straitjacket, harrowing sounds of grief in her throat.
'Whatever happened to that PhD?' he asked calmly, though the skin of his forearms was prickling.
'That was someone else. Get out of here, before I have you thrown out. The sheriff and I are old friends.
We paint each other's toenails. The chain-link fence? The goddamn desert? Forget about it. This is my
Saying his name she quaked as if an old, unendurable torment was about to erupt. She leaned forward and, one arm moving jerkily like a string puppet's, she began smashing teacups on the tray with her fist.
Shards flew. When she stopped her hand was bleeding profusely. She put it in her lap and let it bleed.
'On your way, bud,' Eileen said to Peter. 'Would you mind asking Lourdes to come in? I think it may be time for my meds.'
While he was waiting at the Las Vegas airport for his flight to Houston, delayed an hour and a half because of a storm out of the Gulf of Mexico, Peter composed a long e-mail to Echo, concluding with: So far I can't prove anything. There's at least two more of them I need to see, so I'm on my way to Texas. But I want you to get off the island
By the time he boarded his flight to Houston, there still was no acknowledgment from Echo. It was six thirty-six P.M. on the East Coast.
John Ransome was still working in his aerie studio and Echo was taking a shower when the Woman in Black walked into Echo's bedroom without a knock and had a look around. Art books heaped on the writing desk. The blouse and skirt and pearls she'd laid out for a leisurely dinner with Ransome. Her silver rosary, her Bible, her laptop. There was an e-mail message on the screen from Rosemay, apparently only half-read. Taja scrolled past it to another e-mail from a girl whom she knew had been Echo's college roommate. She skipped that one too and came to Peter O'Neill's most recent message.
This one Taja read carefully. Obviously Echo hadn't seen it, or she wouldn't have been humming so contentedly in the slow-running shower, washing her hair.
Taja deleted the message. But of course if Peter didn't hear from Echo soon, he'd just send another, more urgent e-mail. The weather was decent for now, the Wi-Fi signal steady.
She figured she had four or five minutes, at least, to disable the laptop skillfully enough so that Echo wouldn't catch on that it had been sabotaged.
But Peter O'Neill was the real problem— just as she had suspected and conveyed to John Ransome in the beginning, when Ransome was considering Echo as his next subject.
No matter how he rated as a detective, he wasn't going to learn anything useful in Texas. Taja could be certain of that.
And she had a good idea of where he would show up during the next forty-eight hours.
TEN
'Eventually they would have reconstructed her face,' the late Nan McLaren's aunt Elisa said to Peter. 'The plastic surgery group is the best in Houston. World-renowned, in fact.'
He was sitting with the aging socialite, who still retained a certain gleam that diet and exercise afforded septuagenarians, in the or-angerie of a very large estate home in Sherwood Forest. There was a slow drip of rain from two big magnolias outside that were strung with tiny twinkling holiday lights. The woman had finished a brandy and soda and wanted another; she signaled the black houseboy tending bar. Peter declined another ginger ale.
'Of course Nan would never have looked the same. What was indefinable yet unique about her youthful beauty—gone forever. Her nose demolished; facial bones not just broken but shattered. Such unexpected cruelty, so deadly to the soul, destroyed her optimism, her innocent ecstasy and joie de vivre. If you're familiar with the portraits that John Ransome painted, you know the Nan I'm speaking of.'
'I saw them on the Internet.'
'I only wish the family owned one. I understand all of his work has increased tremendously in value in the past few years.' Elisa sighed and shifted the weight of the bichon frise dog on her lap. She stared at a recessed gas log fire in one angle of the octagonal garden room. 'Who would have thought that a single, unexpected blow from a man's fist could do such terrible damage?'
'In New York they're called 'sly-rappers,'' Peter said. 'Sometimes they use a brick, or wear brass knuckles. They come up behind their intended victims, usually on a crowded sidewalk, tap them on a shoulder. And when they turn, totally defenseless, to see who's there—'
'Is it always a woman?'
'In my experience. Young and beautiful, like Nan was.'
'Dreadful.'
'I understand Houston PD didn't get anywhere trying to find the perp.'
''Perp?' Yes, that's how they kept referring to him. But it happened so quickly; there were only a couple of witnesses, and he disappeared while Nan was bleeding there on the sidewalk.' She reached up for the drink that the houseboy brought her. 'Her skull was fractured when she fell. She didn't regain consciousness for more than a week.' Elisa looked at Peter while the bichon friese eagerly lapped at the brimming drink she held on one knee. 'But you haven't explained why the New York police department is interested in Nan's case.'
'I can't say at this time, I'm sorry. Could
'Between, I think, her third and fourth surgeries. What she really needed was therapy, but she stopped seeing her psychiatrist when she took up with a rather dubious young man. He, I'm sure, was the one who— what is the expression? Got her hooked.'
