“She’s hurt and tired,” said Mary Jo. “Can’t questions wait until she’s had a chance to recover?”

“No,” said Adam. “We need to deal with him, so Christy can go back to Eugene and get on with her life.”

Christy turned her wet blue eyes on my husband, and said, “I’ve been thinking of moving back home.”

The food I had just swallowed went down wrong and sent me off in a paroxysm of coughing.

3

“Well, now,” said Warren over the top of my coughing, Texas thick in his voice. “I don’t know ’bout all that, Miss Christy. Where you live is up to you. But the sooner we get rid of the man who is scaring you, the safer you are going to be. So I’m going to ask you to tell me how you met him and everything you can remember about him.”

Christy’s eyes got bigger at the solid authority in his voice, and she looked as though she were sixteen instead of the over forty I was sure of. “Okay,” she said.

He reached behind him and grabbed the notebook he’d tossed on the floor when we’d sat down, and said, “Let’s start with the first meeting. When and where?”

“A couple of months ago—early February, I can check for the exact date. My girlfriends and I were out gambling, a weekend in Reno. We’d gone to a show and were finishing up the night with dinner in one of the casinos. There were a lot of people around, and since we do this once a month, there were even a lot of people we knew.” She played with her plate. “This man came up to our table. He was beautiful—younger than me, in a suit that … You know that blue-gray suit you had that was so expensive?”

Adam nodded, and I found that I was jealous of her memory of seeing him in a suit, even though he wore suits a lot. But I’d never seen him in the blue-gray suit that she was talking about.

She kept her eyes on my husband as she continued. “It reminded me of that, not in color, but in the way it was shaped. He looked … expensive, but not in a ‘kept man’ or ‘I’m going to impress you’ kind of way. His eyes were bright, and he ignored the others, just looked at me. Tall, golden hair, swarthy skin—not the warm tones you usually see with South American Hispanics. More like Mediterranean dark. He was big.”

“How big?”

She looked at Warren. “Taller than you. Heavier—but all muscle. Like a bodybuilder.” Her eyes strayed to Adam. “He must spend a lot of time in the gym because the only other man I’ve seen quite that muscular is Adam. And when he looked at me, he saw me. Intense.”