Dark Rivers of the Heart

bodies from the TV cameras down the block. And anyway, a neighbor has it all on videotape!"
        "Did the guy kill his own wife and kid?"
        "I wish. But maybe it can still look that way."
        "Even with videotape?"
        "You've been around long enough to know photographic evidence rarely clinches anything. Look at the Rodney King video. Hell, look at the Zapruder film of the Kennedy hit." Summerton sighed. "So I hope you've got good news for me, Roy, something to cheer me up."
        Being Summerton's right-hand man was getting to be dreary work.
        Roy wished that he could report some progress on his current case.
        "Well," Summerton said, just before hanging up, "right now no news seems like good news to me."
        Late nor to leavin the Ve as offices on Sunda evening, Roy decided to ask Mama to use Nexis and other data-search services to scan for "Jennifer Corrine Porth" in all media data banks that were offered on various information networks-and to report by morning. The past fifteen to twenty years' issues of many major newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, were electronically stored and available for online research. In a previous perusal of those resources, Mama had turned up the name "Spencer Grant" only related to the killing of the two carjackers in Los Angeles a few years ago. But she might have more luck with the mother's name.
        If Jennifer Corrine Porth had died in a colorful fashion-or if she'd had even a middle-level reputation in business, government, or the artsher death would have made a few major newspapers. And if Mama located any stories about her or any long obituaries, a valuable reference to Jennifer's only surviving child might be buried in them.
        Roy stubbornly clung to positive thinking. He was confident that Mama would find a reference to Jennifer and break the case wide open.
        The woman. The boy. The barn in the background. The man in the shadows.
        He didn't have to take the photographs out of the envelope in which he was keeping them to recall those images with total clarity.
        The pictures teased his memory, for he knew that he'd seen the people in them before.
        A long time ago. in some compelling context.
        Sunday night, Eve helped to keep Roy's spirits high and his thoughts on a positive track. Aware that she was adored and that Roy's adoration gave her total power over him, she worked herself into a frenzy that exceeded anything he had seen before.
        For part of their unforgettable third encounter, he sat on the closed lid of the toilet, watching, while she proved that a shower stall could be as conducive to erotic games as any fur-draped, satin-sheeted, or rubbercovered bed.
        He was astounded that anyone would have thought to invent and manufacture many of the water toys in her collection. Those devices were cleverly designed, intriguingly flexible, glistening with such lifelike need, convincingly biological in their battery- or hand-powered throbbing, mysterious and thrilling in their serpentine-knobby-dimpled-rubbery complexity. Roy was able to identify with them as if they were extensions of the body-part human, part machine-that he sometimes inhabited in dreams. When Eve handled those toys, Roy felt as though her perfect hands were fondling portions of his own anatomy by remote control. in the blurring steam, the hot water, and the lather of scented soap, Eve seemed to be ninety percent perfect rather than just sixty percent.
        She was as unreal as an idealized woman in a painting.
        Nothing this side of death could have been more fulfilling for Roy than watching Eve methodically stimulate one exquisite anatomical feature at a time, in each case with a device that seemed to be the amputated but functioning organ of a superlover from the future. Roy was able to focus his observations so tightly that Eve herself ceased to exist for him, and each sensuous encounter in the large shower stall-with bench and grab barswas between one perfect body part and its fleshless analogue: erotic geometry, prurient physics, a study in the fluid dynamics of insatiable lust. The experience was untainted by personality or by any other human trait or association. Roy was transported into extreme realms of voyeuristic pleasure so intense that he almost screamed with the pain of his joy.
        Spencer woke when the sun was above the eastern mountains. The light