He lay in the surgery of the NSA safe house in Virginia. The trouble was he felt anything but safe here.

While the surgeon was removing the bullet from his shoulder and picking out bone fragments with a Jansen forceps, St. Vincent was visited by the figure in the black latex hood, its horns distended, the eye-zippers glittering. The figure itself moved so fast it was merely a blue-white blur, sexless and ageless. It was the hood, and what lay beneath the hood—a bull’s head? a crow’s?—that he was fixated on. That unknown face frightened him as nothing had since his boyhood amid the Louisiana bayous, the tortuous trees, the gray nooses of Spanish moss, the things that roamed by the cold light of the moon and the stars.

It exacerbated the sense in him that he had never outrun his childhood, never outrun the intimate sessions with his mother, or his mother’s murderous intent, when she took him with her, made him an accessory to a murder she believed she’d willfully and happily committed. He could not escape the feeling that by bringing him to witness the shooting, his mother had made him as culpable as she, had bound him to her with a spiderweb from which he was incapable of breaking free. All of this memory-sense had been triggered by the sight of the figure in the black latex hood—as if it were an avenging demon sent by Preach to destroy him. And the figure exposed something else, buried even deeper inside him: his guilty fear of divine punishment for his time alone with his mother …

When he awoke, hours later, it was to the sight of King Cutler standing by his bedside. Cutler, seeing him awake, poured some iced water, hit the pedal on the bed to elevate St. Vincent to a sitting position, and handed him the plastic cup.

St. Vincent drank gratefully, ignoring the pain in his heavily bandaged shoulder.

“We need to talk,” Cutler said, placing the empty cup beside the water pitcher on the swing table. “You up for it?”

St. Vincent narrowed his eyes in distaste. “What d’you think?” He wanted nothing more than to spit out the caustic taste of bile his nightmares had left in the back of his throat.

Cutler peered at him. “I’d assumed you’d be sedated.”

“I don’t do sedation,” St. Vincent snapped. “Clouds the mind for days I can’t afford to miss.” He gestured with his head. “Bring me up to date.”

“The apartment has been sterilized. The woman’s body has been disposed of. It’s like it never happened.”

“The Metro Police?”

“As far as they’re concerned the 911 call never happened.”

“And the neighbors?”

“Calmed and placated. So far as they’re concerned the girl went out of town to be with her ill mother.”

“And the gunshots?”