Intensity

at which she ordinarily drove. Judging by the catastrophes that she had seen befall others, survival was closely related to moderation, and her whole life was about survival, as any nun's life might be defined by the word faith or any politician's by power. She seldom drank more than one glass of wine, never used drugs, engaged in no dangerous sports, ate a diet low in fat and salt and sugar, stayed out of neighborhoods reputed to be dangerous, never expressed strong opinions, and in general was safely inconspicuous-all in the interest of getting by, hanging on, surviving.

Against the odds, she had already survived the events of the past few hours. The killer didn't even know that she existed. She had made it. She was free. It was over. The smart thing, the wise thing, the sane thing-the Chyna thing-to do was to let him go, just let him get away, pull off to the side of the road, stop, surrender to the shakes that she was strenuously repressing, and thank God that she was untouched and alive.

As she drove, Chyna argued against her previous conviction, insisting that the teenage girl in the cellar, Ariel of the angelic face, wasn't real. The photo might be of a girl whom he had already killed. The story of her incarceration might be only a sick fantasy, a psychotic's version of a Brothers Grimm tale, Rapunzel underground, merely a mind game that he'd been playing with the two clerks.

'Liar,' she called herself.

The girl in the photo was alive somewhere, imprisoned. Ariel was no fantasy. Indeed, she was Chyna; they were one and the same, because all lost girls are the same girl, united by their suffering.

She kept her foot pressed firmly on the accelerator, and the Honda crested a hill, and the aged motor home was on the long gradual downslope ahead, five hundred feet away. Her breath caught in her throat, and then she exhaled with a whispered, 'Oh, Jesus.'

She was approaching him at too great a speed. She eased off the accelerator.

By the time she was two hundred feet from the motor home, she had matched speeds with it. She fell back farther, hoping that he hadn't noticed her initial haste.

He was driving between fifty and fifty-five miles per hour, a prudent pace on that highway, especially as they were now traveling on a stretch without a median strip and with somewhat narrower lanes than previously. He wouldn't necessarily expect her to pass him, and he shouldn't be suspicious when she remained behind; after all, at this sleepy hour, not every driver in California was in a blistering hurry or suicidally reckless.

At this more reasonable speed, she didn't have to concentrate as intently as before on the road ahead, and she quickly searched the immediate interior of the car in hopes of finding a cellular telephone. She was pessimistic about the chances that a night clerk at a service station would have a portable phone, but on the other hand, half the world seemed to have them now, not just salesmen and Realtors and lawyers. She checked the console box. Then the glove box. Under the driver's seat. Unfortunately, her pessimism proved well founded.

Southbound traffic passed in the oncoming lanes: a big rig with a lead-footed driver, a Mercedes close in its wake-then, following a long gap, a Ford. Chyna paid special attention to the cars, hoping that one of them would be a police cruiser.

If she spotted a cop, she intended to get his attention with the car horn and by making a weaving spectacle of herself in his rearview mirror. If she was too late with the horn and if the cop didn't look back and catch a glimpse of her reckless slalom, she would turn and pursue him, reluctantly letting the motor home out of her sight.

She wasn't hopeful about finding a cop anytime soon.

All the luck seemed to be with the killer. He conducted himself with a confidence that unnerved Chyna. Perhaps that confidence was the only guarantor of his good luck-although even for one as rooted in reality as Chyna, it was easy to let superstition overwhelm her, attributing to him powers dark and supernatural.

No. He was only a man.

And now she had a revolver. She was no longer helpless.

The worst was past.

Lightning traveled the northern sky again, but this time it was not pale or diffused through cloud layers. The bolts were as bright as though the naked sun were breaking through from the other side of the night.

In those stroboscopic flashes, the motor home seemed to vibrate, as if divine wrath would shatter it and its driver.

In this world, however, retribution was left to mortal men and women. God was content to wait for the next life to mete out punishment; in Chyna's view, this was His only cruel aspect, but in this was cruelty enough.

Explosions of thunder followed the lightning. Although something above should have broken, nothing did, and the rain remained bottled higher in the night.

She hoped to spot a sign for a highway patrol depot, where she could seek help, but none appeared. The nearest town of appreciable size, where she might be fortunate enough to find a police station or a cruising squad car, was Eureka, which was hardly a metropolis. And even Eureka was at least an hour away.

As a child, flat under beds and curled in the backs of closets, perched on rooftops and balanced in the upper reaches of trees, in winter barns and on warm night beaches, she had hidden and waited out the passions and the rages of adults, always with dread but also with patience and with a Zen-like disconnection from the realities of time. Now impatience plagued her as never before. She wanted to see this man caught, manacled, harried to justice, hurt. Desperately she wanted this and without a single additional minute of delay, before he could kill again. Her own survival wasn't currently at stake but that of a teenage girl whom she had never met, and she was surprised-and made uneasy-to discover that she could care so ferociously about a stranger.

Perhaps she had always possessed that capacity and simply had never been in a situation that required recognition of it. But no. That was self-deception. Ten years ago, she would never have followed the motor home. Nor five years ago. Nor last year. Perhaps not even yesterday.

Something had profoundly changed her, and it hadn't been the brutality that she'd seen a few hours earlier at the Templeton house. Viscerally she was aware that this unsettling metamorphosis had been a long time coming, like the slow alteration in a river's course-by imperceptible fractions of a degree, day after day. Then suddenly mere survival was not enough for her any longer; the final palisade of soil crumbled, the last stone shifted, and the destination of the river changed.

She frightened herself. This reckless caring.

More lightning, more ferocious than before, revealed redwood trees so massive that they reminded her of cathedral spires. The steeple-shattering light was followed by quakes of thunder as violent as any shift in the San Andreas. The sky fissured, and rain fell.

In the first instant, the drops were fat and milky white in the headlights, as if the night were an extinguished chandelier in which were suspended an infinite number of rock-crystal pendants. They shattered into the windshield, against the hood, across the blacktop.

On the highway ahead, the motor home began to disappear into the downpour.

In seconds the drops dwindled drastically in size even as they increased in number. They became silver gray in the headlamps, and fell not straight down as before but at an angle in the punishing wind.

Chyna switched the windshield wipers to their highest setting, but the motor home continued to slip rapidly away into the storm as visibility declined. The killer was not lowering his speed in respect of the worsening weather; he was accelerating.

Afraid to let him out of her sight for as much as a second, Chyna closed the gap between them to about two hundred feet. She was worried that he would attach the correct significance to her maneuver and realize that somehow she was onto him.

Southbound traffic had been sparse to begin with, but now it declined in direct proportion to the power of the escalating storm, as though most motorists had been washed off the highway.

No headlights appeared in the rearview mirror either. The psychotic in the motor home had set a pace that no one but Chyna was likely to match.

She felt almost as alone with him here in the open as she had been inside his abattoir on wheels.

Then, as enough time passed to make the lonely lanes of blacktop and the dreary cataracts of rain less threatening than monotonous, the killer suddenly surprised her. With a quick touch of his brakes, without bothering to use a turn signal, he angled to the right onto an exit lane.

Chyna fell back somewhat, again concerned that he would become suspicious, seeing her take the same exit.