constraining hide, a process known as ecdysis. The discarded skin, or exuvium, that Alison Beck had found on the passenger seat of her car belonged to a Sri Lankan ornamental tarantula, Poecilotheria fasciata, a beautifully colored but temperamental arachnid. The species had been specifically selected for its capacity to alarm: its body was about two and a half inches in length, marked with grays, blacks, and creams, and its legspan was almost four inches. Alison had been terrified, and that terror had only slightly abated when she realized that the shape beside her was not a living, breathing spider.

Mercier had gone silent then, before advising her to go away for a time, promising that he would warn their associates to be vigilant.

And so Alison Beck had, in that final week, decided to take her first vacation in almost two years. She intended to drive to Montana, stopping off along the way for the first week, before visiting an old college friend in Bozeman. From there they planned to travel north together to Glacier National Park if the roads were passable, for it was only April and the snows might not yet have completely melted.

When Alison did not arrive on that Sunday evening as she had promised, her friend was mildly concerned. When, by late Monday afternoon, there was still no word from her, she phoned the headquarters of the Minneapolis PD. Two patrol officers, Ames and Frayn, familiar with Alison from previous incidents, were assigned to check on her home at 604 West Twenty-sixth Street.

Nobody answered the doorbell when they rang, and the garage entrance was firmly locked. Ames cupped his hands and peered through the glass into the hallway. In the open doorway leading into the kitchen were two suitcases, and a kitchen chair lay on the floor with its legs toward the wall. Seconds later, Ames had slipped on his gloves, broken a side window, and, his gun drawn, entered the house. Frayn made his approach from the rear and came in through the back door. The house was a small two-story, and it didn't take the policemen long to confirm that it was empty. From the kitchen, a connecting door led into the garage. Through the frosted glass, the lines of Alison Beck's Boxster were clearly visible.

Ames took a breath and opened the door.

The garage was dark. He removed his flashlight from his belt and twisted it on. For a moment, as its beam hit the car, he wasn't sure what he was seeing. He believed initially that the windshield was cracked, for thin lines spread in all directions across it, radiating from irregular clumps dotted like bullet holes across the glass and making it impossible to see the interior of the car. Then, as he drew nearer the driver's door, he thought instead that the car had somehow filled with cotton candy, for the windows appeared to be coated on the inside with soft white strands. It was only when he shined the light close to the windshield and something small and brown darted across the pane that he recognized it for what it was.

It was spiderweb, its filaments gilded with silver by the flashlight's beam. Beneath the weave, a dark shape sat upright in the driver's seat.

“Dr. Beck?” he called. He placed his gloved hand on the door handle and pulled.

There came the sound of sticky strands breaking, and the silken web flailed at the air as the door opened. Something dropped at Ames's feet with a soft, barely audible thud. When he looked down, he saw a small brown spider making its way across the concrete floor toward his right foot. It was a recluse, about half an inch in length, with a dark groove running down the center of its back. Instinctively, Ames raised his steel-capped shoe and stamped down on it. For a brief moment he wondered if his action constituted a destruction of evidence, until he looked into the interior of the car and realized that, for all its effect, he might just as easily have stolen a grain of sand from the seashore or pilfered a single drop of water from the ocean.

Alison Beck had been stripped to her underwear and tied to the driver's seat. Gray masking tape had been wrapped around her head, covering her mouth and anchoring her to the seat. Her face was swollen almost beyond recognition, her body mottled with decay, and there was a square of exposed red flesh just below her neck where a section of skin had been removed.

Yet the disintegration of her body was masked by the fragments of web that covered her in a tattered white veil, her face almost concealed beneath the dense pockets of thread. All around her, small brown spiders moved on arched legs, their palps twitching as they sensed the change in the air; others remained huddled in dark recesses, orange egg sacs dangling beside them like bunches of poisonous fruit. The husks of drained insects speckled the snares, interspersed with the bodies of spiders that had been preyed upon by their own kind. Fruit flies flitted around the seats, and Ames could see decaying oranges and pears on the floor by Alison Beck's feet. Elsewhere invisible crickets chirped, part of the small ecosystem that had been created inside the doctor's car, but most of the activity came from the compact brown spiders that busied themselves around Alison Beck's face, dancing lightly across her cheeks and her eyelids, continuing the construction of the irregular webs that coated the inside of the car with thread.