Suddenly Barclay's jocular Southern twang filled the room: "Sixes and nines, the yin and the yang. The man eats the woman and the woman eats the man—"

Martin leaned over her shoulder and flicked off the tape player, his heart drumming staccato. He knew he'd eventually have to listen to that voice again, but he hadn't been prepared for how he would react. He tasted blood. The bite on his tongue from earlier must have split open.

Sheila looked up at him from the floor. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. Just give me a second, okay?"

"I know how you feel."

"Barclay didn't threaten to kill you."

"No, that's true. But he did say he'd send me your genitals in a box, and that's a pretty frightening image too."

"Ha." He nodded toward the tape player. "All right. Do it."

She thumbed the Fast-Forward button, then hit Play again. This time it was her own voice, relaxed and comforting. A therapist's voice if he'd ever heard one. "And you believe you had the right to kill those women."

"It's my purpose," Barclay said. "It's what I was put here to do."

"Meaning?"

A long pause. The tape whirred. Cold wind from the river whipped against the outside of the building, thumping on the windows.

Finally, Barclay laughed. Cackled, really.

"Well, I don't know. I ain't particularly religious. My mother was Southern Baptist, I believe, but Daddy... he didn't need no church to be spiritual. I b'lieve my daddy always looked down on Mama for that. I 'member one time he told me she was weak. A weak-minded woman, he said. That she needed Jesus to carry her like she was a cripple. Only the way he meant it was emotionally crippled, y'understand. Not handicapped."

Sheila murmured noncommittally.

"I s'pose some of her old-time religion musta rubbed off on ol' Jimmy, though," he said, speaking in the third person as he often did. "Ol' Gimme Jimmy. Apple don't fall far from the tree, they say, even if that tree is crazy as catshit."

Crazy as catshit. Qurban had asked Martin if the phrase was an Americanism when he'd said it in the car.

But it wasn't. It was a Barclayism.

And I didn't even remember where it came from, he thought. It's a part of me now.

"Yeah," Barclay said thoughtfully, responding to something Sheila must have said. "Yeah, you're not like most women, are you, Doc? You understand things. You git it. See, most women, they think with their emotions, which means they ain't thinkin at all. Women feel. Men reason."

A slight pause, filled with an off-mic response from Sheila, barely a murmur. Sitting at Martin's feet, Sheila shook her head derisively.

"Oh, you can sneer, but it's a stereotype because there's some truth to it. We're built that way, ain't no fault of our own. It's in our genetic make-up. Our DNA," he said with a sarcastically reverential vibe. "But we aim to deny that. See, women want equality, but they don't want the price that comes with it. Don't expect chivalry with equal rights. And there's no battered woman syndrome, not 'less there's a battered man syndrome, which I'm liable to think there ain't. And girls—you look at the schoolyard these days and tell me they aren't just about as messed up as you ever seen a boy. How's that for equality, huh?"