I stood, dizzy and feverish, and leaned against the car. I had been wrong. The wasted flesh that rotted at my feet had once been C. Wakefield Caldwell, a corporate executive, a millionaire, a philanthropist, a father, husband, and son to a proud, proud family—until the disease of drink captured his soul, long before I captured his body. His aspirations were of a different sort than Jack’s, but no less filled with conviction and altruism. His suffering pained me; he was unable to stop drinking; he was addicted to it, even though it destroyed the very fiber of his being. He watched his family lose respect, and leave; he watched his empire collapse; he had seen the last scrap of rug pulled out from under him when his mother had the locks on her apartment changed. He knew what he had been when he scavenged in the free-clothes barrel at the Salvation Army and sold the rags for wine.

Jack’s voice slipped back to join that of Joshua and Sarah and the others. Background music.

I now had C. Wakefield Caldwell for company.

“The waiting was the hardest part. Jesus, she slipped by us at every turn. It seemed like she was a pro. She seemed to know all the right dodges, all the right things to do that would leave absolutely no trace of her whereabouts, or clue to her direction. I couldn’t believe she was that crafty, although maybe she was. I rather think she was lucky.

“Whatever. It gave me time to dwell on her. And myself. I didn’t like thinking about myself too much, but I fantasized a lot about Angelina. I was always trying to put her in a situation in my mind and have some flash of intuition or something that would be strong enough for me to actually proceed in some direction with the investigation. As a result, my imagination took me into some pretty bizarre realms. This territory was darker than any forest I’d been in; this bounty was scarier, more perverse, more dangerous, than any I could ever imagine.

“But trying to get inside her mind was the worst. You always try to second-guess the animal—will it go to high ground, or to water, or underground?—and to do that with any accuracy, you must know a little about the species.

“I knew nothing about Angelina—only what I made up in my head. Sometimes I was accurate, most times I wasn’t. But the worst part was when I had to admit that I was enjoying the dark meditations I began to have, where I tried to think like her, tried to be her, to imagine how she thought, where she would go, how her sickness would progress.

“I gave up everything for her. Everything. Family, friends, job, everything. For her. Her, and those dark meditations.”

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