dawn rather than moonlight. Too early to wake Anne, who had a long day ahead of her, although he felt a stir between his legs at the prospect of turning over and fitting himself against her warm and sleepy body. Instead, he thought about sex with Anne Waverly.
The first time—ten? No, twelve years before—had taken him completely by surprise. He had, then as now, been dismayed by the sheer unprofessionalism of it, and had long since convinced himself that the fear that she was about to back out of the project he had fought so long to set up was all that had kept him from standing up and walking out.
She had been terrified that night, so afraid at the idea of putting herself into the North Dakota community under investigation that her hands had been like ice, and she had turned to him impulsively in her apartment in town, where they were working late to complete the briefing, reached for him as the only warm thing in the world. Pity and compassion and the cold-blooded snap decision that a good screw tonight might be the only thing that got her through to the next day had stopped him from gently pushing her away; the intensity of her response had quickly overwhelmed rational decision, and had made the next morning's slow, languorous follow-up an experience that had not faded in memory in all the years and the various women since then—including his fiancee.
He wasn't sure what it was about her that made her so difficult to push from his mind. Physically, she had nowhere near the attraction of most of the women he slept with, and certainly nothing of Lisa's hard, sports-club- tuned body. Anne was fit, but it was the seasonal fitness of someone who went soft over the winter, and her skin was frankly wrinkled and stained with too many years in the sun. She was too old for him, she often made him more uncomfortable than attracted, and she had a knack of making him feel even younger than he was and considerably more incompetent. But he could not forget her and did not really regret whatever quirk it was that made her want to begin a case by sleeping with him. He had finally dismissed his discomfort by classifying their attraction as some mysterious form of 'chemistry'.
After that first time, three years went by before he had slept with her again, the night before she was to fly to Miami to look at a group of rumored Satanists. It had been a more clear-cut case, less personal to her and more professional, and her nervousness had been less intense. Still, when he had gotten to his feet to leave this house and drive down the hill to town, her cold hand had stopped him, and he had ended up in this same bed, with a vigorous and intense night followed by a slow and climactic morning.
The third session had also been here, eighteen months after the second, just before she left for Jeremiah Cotton's armed camp in Utah. That had been a lighthearted night, punctuated by laughter and the electrifying sensation of Anne seized by giggles while he was deep inside her, and she had turned to him in the morning with a sort of farewell affection. She had bought and restored the old Volkswagen bus by then, and as he stood next to his government sedan he'd seen her arm pop out of the driver's window and wave merrily before the lovingly revived old chatterbox of a vehicle dipped behind the trees and the distinctive rattle of the VW engine faded into the quiet morning sounds of the woods and the distant growl of a neighbor's chain saw.
Only twenty-nine days went by before Glen saw the bus again. He thought he was ready for the sight, having just come from the hospital bed of its owner, but the appearance of the old vehicle by the roadway had been chilling: spattered with mud, most of the paint gone along one side and a fender torn half away, two tires flat and all the front windows shattered by a continuation of the neat line of holes punched up the driver's side door. Inside, the bright cotton Mexican blanket covering the driver's seat was stiff with dried blood.
Anne was in intensive care for a week and in and out of half a dozen hospitals for the next year while they attempted to rebuild her knee. The fiasco aged her badly, and when Glen had last seen her, in a Bethesda surgical ward, she would not meet his eyes.
She disappeared for some months after that, and although the following September Glen had been relieved to get word that she was teaching again, he stayed away from her. Some bizarre impulse had prompted him to send her a Christmas card, but she had not answered it, and he had removed her from his mental list of potential colleagues. Someday, he thought, he would drop in and see her: but somehow whenever business took him to the Northwest, there was never quite enough time for a visit.
Three years went by after that last cold hospital conversation, three years and seven months before the Friday afternoon when he picked up a letter from his desk and saw, in the instantly familiar handwriting, the terse message off the fax machine:
Glen—must talk to you.
Anne
He did not hesitate—or at least not more than an hour or two. She was not at home or in her office, but when he reached the departmental steno pool, the secretary said she was around, and indeed, twenty minutes later he picked up his phone to hear her voice, tight and low.
'Glen, I have to see you.'
'That's what your note said. What's it about?' He was pleased to hear that his voice sounded calm, professional, normal.
'Not over the phone. Are you free this weekend?'
He had not expected this. After a minute he said, 'I am, but I have to stay available for an investigation I'm coordinating. I can't leave town.'
'I'll come out,' she said immediately. 'Shall we say five o'clock tomorrow? Where shall we meet?'
Glen offered the name of a restaurant where they had eaten before, but she rejected it.
'I don't want to talk in front of waiters. Your office?'
'How about if I meet you at the airport and we can decide on the way in?'
She agreed, and called back half an hour later with the flight information, her voice still tight with inexplicable tension. That tension and her refusal to say what it was about had given him a sleepless night, as a parade of possibilities marched through his head, ranging from a bone cancer induced by the injuries to the revelation of a four-year-old child resulting from one of the dusty packets of condoms she had taken from her bedside table.
This last irrational thought had sent him angrily for the rarely used bottle of Scotch, and he gulped down the dose like medicine. No pregnancy could have been concealed during those months of intense medical care, he told himself, and went with spinning head back to bed.
Her flight was due into Kennedy at three forty-five. At two-thirty, something came up that demanded his attention, or seemed to, and so he sent a driver to meet the plane and take her to her hotel. Finally, at six, he had to admit that the need for his immediate presence was long over, and he phoned her room to suggest she meet him down in the hotel restaurant.
'I'm in Room 546, Glen, just come up. We'll order room service if you want something.'
'I, er—'
'For Christ sake, Glen, I'm not going to eat you. I'm not even going to rape you. Just get here.'
The phone went dead. Still, she had sounded more businesslike than seductive. She also still sounded tense, almost fierce. He put on his coat and took a taxi to the hotel.
Glen McCarthy was a pragmatist, and no romantic. He was good at his job; good, too, at allowing the past to fade. However, he had to admit that on the rare occasions when he was ambushed by memories, more often than not they were linked with this strange, damaged woman and the emotionally draining cases she was involved with. Odd things such as the sound of children in a park would jolt him with a palimpsest of horror overlaid with pleasure, a clear image of an array of young bodies, lovingly laid out and murdered by a madman, superimposed by a strong tactile memory of the small mole on Anne's left breast, a low bump tantalizing to the fingertips, two inches northeast of the nipple.
He was hit by such a memory as he stood in the anonymous hallway of the New York hotel, a vivid picture from the days when he was trying hard to shape her into some semblance of a law enforcement professional, driven by the uncertainty of what the hell he thought he was doing and the fear of how utterly unprepared she was for the position in which he proposed to put her. He had shouted at her, in doubt and anxiety, that
The security bolt rattled, the door opened, and the four and a half-year-old memory of a mole, lodged deep in the skin of his fingertips, flitted through his awareness before retreating again into deep storage.
