Claire had made a brief stab at decorating her home and her life. After Stargill moved out, she stripped the house bare. Not for serenity. Back to the cell.

Punishing herself, just as Professor Racano had suspected. Trying, once again without consciously realizing it, to replicate Denton Argent's bleak fate in order to bond, somehow, with the brother who'd polluted her formative years.

She'd been twelve when Denton slaughtered the Brown-lees. But maybe much younger when she realized there was something different-maybe dangerously different-about her only sibling. Did she blame herself for not telling someone?

Or was she simply ashamed to be linked genetically to a monster?

I thought of how the Argents had refused to move. Remaining on the same block had to have been wrenching for them. For the entire neighborhood. Had Claire been shunned for the rest of her childhood?

When Denton seized fatally, she'd been seventeen, still living at home. An upbringing capped at both ends by trauma, shame, and loss. Adolescence was hallmarked by the quest for identity. What had happened to Claire's sense of self?

Had she ever visited Denton at the asylum, or had her parents forbidden contact? Had she planned, at some point, to talk to her brother about his crimes? Tried to make sense of events that defied explanation?

If so, Denton's death had killed any hope.

Years later, she decided to look for answers anyway.

Learning about the Ardullo murders must have seemed like salvation.

The parallels between the two cases chilled my blood. I could only imagine how Claire had felt, spooling microfiche, only to come upon Denton's doppelganger in Ardis Peake.

First, shock. Then sickening, spreading familiarity, empathy in its worst incarnation.

Finally, a glimmer of reprieve: one last chance to tackle the Big Why.

Now that I knew what I did, Claire's move to Starkweather, her zeroing in on Ardis Peake, wasn't puzzling at all.

So many madmen, so little time.

Not a choice, really. A psychologically preordained dance backed by the choreography of pain.

A dead certainty.

Chapter 26

"No luck," said Milo.

"On what?"

"Anything. The Corvette, any sort of locale on either Wark or Derrick Crimmins. No Social Security on Wark, and Crimmins's last tax filing was ten years ago. In Florida. Didn't get to take it any further 'cause I was tied up in the courthouse. Trying to get three separate judges to okay warrants on Peake's mail and his phone calls. No go. Prophecy didn't impress them. The third one laughed me out of chambers and told me to consult a palm reader."

It was nearly five. He'd pulled up in my driveway a few minutes ago. Now he was scrounging in the fridge, bent sharply as he eyed a lower shelf, the ridges and bulges of his service revolver protruding through his too-tight tweed jacket.

"Claire's relationship to Peake didn't matter?" I said.