Was he such a pure seeker after truth that its pursuit trumped any concern for rules or his own career? Was he driven by an obsessive desire to embarrass the powerful? Or did the risk itself, the giddy edge of the cliff, attract him with the same power with which it repelled saner men? Gurney had asked himself these questions about the man before. Once again he concluded that the answer was probably yes to all of them.

“So, Davey boy …” Hardwick’s voice jarred him back to the issue at hand. “The plot thickens. Or maybe this makes everything clearer to you. Which is it?”

“I don’t know, Jack. A little of both. It depends on what happens next. In the meantime, is that everything Clegg told you?”

“Almost everything.” Hardwick hesitated. His appetite for dramatic pauses irritated Gurney intensely, but it was a tolerable price to pay for what often followed. “Remember the little plastic animals the Good Shepherd left at the roadside shootings?”

“Yes.” In fact, he’d been thinking about them that morning, wondering about their purpose.

“Well, they found a little plastic animal at the scene—balanced delicately on Ruth Blum’s lips.”

“On her lips?”

“On her lips.”

“What kind of animal?”

“Clegg thinks it was a lion.”

“Wasn’t a lion the first animal in the original sequence of six?”

“Good memory, ace. So what are the odds we can expect five more?”

Gurney had no answer for that.

As soon as he got off the phone with Hardwick, he called Kim. He wondered if she was still at Kyle’s apartment, wondered if they were in bed together, wondered what their plans were for the day, wondered if they knew …

The call went into her voice mail. He left a blunt message. “Hi. I don’t know if it’s on the news yet, but Ruth Blum is dead. She was murdered in her home in Aurora late last night. It’s possible that the Good Shepherd is back, or someone wants us to think so. Call me as soon as you can.”

He tried Kyle’s number, got his voice mail, and left the same message.

He stood staring out the north window of the den at the wet, gray hillside. The rain had stopped, but the eaves continued to drip. The new information from Hardwick was scattering rather than organizing his thoughts. So damn many bits and pieces. It was impossible to see the path through the maze. To take a step forward, one had to know where forward was. He was overcome by a sick feeling that time was running out, that the endgame was rapidly approaching, without even knowing what that might mean.

He had to do something.

For want of a better idea, he found himself in his car, setting out for Aurora.