I wasn’t prepared to even think about that right now. The violation I’d been living with since Fields held up those tape recorders was total and ugly.

I said, “My place didn’t have fifty agents—”

Her hand turned under mine so that our palms met and she tightened her fingers around my wrist. “He’s beyond reason,” she said. “Evandro. He’s…nothing like we’ve ever dealt with. He’s not a person, he’s a force, and I think if he wants me bad enough, he’ll get to me.”

She sucked hard on her cigarette; the coal flared and I could see red pockets under her eyes.

“He won’t—”

“Sssh,” she said and removed her hand from mine. She stubbed out the cigarette and cleared her throat. “I don’t want to sound like a wimp here or the pathetic little woman, but I need to hold someone now and I…”

I came out of my chair and knelt between her legs and she wrapped her arms around me and pressed the side of her face against mine and dug her fingers into my back.

Her voice was a warm whisper in my ear. “If he should kill me, Patrick—”

“I won’t—”

“If he should, you have to promise me something.”

I waited, felt the terror rattling up through her chest and squirming out the pores of her skin.

“Promise me,” she said, “that you’ll stay alive long enough to kill him. Slowly. For days, if you can manage it.”

“What if he gets to me first?” I said.

“He can’t kill us both. No one’s that good. If he gets to you before me”—she leaned back a bit so her eyes could meet mine—“I’ll paint this house with his blood. Every last inch of it.”

She went to bed a few minutes later and I turned on a small light in the kitchen and read through the files Bolton had given me on Alec Hardiman, Charles Rugglestone, Cal Morrison, and the murders of 1974.

Both Hardiman and Rugglestone looked numbingly normal. Alec Hardiman’s only distinguishing characteristic was that, like Evandro, he was extremely handsome, almost to a degree you’d consider feminine. But there are plenty of handsome men in the world, several of whom hold no sway over anyone.

Rugglestone, with his widow’s peak and long face, looked more like a West Virginia coal miner than anything else. He didn’t look particularly friendly, but he didn’t look like a man who crucified children and disembowled winos.

The faces told me nothing.

People, my mother once claimed, cannot be fully understood, only reacted to.

My mother was married to my father for twenty-five years so she probably did a lot of reacting in her time.

Right now, I had to agree with her. I’d spent time with Hardiman, read how he’d turned from an angelic boy into a demon overnight, and nothing could tell me why.

Less was known about Rugglestone. He’d served in Vietnam, been honorably discharged, came from a small farm in East Texas and hadn’t had any contact with his family in over six years by the time he was killed. His mother was quoted as calling him “a good boy.”