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Dedication

FOR PAT FERA,

AND IN MEMORY OF TONY FERA

PART ONE

WITNESSES

SEPTEMBER 2018

CHAPTER ONE

The last decision Danica Ellis made in her ordinary life—the life in which stress meant playing chicken with the rent due-date, and wondering if going back to school was another slow-motion train wreck of a mistake—was whether to buy sixty-watt or hundred-watt light bulbs. As choices went, it wasn’t exactly roads diverging in a yellow wood. The prices weren’t a hell of a lot different, and probably the electric bill wouldn’t be swayed much, either—a few dollars per month, maybe. But a few dollars could matter. It had come to that once or twice already this year, and probably would again before she had her new degree and—fingers and toes crossed—some kind of career related to it. She grabbed the sixties off the shelf and tucked them into her cart beside the ninety-nine-cent white bread.

It was two in the morning and she had Kroger almost to herself. She’d passed a single bored cashier on her way in, and had seen no more than three other customers making lazy rounds among the aisles. Even the stocking crew had finished up and gone home for the night.

Danica moved on from the light bulbs. She rolled her cart into the broad lane that ran the length of the store’s back wall. At this hour the open refrigerated displays seemed to radiate a deeper chill than they would have during the evening rush. Maybe it was the absence of dozens of warm bodies.

Just ahead, a man stood looking over the orange juice racks. Danica had seen him browsing paperbacks a few minutes earlier. He apparently hadn’t found one to his liking; he had nothing in his hands now, and no cart, either. He was lean and attractive, and well-dressed for someone buying groceries in the middle of the night. Maybe he’d just come from a party; he was thirty, give or take.

Ten years closer to the cradle than you are, sweetie.

Jesus, since when did checking out a thirty-year-old make her feel like a leering pervert? Being forty-one didn’t qualify you as ancient, did it? Especially if everyone said you were a young forty-one, and everything that had been perky in your twenties was still pretty damned perky, thank you very much.

Tell yourself whatever keeps your confidence up.