Dark Rivers of the Heart

not.
        Spencer came to a waterless riverbed, which the interstate crossed on a low concrete bridge. He drove into that declivity, onto a soft bed of silt, where driftwood slept and where dead tumbleweeds moved as ceaselessly as strange shadows in a bad dream.
        He followed the dry wash under the interstate, west into the inhospitable Mojave.
        The forbidding sky, as hard and dark as sarcophagus granite, hung within inches of the iron mountains. Desolate plains rose gradually toward those more sterile elevations, with a steadily decreasing burden of withered mesquite, dry bunchgrass, and cactus.
        He drove out of the arroyo but continued to follow it upslope, toward distant peaks as bare as ancient bones.
        The Chevrolet was no longer in sight.
        Finally, when he was sure that he was far beyond the casual notice of any surveillance teams posted to watch the traffic on the interstate, he turned south and paralleled that highway. Without it as a reference, he would be lost. Whirling dust devils spun across the desert, masking the telltale plumes cast up behind the Explorer.
        Although no rain yet fell, lightning scored the sky. The shadows of low stone formations leaped, fell back, and leaped again across the alabaster land.
        Rocky's cloaks of courage had been cast off as the Explorer's speed had fallen. He was huddled once more in folds of cold timidity.
        He whined periodically and looked at his master for reassurance.
        The sky cracked with fissures of fire.
        Roy Miro pushed the troubling photographs aside and set up his attache case computer on the kitchen table in the Malibu cabin. He plugged it into a wall outlet and connected with Mama in Virginia.
        When Spencer Grant had joined the United States Army, as a boy of eighteen, more than twelve years ago, he must have completed the standard enlistment forms. Among other things, he'd been required to provide information about his schooling, his place of birth, his father's name, his mother's maiden name, and his next of kin.
        The recruiting officer through whom he had enlisted would have verified that basic information. It would have been verified again, at a higher level, prior to Grant's induction into the service.
        If "Spencer Grant" was a phony identity, the boy would have had considerable difficulty getting into the army with it. Nevertheless, Roy remained convinced that it was not the name on Grant's original birth certificate, and he was determined to discover what that birth name had been.
        At Roy's request, Mama accessed the Department of Defense dead files on former army personnel. She brought Spencer Grant's basic information sheet onto the display screen.
        According to the data on the VDT, Grant's mother's name, which he had given to the army, was Jennifer Corrine Porth.
        The young recruit had listed her as "deceased."
        The father was said to be "unknown."
        Roy blinked in surprise at the screen. Unknown.
        That was extraordinary. Grant had not simply claimed to be a bastard child, but had implied that his mother's promiscuity had made it impossible to pinpoint the man who fathered him. Anyone else might have cited a false name, a convenient fictional father, to spare himself and his late mother some embarrassment.
        Logically, if the father was genuinely unknown, Spencer's last name should have been Porth. Therefore, either his mother borrowed the "Grant" from a favorite movie star, as Bosley Donner believed she'd done, or she named her son after one of the men in her life even without being certain that he had fathered the boy.
        Or the "unknown" was a lie and the name "Spencer Grant" was. just another false identity, perhaps the first of many, that this phantom had manufactured for himself At the time of Grant's enlistment, with his mother already dead and his father unknown, he had given his next of kin as "Ethel Marie and George Daniel Porth, grandparents."
        They had to be his mother's parents, since Porth was also her maiden name.
        Roy noticed that the address for Ethel and George Porth-in San Francisco-had been the same as Grant's current address at the time that he'd enlisted. Apparently the grandparents had taken him in, subsequent to the death of his mother, whenever that had been.
        If anyone knew the true story of Grant's provenance and the source of his scar,