skated on its surface; no frog sang from its shore; no cricket scraped the hairy bow of one leg across the other. There was no night music.
For several moments after they heard the last jeeps pull away Grace, Annie, and Sharon remained perfectly still, kneeling in the water like three soggy penitents.
Annie's nose itched. Were they really gone? If she lifted her hand to scratch her nose, if a drop of water plunked back to the surface, would a dozen men leap from hiding and start shooting?
Slowly, carefully, she lifted her left hand from the water and raised it to her nose. It was covered with thick clots of swampy mud. She scratched her nose and no one shot her. 'Can we get out yet?' Her whisper was barely a breath.
Grace's shoulders lifted under the surface, and the water around them rippled. 'Carefully,' she whispered back.
Annie rose from her knees, wobbling, water sheeting from her tattered dress, her eyes almost screwed shut when the body of the cow behind her shifted. 'There's a cow in here.' She moved aside to show them.
'Good Lord,' Sharon whispered, staring at the thing. It looked peaceful lying there, only a portion of the belly rising above the water's surface like a hairy black-and-white rock. 'That's where all the animals went. They pushed them into the lake.'
The three of them waded hurriedly out from among the cattails onto the mud-flattened grass of the shore, water running from their clothes to puddle at their feet. Sharon and Annie both sagged to the ground like dazed, broken-stemmed flowers pummeled by a heavy rain. Grace stayed upright a moment longer, standing straight and tall and still, a motionless vessel for her busy eyes. Finally, she took a deep breath, and Annie knew it was safe. 'That's what happened here,' she said. 'They were moving some kind of gas in trucks, something went wrong, and they killed a whole town.'
'Oh, shit.' It was the first time Grace had ever heard genuine panic in Annie's voice. 'So we've been sitting in a lake filled with animals that died from poison gas?'
Grace sat down next to her, lifted a soggy piece of silk away from her neck, and laid it back on her shoulder where it belonged. 'It's been hours. Those soldiers weren't worried, so we shouldn't be. Whatever it was isn't here anymore.'
'So I don't have to strip down and look for lesions?'
Grace shook her head. 'There wouldn't be lesions, anyway. It wasn't a chemical agent. It was nerve gas.'
Sharon looked at her. 'How do you know that?'
'Chemical agents are all corrosive. From what I saw of that cow, it was clean, and there wasn't a mark on that dog back in the house, either.'
Annie thought about that for a second, then breathed out and nodded, completely satisfied, and Sharon wondered how the hell she learned to do that. She shivered, hugging her knees, feeling the very careful world she'd created for herself crumbling around her. Suddenly, what she had chosen to do with her life, profiling one killer at a time, maybe saving a life or two along the way, seemed terribly insignificant. While she was so busy-and Grace and Annie, too, for that matter-tracking single serial killers all over the country, mass murder was happening right in her own backyard. 'Christ, I don't believe this. Nerve gas? This is Wisconsin, for God's sake, not the Middle East. Where the hell did they get nerve gas?'
Annie patted her on the knee. 'Actually, Wisconsin's a pretty good place to get the stuff. It's pretty much pesticides on steroids. You've got the main ingredient on every farm in the Midwest, and instructions on how to make it all over the Internet.'
Sharon closed her eyes. 'It just can't be that easy, or every nutcake on the planet would be using it. We're not talking about fertilizer bombs here.'
'It isn't that easy,' Grace said quietly. 'But it isn't impossible, either. Remember the sarin release in the Tokyo subway? They didn't buy that stuff from an arms dealer. They made it themselves.'
Sharon rubbed at her eyes and took a couple deep breaths, thinking that this was what had killed all the people and animals here. Just breathing. 'They've got two more trucks filled with the stuff out there somewhere.' Her voice was trembling now, and her hand shook as she fumbled with the button to light up her watch face. 'And in about nine hours, they're going to gas a thousand people if we don't do something. We have tohurry.'
Grace's voice was maddeningly calm. 'We need someplace to hurry to first.'
'Out of here! We have to get out and let someone know what's going on!'
Annie grabbed Sharon's hand and shook it with a little scold. 'You have to calm down. Just think for a minute. . . .'
'We don't have a minute!' Sharon hissed. 'This isn't just about us anymore. What are we supposed to do? Sit around here, thinking, while a lot of other people die?'
Grace blew out a sigh, reminding herself that this wasn't just a panicked woman talking-the cop in Sharon had just taken over, and as far as cops were concerned, immediate action was the answer to everything. 'Fine,' she said quietly. 'Just what would you like us to do?'
'Head for the roadblock, take out the men guarding it, steal one of the jeeps.'
'You and me with our nines against who knows how many men with Ml6s?'
Sharon didn't want to hear about problems, just solutions. She spoke quickly, fueled by the desire to make things happen. 'So first we try to pick them off from some kind of cover, even if we don't get all of them, we'll at least improve the odds, then we rush the jeep while we're still firing. . . .'
'Honey, that's just plain suicide.'
Sharon glared at Annie. 'There's too much at stake here not to try it.'
'There's too much at staketo try it,' Grace corrected her, speaking very slowly, very clearly. 'Because if we die trying, a thousand other people die with us.' She let that sink in for a minute. 'We have to think of another way.'
'Goddamnit, thereis no other way. We've been trying to get out of here since we got in and couldn't do it, and it's even worse now. Now they're all out there in a big circle, just waiting for us.'
'Then we have to break the circle.'
Annie nodded. 'What we need is a diversion.'
Grace eyed her. 'You've been watching old war movies again.' 'Lots of movies. And that's what you do. You get all the enemy in one place, then you slip out in the other direction.'
Sharon snorted. 'Great idea. How do you propose we do that?' 'Hell, I don't know. How do cops do it? If you're in the field, on the job, and surrounded, what do you do?'
'The one thing we can't do. You call for backup.' Grace spun her head to look at her, went very still for a moment, and then a rare smile spread slowly over her face. 'Maybe we can do both.' She took a breath, looked up the slope toward the paddock, then back down at Annie and Sharon. 'What if we set the whole goddamned town on fire?'
DEPUTY DOUGLAS LEE was in the one and only place he considered safe at the moment-twenty feet up in the knobby clutches of an old box elder tree.
He'd always hated the messy box elders and the massing, flying beetles they hosted. Damn things took root anywhere-in the sand or the clay, in the sun or the shade, in the middle of a cornfield or a crack in the sidewalk if you didn't keep after them. Even in the middle of a first-growth pine forest, thank God. One day a spindly sapling, the next day a monster like the one he sat in.
The lowest branches of the white pines had been too high for him to reach, and too well spaced for easy climbing. The box elder had been a godsend with its fat, sharply angled limbs and broad, cupped crotches. If he managed to live through this, he had the box elder to thank, and by God, he'd never uproot another seedling from his yard.
He didn't know how long he'd been in the tree-near half an hour, he figured. Long enough to doze off and jerk awake to a terrifying volley of gunfire that turned out to be only in his brain. The wound on the side of his head had run like a faucet while he was tearing likehell through the woods, and for long minutes after, he'd settled in the tree to listen to his heart thunder in his chest. He reached up and touched the side of his head with one of the few clean spots remaining on his bloody handkerchief. Hardly bleeding at all now. Maybe it wasn't too deep, just a bleeder like all head wounds.
