An image in her mind: children sitting around a birthday-party table, singing to Sarah who was smiling and embarrassed and happy, and next to her, safe and secure in a baby-seat, was Billy Lawrence, cute as a button in his baseball outfit, giggling as Carol Beals played nosey-nose with him...

“Children don’t know about chronos, Mr. H., and as long as we continue SHIT’s work, that’s how it remains.”

...Blow out the candles! See if you can get ‘em all in one breath!

“I’ve been wrong in thinking that Sarah was my only child, Mr. H—Heather Wilson, Daniel McKellan, Rosie and Thad Simpkins, Billy Lawrence…all of them are mine—are ours—because no one else wants the responsibility. And there’re hundreds more just like them, too many of whom died at the hands of a parent who was supposed to love them, care for them, protect them from harm, or who died at the hands of family friends, or suffered unspeakable deaths inflicted on them by people who stole them away for their own twisted pleasures. We have babies, Mr. H., some who lived less than a month because they were starved or beaten or dumped in trash cans or left out in the cold to freeze to death or locked in cars on summer days to slowly suffocate—but that can’t touch them now because when we dispatch those who snuffed out their lives, they come into our care, and in our care they live only in kairos. Chronos isn’t part of them any longer.”

She turned the scrapbook around so as to give Mr. Hands a glimpse of the Lawrence section. She suspected that he peeked out from between the rows of stone faces and was pleased with what he saw.

“The world will not be this way within reach of my arm, Mr. H.

“We will continue to punish the monsters who have already killed, but from now on we will also save as many living children as we can from having to die at abusive, neglectful, violent hands.

“And there shall be no mercy. Under no circumstances.”

A cool autumn breeze kissed her cheek as she gently closed the scrapbook and filled herself with the scent of the dried leaves whispering around her.

Somewhere between the breeze and the sound of the leaves brushing against the ground, she heard Sarah’s voice saying, What a great birthday party! I’m so glad you’re my mommy...

And thus, under the all-seeing eye of SHIT, the focus of their mission expanded.

Chapter Four

Lucy spotted the couple outside the Sparta restaurant downtown two days later. Everything about them screamed Welfare Recipients (the despicable type who gave the truly needy a bad name—both obviously available and able to work but deciding instead to bilk the system for everything they could get, feeling that the world owed them and screw anyone else); the two of them, dressed in not-cheap winter clothing and arguing loudly over who was going to pick up the “party supplies” for that night, seemed oblivious to the infant in its stroller: dressed in clothing far too thin for this type of weather (not to mention far too small, as if they’d chosen to spend the money on beer instead of proper seasonal attire for their baby), the child’s cold-reddened face showed open misery. The woman—twenty, maybe twenty-one—kept kicking at the back of the stroller every time the baby cried too loudly, while the father flicked his cigarette ashes thoughtlessly to the side, more than a few of them—still red and hot—landing on the child’s exposed hands and causing it to cry all the louder, which in turn compelled the mother to kick the back of the stroller even harder.