Afterward, as Catheryn slept, I lay awake in the darkness, my mind roaming the landscape between consciousness and oblivion. Lulled by the sound of Catheryn’s breathing, I stared at the ceiling, my thoughts awash in a dreamy swirl of images: A brass marker set in a grassy hillside. The inquisitive stare of a long-eared rabbit. The smell of jasmine in a suburban back yard. Nate’s tears wet on my cheek. The ragged cuts on a young boy’s hands. And running through it all, like the clash of a dissonant chord, the anguish I had seen in Catheryn’s eyes as she’d spoken of our lost son.
6
Monday morning, at precisely 3:29 AM, Victor Carns awoke from a deep and dreamless sleep. He lay motionless for several heartbeats, taking slow, measured breaths as his mind spiraled to consciousness. Moments later he extended an arm and groped the nightstand, shutting off his alarm clock an instant before it sounded.
He lay still a few seconds more, then flipped off the covers and rose from the bed. Without turning on the light, he crossed to the window and opened the blackout curtains. Standing nude and unseen, he surveyed the predawn California landscape.
At the mouth of the canyon far below, guarded on the north by the twin peaks of Saddleback Mountain, the inky outline of Portola reservoir shimmered in the moonlight. To the west, over an encirclement of hedges and wrought-iron fences bordering his estate, Carns could see a single pair of headlights winding down Coto de Caza Drive. In their serpentine progression south, the beams occasionally swung wide, spilling over an expanse of golf fairways traversing the center of the valley. Above the road, in stands of sycamore and live oak, isolated glimmerings marked a smattering of residences climbing the opposite ridge. Most of the homes there were ensconced in high-end developments with names like “The Arbours,” “Upper Rancho Colinas,” and “The Woods,” titles Carns considered pretentious, typical of the Southern Californian gentry that had recently descended like locusts upon the area.
Although the sun wouldn’t rise for hours, a glow from the lights of Rancho Santa Margarita lit low-hanging clouds to the west. Urban sprawl had reached the base of the Santa Ana Mountains, with similar developments like Irvine and Mission Viejo gobbling up mammoth tracts that had once been Spanish missions and Mexican potreros.
Years before, after careful consideration, Carns had chosen the gated community of Coto de Caza as an appropriate site for his estate. Originally known as Gobernadora Canyon, Coto lay nestled in the brush-covered foothills of the Cleveland National Forest, twenty miles from the Pacific. In keeping with its ranching heritage, the canyon had been subdivided as an equestrian community, with homesites and horse riding easements throughout. Though not a horseman, Carns had selected Coto because of its access to urban centers, quality of lifestyle, and privacy. Over the years his choice had proved exceptionally satisfactory, at least on the first two counts. Arterial thoroughfares to the population centers of Orange and Los Angeles Counties lay within easy reach, and Coto’s 44,000-square-foot clubhouse, Robert Trent Jones, Jr., golf course, Olympic-class aquatic center, multiple tennis courts, and huge equestrian facility provided one of the finest residential environs in Southern California. Privacy, however, had increasingly become a problem.
Leaving the window, Carns crossed to his dresser and pulled on underwear, sweat pants, a cotton T-shirt, socks, and tennis shoes. After descending a broad staircase to the main floor of his mansion, he proceeded through a gigantic living room, treading a collection of tribal rugs and flat-woven kilims from Persia, the Caucasus, and Turkey-many of whose value far exceeded an average family’s yearly income. Without stopping, he continued down a long hallway to a well equipped gymnasium. There for the next hour he exercised without pause, spending fifteen minutes on an inclined treadmill, thirty with free weights, and a final quarter hour on Nautilus and Gravitron machines.
Afterward he made his way to an adjacent bathroom. Dripping sweat, he stripped, reached into the bathroom’s black granite shower, turned the water on cold, and stepped beneath the icy spray. Gasping at the cold, he forced himself to remain under the frigid stream for several minutes, the ice-cold needles stinging his skin, a near-painful sensation of numbness creeping through his limbs. When he could endure no more, he stepped out. Grabbing a towel from a nearby hook, he inspected himself in a full-length mirror on the opposite wall.
A fraction under six feet tall, the image in the glass looked hard and lean, the powerful upper body bearing the mark of years of weight training. Dense black hair coursed from chest to groin, matching a wiry thicket on his forearms and shoulders. The face in the mirror appeared bland: thin lips, a broad triangular nose, close-cropped hair, and small, well-formed ears tucked flat against the skull.
As he began drying himself, Carns stepped closer, peering at his reflection. The eyes staring back were dark brown, almost black, as hard and symmetrical as marbles. Carns grinned at his image, then crossed to a clothes closet and
selected a fresh pair of sweats. After pulling them on, he checked the clock on the weight room wall: 4:45 AM.
Whistling contentedly, Carns returned to the living room and took a corridor to the right, passing an unused banquet room with seating for thirty, a granite-countered kitchen with a huge central island, and a darkened stairway leading to the subterranean level of his estate. Continuing, he reached the most lived-in portion of his house, and the area, with the exception of a small room in the basement, in which he derived his most pleasure.
He paused in the doorway, enjoying the anticipation that always gripped him before entering. The glow from a bank of computer screens bathed the room’s interior in greens and reds and blues, creating an illusion of festivity. Carns hesitated a moment more, then touched a switch near the door. Banks of hidden fluorescents flooded the chamber with light.
Like spokes of a wheel, a configuration of desks, counters, and shoulder-high partitions divided the space into three areas. Most prominent, a central, U-shaped desk dominated the assembly, its surface ringed by twenty- seven-inch computer monitors, along with a multiple-line phone terminal that he used to access the options trading floors of Chicago and New York. Two lesser workstations jutted from the main desk. The left branch, Carns’s “weather station,” harbored a computer terminal capable of serving up global weather forecasts, pest and crop reports, an AP wire feed, and an assortment of agricultural newsletters. The right wing, which served as a research center, contained a combination copier, scanner, and fax machine, a bookcase, and two additional computer screens-both displaying programs that Carns used for technical analysis.
Long ago, when he’d first begun futures trading, Carns had realized that up-to-the-minute information provided an immeasurable edge over the field. As a result he spent over a hundred thousand dollars yearly on fundamental data, information that included regular reports from certain feed-yard employees in Kansas, Texas, and southern Nebraska-some of it illegal. Recently his expenditure in this latter category had more than proved its worth.
Before starting his workday, Carns stepped into an auxiliary kitchen off the main office and poured a mug of black coffee from a pot preset to brew at 4:40 AM. Next he toasted an English muffin and ate it with a glass of tomato juice, precisely as he did every weekday morning. Coffee in hand, he moved to the Data Transmission Network weather screen and pulled up precipitation forecasts for various regions of crop production, checking the current six-to-ten-day forecast for each locale. That done, he crossed to the research station for a review of overnight currency moves, also spending time studying commodity reports he had requested on Friday.
Forty-five minutes later, following a regimented schedule, Carns shifted to a review of crop charts, concentrating on recent moves in soybeans. But as he studied the graphs, his mind drifted to the cattle market, the area in which he presently held his biggest position. Unable to concentrate on other matters, he allowed his thoughts to turn to the disastrous slide cattle futures had suffered over previous weeks. Although the market still showed signs of heading even lower, he had begun closing out his “short” contracts last Thursday. The remainder would take days to unload, but if nothing went awry, he stood to make money. A lot of money.
At 5:19 AM, Carns moved to his trading desk. Sixty seconds later he began his day, concentrating on the markets as they opened in turn: bonds, currency, and metals during the first hour, stock-index futures at six-thirty, cattle and hogs a half hour later, then finally grains. Working straight through the morning, he spent considerable
