'Hello, Anne.'
'Glen.' She retreated a step and he followed her into the room.
'Sorry I couldn't meet you. Something came up. How are you?' He watched her loop the security device back over its knob and then limp over to the chairs by the window.
'Not bad. With cortisone injections and a knee brace I can almost do an eleven-minute mile, but I hate the brace and the shots, and in the end I decided to make the limp a part of my new persona. I even carry a cane. You want a drink?' The room had a tiny locked refrigerator filled with tiny expensive bottles, but a normal-sized bottle of a California zinfandel stood uncorked on top of the desk and Glen told her he would have some of that. She stripped a glass of its sanitary wrapping, poured it half full, and raised her own glass in a toast.
'You look well,' she said. 'You've lost some weight.'
'I've been working out. How was your flight?'
'Lousy.' She put down her glass and reached over to the desk. 'I have something I want you to look at.'
To his astonishment and dismay, when her hand came back it was holding out a manila envelope, the same kind of envelope she herself had received from him three times now. He took it reluctantly, studying her face for clues, but she got up and went to stand looking out of the window at the traffic and buildings. Her hair was beginning to go gray, he noticed, but it curled gently down between her shoulder blades, still looking thick and very touchable.
Abruptly, he bent to tear open the envelope. With one glance at the top clipping his heart tried simultaneously to sink and speed up.
Martin Cranmer. One of a number of Midwest messiahs, there was a growing file on him in Glen's own office cabinets, including this very clipping. In the photograph, Cranmer was surrounded by the children of the school that he had just donated to the nearby town, there in the Kansas wheatfields. The school was built with his money and the labor of his followers, staffed by fully qualified volunteer teachers from the huge, heavily fenced farm where they all lived, a community outreach project that saved the local children an hour-long bus ride to the next nearest school, a noble gesture that got his picture in the weekly paper and reduced the anxiety level of the suspicious local farmers by a great deal.
McCarthy, when the action came to his attention, had not been so reassured. Neither, apparently, was Anne Waverly.
Her file missed some of the material his contained, mostly letters and missives sent out over the growing international computer network. It did, however, contain half a dozen items his lacked, two of which, had they come to his attention earlier despite being illegally obtained and therefore legally inadmissible would have upgraded the level of concern over Martin Cranmer's enterprise a number of notches.
Three of the pages were photocopies of letters to the editor of the county's local newspaper, complaints about suspicious activities on the Cranmer farm. They had not been published, an oddity that took on distinctly sinister overtones when coupled with six months' of photocopies of a man's bank statements clipped to an unsigned letter that read:
Dear Professor Waverly,
I know I said I couldn't help you, but I got to thinking, and I don't like the idea of what may be going on. I won't go into detail, and I won't testify or anything, but still, you may be able to use these somehow.
'Who's William Denwilling?' Glen asked, reading the name from the checking account statements.
'The owner and editor of the local paper.'
Denwilling had received a postal order for five hundred dollars in the middle of each of the months for which there were photocopies. Glen read on.
The second alarming factor Glen missed at first, because the name on the photocopied obituary, a forty-six- year-old farmer killed in an automobile accident, meant nothing to him. However, the next page Anne had included was an assessor's map with the boundaries of two adjacent properties highlighted: Martin Cranmer's name was in one, the dead farmer's in the other. With that, a small bell rang, and Glen leafed back through the file to find that the man had been one of the three residents who had written irate yet unpublished letters to William Denwilling's newspaper, complaining about problems with their weird neighbors.
The rest of the file contained no revelations. However, the familiar material, from the harangues across the Web to the stockpiling of foodstuffs, took on a darker meaning with the knowledge of editorial bribery and the death of an outspoken critic.
He reached the end of the file, folded the earlier pages back, and sat for a moment studying the grainy photo of Cranmer, the smiling, bearded farmer/prophet.
'There's very little of this I can use, you know,' he said.
'You won't have to if I go in.'
Even with the evidence of her carefully compiled file in his hand, the blunt offer startled him. He had never expected to use her in anything but an advisory capacity again, and then only as a last resort.
'I don't think that's a good idea, Anne,' he said carefully.
'Is there anyone else?'
'We have a couple of—'
She interrupted. 'Anyone as good?'
He was silent. She turned back from the window then to look at him, and she was smiling.
'If I don't do it one more time, I'm going to live the rest of my life with the taste of failure in my mouth. My clumsiness in Utah killed seven people.'
'Anne, your skill and your willingness to sacrifice yourself saved all the rest of them.'
'From a situation I put them in.'
'For Christ sake, Anne. Not even you can stop an avalanche. Not even you could second-guess a man like Jeremiah Cotton.'
'In my head, I know that, Glen. In my gut, I need to try one more time.'
'And if it happens that this one goes bad?'
'Well, I guess I'll just shoot myself,' she said, still smiling.
'Anne…'
'I'm joking, Glen. Surely you must know that if I were going to commit suicide, I'd have done it a long time ago. And anyway, this one won't go bad. We're early enough with Cranmer, we can certainly defuse him and may even get enough evidence to put him away for a while. Very different from the last time. And a nice, tidy investigation might take your boss's mind off Waco.'
'I didn't have anything to do with Waco,' he said quick ly.
'I didn't think you had.' It was a simple statement, but Glen heard Anne's faith in his abilities behind it. He looked down at the envelope.
'Okay,' he said. 'I'll push a little harder.'
He had pushed, and Anne had gone in, and in fact, they had been early enough: Cranmer was in prison now for a variety of offenses. However, the night before Anne had gone to Cranmer had not been an easy one. It had taken Glen two hours of concentrated effort to gain Anne's full and undistracted attention, and he had felt distinctly triumphant when she had fallen asleep afterward. When she came back from Kansas, however, she looked immensely tired and had lost an alarming amount of weight. Besides, she was beginning to make him feel… uneasy. He went through the motions of preparing a new identity for her, but privately he vowed that he would not again pull her into one of his investigations.
Over the course of his nearly forty years, Glen had been forced to break any number of vows, some of them serious, but never had he gone back on his private word with greater reluctance than with the case that had taken him into Anne Waverly's lecture hall two weeks before that morning, and into her bed last night. In fact, it was something of a surprise that his reluctance had not manifested itself physically. Perhaps if Anne had not been so… uncontrolled, he might have had time to consider what he was doing and created difficulty for himself, but she had been. God, had she been.
He only hoped he hadn't hurt her. Whatever had taken possession of her last night had wanted to be hurt, and although Glen knew full well that wife-beaters and sadists the world around always used that rationalization, in
