"Who else knows about this?" . . . "Why did you follow me?" . . . "Did someone specifically tell you to investigate me?" . . . "Tell me again about the inhaler. What was it I did that made you suspicious?" . . . "What did Con-stanza and Beatriz tell you?" . . . "Who else knows about this?" . . . "Who else knows about this?"

Even now, in the dense silence, his voice was salt on the raw, exposed wound of her mind.

And yet with each passing second, each agonizing minute, she felt her power to resist grow.

If, as it seemed now, she was going to die, she was going to die victorious, with her secret and her self-esteem intact. Maybe sometime after her death Lester would come forward and the FBI would find and thoroughly search her car. . . . Maybe they would find the inhaler. . . . Maybe they would test it and determine that there was something out of the ordinary about it. . . . Maybe . . .

Alison smiled savagely at the notion that it was the very hatred Griswold had created in her that had kept her from disclosing what he wanted to know. It was the pain he caused that made her fight back. It was the knowledge that there was probably no way he could let her live that would keep her from ever telling him about Lester and what precious little she did know about the inhaler tucked beneath the driver's side seat of her car.

Still, she feared the pain.

When she needed to, she passed the hours by focusing her hatred on Griswold's visage—his basketball head, his balding pate, his pinched face, and his small, despicable eyes.

She tried lifting her head off the thin military pillow. The muscles in the back of her neck allowed the movement, but only at a painful price.

How could one human do this to another?

It was a stupid question. Humans had been torturing other humans for as long as there had been the means to do it.

And God made man in his own image . . . and God saw that it was good.

Not this time.

Mercifully, her eyes closed and sleep descended. As she was drifting off, she found herself focusing on why Griswold seemed so insistent on questioning her over and over regarding the inhaler. She had answered his questions not only plausibly but with the truth. Beyond the fact that Griswold had been handling the inhalers at all, she knew of nothing that he had done wrong. Now his persistence in not believing her had her wondering.