Mine

the background atop a small green rise stood a blurred figure, one arm cocked to throw a yellow Frisbee.

'I don't know. Looks like the picture was taken in a -'

Laura took the photo from Kastle's hand. She had been looking at the woman's face, and she'd not noticed this before. Still, it was blurry and hard to make out. 'I need a magnifying glass.'

Doug got up. Kastle leaned forward, squinting. 'What're you looking at?'

'There. The Frisbee. See it?'

'Yeah. What about it?'

'Right there. You can see the top of the Frisbee, the way it's angled. See?' Her heart was pounding. Doug brought her a magnifying glass, and she held it over the yellow Frisbee. She positioned the glass out to its highest magnification from the picture, just about to lose its focus altogether. 'There,' she said. 'There it is. Look.'

Kastle did. 'I see it,' he said.

Two black dots of eyes and a semicircle of a mouth had been painted on the Frisbee's lid. It was a Smiley Face, about to be spun to an unknown destination.

Laura held the magnifying glass over Mary Terrell's face, studied it carefully.

She knew her enemy.

Time had changed this woman, yes. It had made her heavier and broken the smoothness of her skin; it had razored her prettiness down to the raw mean. But the real resemblance was in the eyes, those gray-blue soul mirrors. You had to have a magnifying glass, and even then you had to look hard and close. The eyes had a dead, hot hatred in them. They didn't go with the blond hippie locks or the Crest-white smile. The eyes were the same ones that had looked down upon her as Laura had given up her baby to bloodstained hands. Yes. Yes. They were the same, but older. Yes. The same.

'It's her,' Laura said.

At once Kastle was kneeling beside her, looking at the photo from Laura's perspective. 'Are you sure?'

'I…' No doubts. Those eyes. Big hands. The Smiley Face in the background. No doubts. 'It's Ginger Coles,' she said.

'You're identifying Mary Terrell as the woman who took your infant?'

'Yes.' She nodded. 'Yes. It's her. This is the woman.' She felt a double shattering within her: relief and horror.

'May I use your telephone?' Kastle took the photograph and went into the kitchen. In another moment, Laura heard him say, 'We've got a positive ID. Hold on to your hat.'

When Kastle returned, Laura was sitting gray-faced, her arms huddled around herself and Franklin stroking her back. Doug stood at a window across the room, like an outcast. 'All right.' Kastle sat down again, and put the photo on the coffee table. 'We're getting a file together on Mary Terrell. All available pictures, prints, family whereabouts, relatives, everything. But I guess there are things you ought to know that I can tell you right now.'

'Just find my baby. Please. That's all I want.'

'I understand that. I have to tell you, though, that Mary Terrell – Mary Terror – probably killed a ten-year-old boy in the woods around Mableton just recently. She took his rifle, and we matched the serial numbers with the seller. So that makes three people she's killed that we know about, not counting the others.'

'The others? What others?'

'As I recall, six or seven police officers, a university professor and his wife, and a documentary filmmaker. All those murders took place in the late sixties and early seventies. Mary Terrell was a member of the Storm Front. Do you know what that was?'

Laura had heard of it before, yes. A militant terrorist group like the Symbionese Liberation Army. Mark Treggs had talked about it in Burn This Book.

'I was in the Miami bureau when it was going on, but I kept up with it,' Kastle continued. 'Mary Terrell was a political killer. She believed that she was an executioner for the masses. The whole bunch of them did. You know how that used to be: a group of hippies stoned all the time and listening to weird music, and sooner or later they started thinking about how much fun it might be to kill somebody.'

Laura nodded vacantly, but part of her was recalling that she had been a hippie who got stoned and listened to weird music, though she'd never wanted to murder anyone.

'The Bureau's been looking for her since the early seventies. Why she broke cover now and took your baby, I don't know. Now I guess I'm getting ahead of myself, because we won't be certain until we match some fingerprints, but I have to tell you this: Mary Terrell is very, very dangerous.' He didn't tell her that Mary Terrell was held in such awe that there was a target dummy in her likeness at the FBI's Quantico firing range. Nor did he tell her that less than an hour before he'd left the office, the Washington Bureau had come back with a four-point match on the shower-head thumbprint with Mary Terrell's right thumbprint. But he'd wanted Laura's positive ID on the photo to clinch it. Funny he hadn't noticed the Smiley Face Frisbee. The big chiefs in Washington had to be chewing their pencils for action on this one, particularly since a fellow agent had been murdered. 'We're going to do everything we can to find her. Do you believe that?'

She nodded again. 'My baby. She won't hurt my baby, will she?'

'I don't see why she would.' He turned the thought of the baby box with its mutilated dolls out of his mind. 'She took your baby for a reason, but I don't think she plans on hurting him.'

'Is she insane?' Laura asked.

This was a difficult question. Kastle shifted his position in the chair, thinking it over. The baby box said she might very well be crazy, like an animal that's lived too long in a hole gnawing on old bones. 'You know,' he said quietly, 'I wonder about some of those people from the sixties. You know the ones I mean: they hated everything and everybody, and they wanted to break the world apart and start it all over again in their image. They fed on hate, day and night. They breathed it, in their attics and cellars, while they burned their incense and candles. I wonder what they did with that hate when the candles went out.'

Kastle began to put away the photographs, and he closed the envelope. 'I suppose I'll go out and face the reporters now. I won't give them much, just enough to whet their appetite. You work for the Constitution, don't you?'

'Yes.'

'You understand what I mean, then. I won't ask you to come out with me. That'll be for later. The longer we can keep the press interested, the better chance we have of finding Mary Terrell quickly. So we have to play them a little bit.' He smiled. 'Such is life. Mr. Clayborne, would you come outside with me?'

'Why me? I wasn't even in the room!'

'Right, but you're a good human interest angle. Plus you can't answer any question in detail. I'll handle all the detail work. Okay?'

'Okay,' Doug said reluctantly.

Kastle stood up, and Doug braced himself for the onslaught. There was a question Laura had to ask: 'When… when you find her… David won't be hurt, will he?'

'We'll get your baby back for you,' Kastle said. 'You can count on it.' Then he and Doug went out front to where the reporters waited.

Laura's father held her hand and talked quietly and reassuringly to her, but Laura barely heard him. She was thinking of a madwoman holding a baby on a balcony, and a SWAT sniper sighting in for the kill. She closed her eyes, remembering the double pop pop of two shots, and the baby's head exploding.

It couldn't happen to David that way.

No.

It couldn't.

No.

She put her hands to her face and wept heartbroken tears, and Franklin sat there, not knowing what to do.

4: Hope, Mother

In the big red brick house in Richmod that had been built in 1853, the telephone rang.