“Knows what?”
“Animals know things,” she said solemnly. “They can see into a person. They see the stains.”
“All Rocky sees is a beautiful lady who wants to cuddle him, and he’s going crazy because there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.”
As if he understood his master, Rocky whined pathetically.
“He sees the stains,” she said softly. “He knows.”
“All I see,” Spencer said, “is a lovely woman on a sunny day.”
“A person does terrible things to survive.”
“That’s true of everyone,” he said, though he sensed that she was talking to herself more than to him. “Old stains, long faded.”
“Never entirely.” She seemed no longer to be staring at the dog but at something on the far side of an invisible bridge of time.
Though he was reluctant to leave her in that suddenly strange mood, Spencer could think of nothing more to say.
Where the white sand met the grass, the bearded man cranked the reel in his hands and appeared to be fishing the heavens. The blood-red kite gradually descended, its tail snapping like a whip of fire.
Finally Spencer thanked Rosie for talking with him. She wished him luck, and he walked away with Rocky.
The dog repeatedly stopped to glance back at the woman on the bench, then scurried to catch up with Spencer. When they had covered fifty yards and were halfway to the parking lot, Rocky issued a short yelp of decision and bolted back to the picnic table.
Spencer turned to watch.
In the last few feet, the mutt lost courage. He skidded nearly to a halt and approached her with his head lowered timidly, with much shivering and tail wagging.
Rosie slipped off the bench onto the grass, and pulled Rocky into her arms. Her sweet, clean laughter trilled across the park.
“Good dog,” Spencer said quietly.
The muscular volleyball players took a break from their game to get a couple of cans of Pepsi out of a Styrofoam cooler.
Having reeled his kite all the way to the earth, the bearded man headed for the parking lot by a route that brought him past Spencer. He looked like a mad prophet: untrimmed; unwashed; with deeply set, wild blue eyes; a beaky nose; pale lips; broken, yellow teeth. On his black T-shirt, in red letters, were five words: ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY IN HELL. He cast a fierce glance at Spencer, clutched his kite as if he thought every blackguard in creation wanted nothing more than to steal it, and stalked out of the park.
Spencer realized he had put a hand over his scar when the man had glanced at him. He lowered it.
Rosie was standing a few steps in front of the picnic table now, shooing Rocky away, apparently admonishing him not to keep his master waiting. She was beyond the reach of the palm shadows, in sunlight.
As the dog reluctantly left his new friend and trotted toward his master, Spencer was once again aware of the woman’s exceptional beauty, which was far greater than Valerie’s. And if it was the role of savior and healer that he yearned to fill, this woman most likely needed him more than the one he sought. Yet he was drawn to Valerie, not to Rosie, for reasons he could not explain — except to accuse himself of obsession, of being swept away by the fathomless currents of his subconscious, regardless of where they might take him.
The dog reached him, panting and grinning.
Rosie raised one hand over her head and waved good-bye.
Spencer waved too.
Maybe his search for Valerie Keene wasn’t merely an obsession. He had the uncanny feeling that he was the kite and that she was the reel. Some strange power — call it destiny — turned the crank, wound the line around the spool, drawing him inexorably toward her, and he had no choice in the matter whatsoever.
While the sea rolled in from faraway China and lapped at the beach, while the sunshine traveled ninety-three million miles through airless space to caress the golden bodies of the young women in their bikinis, Spencer and Rocky walked back to the truck.
With Roy Miro trailing after him at a more sedate pace, David Davis rushed into the main data processing room with the photographs of the two best prints on the bathroom window. He took them to Nella Shire, at one of the workstations. “One is clearly a thumb, clearly, no question,” Davis told her. “The other might be an index finger.”
Shire was about forty-five, with a face as sharp as that of a fox, frizzy orange hair, and green fingernail polish. Her half-walled cubicle was decorated with three photographs clipped from bodybuilding magazines: hugely pumped-up men in bikini briefs.
Noticing the musclemen, Davis frowned and said, “Ms. Shire, I’ve told you this is unacceptable. You must remove these pinups.”
“The human body is art.”
Davis was red-faced. “You
“Yeah?” She took the fingerprint photos from him. “By who?”
“By any male worker in this room, that’s by
“None of the men working here looks like these hunks. Until one of them does, nobody has anything to worry about from me.”
Davis tore one of the clippings from the cubicle wall, then another. “The last thing I need is a notation on my management record, saying I allowed harassment in my division.”
Although Roy believed in the law of which Nella Shire was in violation, he was aware of the irony of Davis worrying about his management record being soiled by a tolerance-of-harassment entry. After all, the nameless agency for which they worked was an illegal organization, answering to no elected official; therefore, every act of Davis’s working day was in violation of one law or another.
Of course, like nearly all of the agency’s personnel, Davis didn’t know that he was an instrument of a conspiracy. He received his paycheck from the Department of Justice and thought he was on their records as an employee. He had signed a secrecy oath, but he believed that he was part of a legal — if potentially controversial — offensive against organized crime and international terrorism.
As Davis tore the third pinup off the cubicle walls and wadded it in his fist, Nella Shire said, “Maybe you hate those pictures so much because they turn
Roy saw that David Davis had to struggle not to answer with the first thing that came to his mind.
Instead, Davis said, “We need to know whose prints these are. Go through Mama, get on-line with the FBI’s Automated Identification Division. Start with the Latent Descriptor Index.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had one hundred ninety million fingerprints on file. Though its newest computer could make thousands of comparisons a minute, a lot of time could be expended if it had to shuffle through its entire vast storehouse of prints.
With the help of clever software called the Latent Descriptor Index, the field of search could be drastically reduced and results achieved quickly. If they had been seeking suspects in a series of killings, they would have listed the prime characteristics of the crimes — the sex and age of each victim, the methods of murder, any similarities in the conditions of the corpses, the locations at which the bodies had been found — and the index would have compared those facts to the modus operandi of known offenders, eventually producing a list of suspects and their fingerprints. Then a few hundred — or even just a few — comparisons might be necessary instead of millions.
Nella Shire turned to her computer and said, “So give me the telltales, and I’ll create a three-oh-two.”
“We aren’t seeking a known criminal,” Davis said.
Roy said, “We think our man was in special forces, or maybe he had special-weapons-and-tactics training.”
