Dark Rivers of the Heart

earphones were of such high quality that he could hear no engine or rotor noise, although he could feel the separate vibrations of both through his seat.
        Gary Duvall-the agent in northern California who had been assigned to look into the matter of Ethel and George Porth-was calling. But not from California. He was now in Denver, Colorado.
        The assumption had been made that the Porths had already been living in San Francisco when their daughter had died and when their grandson had first come to live with them. That assumption had turned out to be false.
        Duvall had finally located one of the Porths' former neighbors in San Francisco, who had remembered that Ethel and George had moved there from Denver. By then their daughter had been dead a long time, and their grandson, Spencer, was sixteen.
        "A long time?" Roy said doubtfully. "But I thought the boy lost his mother when he was fourteen, in the same car accident where he got his "No. Not' just two years. Not a car accident."
        Duvall had unearthed a secret, and he was clearly one of those people who relished being in possession of secrets. The childish I-know-something-that-you-don't-know tone of his voice indicated that he would parcel out his treasured information in order to savor each little revelation.
        Sighing, Roy leaned back in his seat. "Tell me."
        "I flew to Denver," Duvall said, "to see if maybe the Porths had sold a house here the same year they bought one in San Francisco. They had.
        So I tried to find some Denver neighbors who remembered them. No problem. I found several. People don't move as often here as in California. And they recalled the Porths and the boy because it was such sensational stuff, what happened to them."
        Sighing again, Roy opened the manila envelope in which he was still carrying some of the photographs that he had found in the shoe box in Spencer Grant's Malibu cabin.
        "The mother, Jennifer, she died when the boy was eight," Duvall said.
        "And it wasn't in any accident."
        Roy slid the four photos out of the envelope. The topmost was the snapshot taken when the woman was perhaps twenty. She was wearing a simple summer dress, dappled in sun and shadow, standing by a tree that was dripping clusters of white flowers.
        "Jenny was a horsewoman," Duvall said, and Roy remembered the other pictures with horses. "Rode them, bred them. The night she died, she went to a meeting of the county breeder's association."
        "This was in Denver, somewhere around Denver?"
        "No, that's where her parents lived. Jenny's home was in Vail, on a small ranch just outside Vail, Colorado. She showed up at that meeting of the breeder's association, but she never came home again."
        The second photograph was of Jennifer and her son at the picnic table.
        She was hugging the boy. His baseball cap was askew.
        Duvall said, "Her car was found abandoned. There was a manhunt for her.
        But she wasn't anywhere near home. A week later, someone finally discovered her body in a ditch, eighty miles from Vail."
        As when he'd sat at the kitchen table in the Malibu cabin on Friday morning and had sorted through the photographs for the first time, Roy was overcome by a haunting sense that the woman's face was familiar.
        Every word that Duvall spoke brought Roy closer to the enlightenment that had eluded him three mornings ago.
        Duvall's voice now came through the headphones with a strange, seductive softness: "She was found naked. Tortured, molested. Back then, it was the most savage murder anyone had ever seen. Even these days, when we've seen it all the details would give you nightmares."
        The third snapshot showed jennifer and the boy at poolside. She held one hand behind her son's head, making horns with two fingers.
        The barn loomed in the background.
        "Every indication was… she'd fallen victim to some transient," said Duvall, pouring out the details in ever smaller drops as his flask of secrets slowly emptied. "A sociopath. Some guy with a car but no permanent address, roaming the interstate highways. It was a relatively new syndrome then, twenty-two years ago, but police had started to see it often enough to recognize it: the footloose serial killer, no ties to family or community, a shark out of his school."
        The woman. The boy. The barn in the background.
        "The