I had really hit the jackpot. On the floor beside the reloader was a microcassette recorder with a tape in it. I pressed the rewind button and then pressed play, listening to a familiar voice slowed down to a series of quite nasty gravel-throated threats. I rewound, switched the tape speed, and tried it again. The voice was clearly Ann's, spelling out her intentions with an ax and a chain saw. The whole thing sounded stupid, but she must have had a ball. "I am going to get you..." We used to do shit like this as kids. "I am going to cut your head off..."I smiled grimly, remembering the night those calls had come through. I'd taken comfort from the fact that someone two doors away was wide awake like me. The square of light had looked so cozy at that hour. All the time she'd been in here, dialing room-to-room, part of her campaign of psychological abuse. At this point I couldn't even remember when I'd had an uninterrupted night's sleep. I was being carried on adrenaline and nerve, the momentum of events sweeping me willy-nilly down the path. The night my room was broken into, all she'd had to do was use her passkey and jimmy up the sliding glass door afterward so it would look like the point of entry. I got to my feet and checked the shelf above. In a shoebox, I found a windowed envelope addressed to "Erica Dahl" containing quarterly dividends and year-end tax summaries for IBM stock. There must have been more than a hundred such envelopes neatly packed into the box, along with a social security card, driver's license, and passport – with Ann Fowler's photograph affixed. The statements from Merrill Lynch showed a $42,000 investment in shares of IBM back in 1967. With stock splits in the intervening years, the shares had more than doubled in value. I noticed that "Erica" had dutifully paid taxes on the interest that accrued from year to year. Ann Fowler was too shrewd to get tripped up by the IRS.

I flashed the penlight through her living room and kitchenette, doing a one-eighty turn. When the narrow beam crossed the bedstead, I caught an oval of white and flashed the light back over it again. Ann .was propped up in bed watching me. Her face was dead pale, her eyes enormous, so filled with lunacy and hate that my skin crawled. I felt as if I'd been pierced with an icy arrow, the chill spreading from the core of my body to my fingertips. In her lap she held a double-barreled shotgun, which she raised and pointed right at my chest. Probably not rock salt. I didn't think the spider story was going to work with her.

"Finding everything you need?" she asked.

I raised my hands just to show I knew how to behave. "Hey, you're pretty good. You almost got away with it."