Dark Rivers of the Heart

have no compassion.”

“The kid had been through a similar hell, unwanted notoriety, when he’d been eight years old, after his mother’s body was found in that ditch. This time it was tearing him apart. The grandparents were retired, could live anywhere, so after almost two years they decided to get Michael out of Colorado altogether. A new city, new state, new start. That’s what they told neighbors — but they wouldn’t tell anyone where they were going. They uprooted themselves and left their friends for the sake of the boy. They must’ve figured that was the only way he’d have a chance to make a normal life for himself.”

“New city, new state, new start — and even a new name,” Roy said. “They legally changed it, didn’t they?”

“Right here in Denver, before they moved away. Given the circumstances, the court record of the change is sealed, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But I’ve reviewed it. Michael Steven Ackblom became Spencer Grant, no middle name or even initial. An odd choice. It seems to have been a name the boy came up with himself, but I don’t know where he got it.”

“From old movies he liked.”

“Huh?”

“Good work. Thanks, Gary.”

Roy disconnected with the touch of a button, but he didn’t take off the telephone headset.

He stared at the photograph of Steven Ackblom. The man in the shadows.

Engines, rotors, powerful desires, and sympathy for the devil vibrated in Roy’s bones. He shivered with a not unpleasant chill.

They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died.

* * *

Here and there in the gloom beneath the trees, where shadows held back the sun through most or all of the day, patches of white snow shone like bone in the carcass of the earth.

The true desert was behind them. Winter had come to this area, had been driven back by an early thaw, and would no doubt come again before true spring. But now the sky was blue, on a day when Spencer would have welcomed bitterly cold wind and dense swirls of snow to blind all eyes above.

“Danny was a brilliant software designer,” Ellie said. “He’d been a computer nerd since junior high. Me too. Since the eighth grade, I’ve lived and breathed computers. We met in college. My being a hacker, deep into that world, which is mostly guys — that’s what drew Danny to me.”

Spencer remembered how Ellie had looked as she’d sat on desert sand; at the edge of the morning sun, bent over a computer, up-linking to satellites, dazzling in her expertise, her limpid eyes alight with the pleasure that she got from being so skillful at the task, with a curve of hair like a raven’s wing against her cheek.

Whatever she might believe, her status as a hacker had not been the only thing that had drawn Danny to her. She was compelling for many reasons, but most of all because she seemed, at all times, more alive than most other people.

Her attention was on the highway, but she was clearly having difficulty treating the past with detachment and was struggling not to become lost in it. “After graduate school, Danny had job offers, but his father was relentless about him coming to work at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Back then, years before he went to the Department of Justice, Tom Summerton was Director of the ATF.”

“But that was in a different administration.”

“Oh, in Tom’s case, it doesn’t matter much who’s in power in Washington, either party, left or right. He’s always appointed to an important position in what they laughingly call ‘public service.’ Twenty years ago, he inherited over one billion dollars, which is now probably two, and he gives huge amounts to both parties. He’s clever enough to position himself as nonpartisan, a statesman rather than a politician, a man who knows how to get things done, no ideological axe to grind, only wants to make a better world.”

“That’s a hard act to pull off,” Spencer said.

“Easy for him. Because he believes in nothing. Except himself. And power. Power is his food, drink, love, sex. Using power is the thrill, not forwarding the ideals it serves. In Washington, a lust for power keeps the devil busy buying souls, but Tom is so ambitious he must have collected a record price for his.”

Responding to the simmering fury in the undertone of her voice, Spencer said, “Did you always hate him?”

“Yes,” Ellie said forthrightly. “Quietly despised the stinking sonofabitch. I didn’t want Danny to work at ATF, because he was too innocent, naive, too easily taken in by his old man.”

“What did he do there?”

“Developed Mama. The computer system, the software to run it — which they later called Mama. It was supposed to be the biggest, baddest anticrime data resource in the world, a system that could process billions of bytes at record speeds, link together federal and state and local law enforcement with ease, eliminate duplication of effort, and finally give the good guys an edge.”

“Very stirring.”

“Isn’t it? And Mama turned out awesome. But Tom never intended her to serve any legit branch of government. He used ATF resources to develop her, yeah, but his intention all along was to make Mama the core of this nameless agency.”

“So Danny realized it had gone sour?”

“Maybe he knew but didn’t want to admit. He stayed with it.”

“How long?”

“Too long,” she said sadly. “Until his dad had left the ATF and moved to the Department of Justice, a full year after Mama and the agency were in place. But eventually he accepted that Mama’s entire purpose was to make it possible for the government to commit crimes and not be caught. He was eaten alive with anger, self-disgust.”

“And when he wanted out, they wouldn’t let him go.”

“We didn’t realize there was no leaving. I mean, Tom is a piece of walking shit, but he was still Danny’s father. And Danny was his only child. Danny’s mother died when he was young. Cancer. So it seemed like Danny was all Tom had.”

Following the violent death of his own mother, Spencer and his father also were drawn closer in the aftermath. Or so it had seemed. Until a certain night in July.

Ellie said, “Then it became obvious — this work with the agency was mandatory lifetime employment.”

“Like being the personal attorney to a Mafia don.”

“The only way out was to go public, blow the whole dirty business wide open. Secretly Danny prepared his own file of Mama’s software and a history of the cover-ups the agency was involved with.”

“You realized the danger?”

“On one level. But deep down inside, I think both of us, to different degrees, had trouble believing Tom would have Danny killed. We were twenty-eight, for God’s sake. Death was an abstract concept to us. At twenty- eight, who really believes he’s ever going to die?”

“And then the hit men showed up.”

“No SWAT team. More subtle. Three men on Thanksgiving evening. The year before last. My folks’ place in Connecticut. My dad is…was a doctor. A doctor’s life, especially in a small town, isn’t his own. Even on Thanksgiving. So…near the end of dinner, I was in the kitchen…getting the pumpkin pie…when the doorbell rang….”

For once, Spencer didn’t want to look at her lovely face. He closed his eyes.

Ellie took a deep breath and went on: “The kitchen was at the end of the hall from the foyer. I pushed the swinging door aside to see who our visitor was, just as my mother opened…just as she opened the front door.”

Spencer waited for her to tell it at her own pace. If he had made the correct assumptions about the sequence of events since that door had been opened, fourteen months in the past, this was the first time that she had described those murders to anyone. Between then and now, she had been on the run, unable to fully trust another human being and unwilling to risk the lives of innocent people by involving them in her personal