Dark Rivers of the Heart

plastic surgery.”

She could not take her eyes off his face. More than weariness was visible in it. She could see the certain shadow of death.

Disconcertingly perceptive and alert to her mood, Spencer said, “What?”

“Thanks for the candy.”

“It would’ve been filet mignon if I could’ve swung it.”

He unfolded the map. They held it between their seats, studying the territory around Grand Junction, Colorado.

Twice she dared to look at him, and each glimpse made her heart race with fear. She could too clearly see the skull beneath the skin, the promise of the grave that was usually so well concealed by the mask of life.

She felt ignorant, silly, superstitious, like a foolish child. There were other explanations besides omens and portents and psychic images of tragedy to come. Perhaps, after the Thanksgiving night when Danny and her parents had been snatched away forever, this fear would plague her every time that she crossed the line between caring for people and loving them.

* * *

Roy landed at Stapleton International Airport in Denver, aboard the Learjet, after twenty-five minutes in a holding pattern. The local office of the agency had assigned two operatives to work with him, as he had requested on the scrambler phone while in flight. Both men — Burt Rink and Oliver Fordyce — were waiting in the parking bay as the Lear taxied into it. They were in their early thirties, tall, clean-shaven. They wore black topcoats, dark-blue suits, dark ties, white shirts, and black Oxfords with rubber rather than leather soles. All that was also as Roy had requested.

Rink and Fordyce had new clothes for Roy that were virtually identical to their own outfits. Having shaved and showered aboard the jet during the trip from Cedar City, Roy needed only to change clothes before they could switch from the plane to the black Chrysler super-stretch limousine that was waiting at the foot of the portable stairs.

The day was bone-freezing. The sky was as clear as an arctic sea and deeper than time. Icicles hung along the eaves of building roofs, and banks of snow marked the far limits of runways.

Stapleton was on the northeastern edge of the city, and their appointment with Dr. Sabrina Palma was beyond the southwest suburbs. Roy would have insisted on a police escort, under one pretense or another, except that he didn’t want to call any more attention to themselves than absolutely necessary.

“It’s a four-thirty appointment,” Fordyce said as he and Rink settled into the back of the limousine, facing to the rear, where Roy sat facing forward. “We’ll make it with a few minutes to spare.”

The driver had been instructed not to dawdle. They accelerated away from the Learjet as if they did have a police escort.

Rink passed a nine-by-twelve white envelope to Roy. “These are all the documents you required.”

“You have your Secret Service credentials?” Roy asked.

From suit-coat pockets, Rink and Fordyce withdrew their ID wallets and flipped them open to reveal holographic identification cards with their photographs and authentic SS badges. Rink’s name for the upcoming meeting was Sidney Eugene Tarkenton. Fordyce was Lawrence Albert Olmeyer.

Roy extracted his own ID wallet from among the documents in the white envelope. He was J. Robert Cotter.

“Let’s all remember who we are. Be sure to call one another by these names,” Roy said. “I don’t expect you’ll need to say much — or even anything at all. I’ll do the talking. You’re there primarily to lend the whole thing an air of realism. You’ll enter Dr. Palma’s office behind me and post yourselves to the left and the right of the door. Stand with your feet about eighteen inches apart, arms down in front of you, one hand clasped over the other. When I introduce you to her, you’ll say ‘Doctor’ and nod or ‘Pleased to meet you’ and nod. Stoic at all times. About as expressionless as a Buckingham Palace guard. Eyes straight ahead. No fidgeting. If you’re asked to sit down, you’ll politely say ‘No, thank you, Doctor.’ Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous, but this is how people are used to seeing Secret Service agents in the movies, so any indication that you’re a real human being will ring false to her. Is that understood, Sidney?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that understood, Lawrence?”

“I prefer Larry,” said Oliver Fordyce.

“Is that understood, Larry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Roy withdrew the other documents from the envelope, examined them, and was satisfied.

He was taking one of the greatest risks of his career, but he was remarkably calm. He was not even assigning agents to seek the fugitives in Salt Lake City or anywhere else directly north of Cedar City, because he was confident that their flight in that direction had been a ruse. They had altered course immediately after dropping under the radar floor. He doubted that they would go west, back into Nevada, because that state’s empty vastness provided too little cover. Which left south and east. After the two enchiladas of information from Gary Duvall, Roy had reviewed everything he knew about Spencer Grant and had decided that he could accurately predict in which direction the man — and, with luck, the woman — would proceed. East-northeast. Moreover, he had divined exactly where Grant would impact at the end of that east-northeast trajectory, even more confidently than he could have plotted the line of a bullet from the barrel of a rifle. Roy was calm not solely because he trusted in his well-exercised powers of deductive reasoning but also because, in this special instance, destiny walked with him as surely as blood flowed in his veins.

“Can I assume that the team I asked for earlier today is on its way to Vail?” he asked.

“Twelve men,” said Fordyce.

Glancing at his watch, Rink said, “They should be meeting Duvall there just about now.”

For sixteen years, Michael Ackblom — aka “Spencer Grant”—had been denying the deep desire to return to that place, repressing the need, resisting the powerful magnet of the past. Nevertheless, either consciously or unconsciously, he had always known that he must pay a visit to those old haunts sooner or later. Otherwise, he would have sold the property to be rid of that tangible reminder of a time he wanted to forget, just as he had sloughed off his old name for a new one. He retained ownership for the same reason that he’d never sought surgery to have his facial scar minimized. He’s punishing himself with the scar, Dr. Nero Mondello had said, in his white-on-white office in Beverly Hills. Reminding himself of something he would like to forget but feels obligated to remember. As long as Grant had lived in California and had followed a pressure-free daily routine, perhaps he could have indefinitely resisted the call of that killing ground in Colorado. But now he was running for his life and under tremendous pressure, and he had come near enough to his old home to ensure that the siren song of the past would be irresistible. Roy was betting everything that the son of the serial killer would return to the marrow of the nightmare, from which all the blood had sprung.

Spencer Grant had unfinished business at the ranch outside Vail. And only two people in the world knew what it was.

Beyond the heavily tinted windows of the speeding limousine, in the rapidly dwindling winter afternoon, the modern city of Denver appeared to be smoky and as vaguely defined at the edges as piles of ancient ruins entwined with ivy and shrouded with moss.

* * *

West of Grand Junction, inside the Colorado National Monument, the JetRanger landed in an eroded basin between one parenthesis of red rock formations and another of low hills mantled with junipers and pinyon pines. A skin of dry snow, less than half an inch thick, was flayed into crystalline clouds by the downdraft.

A hundred feet away, a green-black screen of trees served as backdrop to the bright silhouette of a white Ford Bronco. A man in a green ski suit stood at the open tailgate, watching the helicopter.

Spencer stayed with the crew while Ellie went outside to have a word with the man at the truck. With the JetRanger engine off and the rotor blades dead, the rock-and tree-rimmed basin was as silent as a deserted cathedral. She could hear nothing but the squeak and crunch of her own footsteps on the snow-filmed, frozen earth.