Neither could I, neither could I. Dr. Petito had waited around for the pictures. He never seemed to leave the hospital. I met with him in his office at a little past eleven-thirty. I was beyond tired. We both were.

"Long day for you,"I said. Every day seemed to be like that for Petito. The neurologist had office hours starting at seven-thirty in the morning, and he was still around the hospital at nine and ten o'clock at night, sometimes later. He actually encouraged patients to call him at home if they had a problem or just got scared at night.

"This is my life." He shrugged. "Helped get me divorced a few years back." He yawned. "Keeping me single now. That and my fear of attachment. I love it, though."

I nodded and thought that I understood. Then I asked the question that was burning in my mind. "What did you find? Is she all right?"

He shook his head slowly, then he spoke the words I hadn't wanted to hear," I'm afraid there's a tumor. I'm pretty certain that it's a pilocytic astrocytoma, a kind of tumor that strikes the very young. We'll confirm that after the surgery. It's located in her cerebellum. The tumor is large, and it's life-threatening. I'm sorry to have to give you that news."

I spent another night at the hospital with Jannie. She fell asleep holding my hand again.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Early the next morning my beeper went off. I made a call and got bad news from Sandy Greenberg, a friend who works at Interpol headquarters in Lyons, France.

A woman named Lucy Rhys-Cousins had been savagely murdered in a London supermarket. She was killed while her children looked on. Sandy told me the police in London suspected that the killer was her husband, Geoffrey Shafer, a man I knew as the Weasel.

I couldn't believe it. Not now. Not the Weasel "Was it Shafer or not?" I asked Sandy. "Do you know for certain?"

"It's him, Alex, though we won't confirm it for the press vermin. Scotland Yard is positive. The children recognized him. Their Mad Hatter daddy! He killed their mother right before their eyes." Months before, Geoffrey Shafer had been responsible for Christine's kidnapping. He had also committed several grisly murders in the Southeast section of Washington. He'd preyed on the poor and defenseless. The news that he might be alive, and killing again, was like a swift, sudden punch below the belt. I knew it would be even worse for Christine to learn about Shafer.

I called her at home from St. Anthony's, but got her answering machine. I talked calmly to the machine. "Christine, pick up if you're there. It's Alex. Please, pick up. It's important that I talk to you."

Still, no one picked up at Christine's. I knew that Shafer couldn't be here in Washington and yet I worried about the possibility that he was. It was his pattern to do the unexpected. The goddamn Weasel!