Dark Rivers of the Heart

to be afraid of what he might one day find crouched and waiting within himself.
        She became aware that she'd let their speed fall. She tramped on the accelerator, and the Rover surged forward.
        Spencer waited.
        Trees crowded close to the highway again. Filleting blades of light flashed across the glass, spattering quick sprays of shadows behind them.
        "My name," she said, "is Eleanor. People used to call me Ellie.
        Ellie Summerton."
        "Not… his daughter?"
        "No. Thank God, no. His daughter-in-law. My maiden name was Golding.
        Eleanor Golding. I was married to Tom's son, only child.
        Danny Summerton. Danny's dead now. Been dead for fourteen months."
        Her voice was pulled between anger and sadness, and often the balance in the contest shifted in the middle of a word, stretching it and distorting it.
        "Some days it seems he's only been gone a week or so, and some days it feels like he's been gone forever. Danny knew too much. And he was going to talk. He was killed to shut him up."
        "Summerton… killed his own son?"
        Her voice became so cold that anger seemed to have won forever against the insistent pull of sadness. "He's even worse than that. He ordered someone else to do it. My mom and dad were killed too… just because they happened to be in the way when the agency men came for Dann " Her voice was colder than ever, and she was whiter than pale.
        During his days as a policeman, Spencer had seen a few faces as white as Ellie's was at that moment-but they had all been faces in one morgue or another.
        " I was there. I escaped," she said. "I was lucky. That's what I've been telling myself ever since. Lucky." … but Michael had no peace, even once he'd gone to Denver to live with his grandparents, the Porths," Gary Duvall said. "Every kid in school knew the name Ackblom. An unusual name. And the father was a famous artist even before he became a famous murderer, killed his wife and forty-one others. Besides, the kid's picture had been in all the papers. Boy hero.
        He was an object of unending curiosity. Everyone stared. And every time it seemed the media would leave him alone, there would be another flareup of interest, and they'd be hounding him again, even though he was just a kid, for God's sake."
        "Journalists," Roy said scornfully. "You know what they're like.
        Cold bastards. Only the story matters. They have no compassion."
        "The kid had been through a similar hell, unwanted notoriety, when he'd been eight years old, after his mother's body was found in that ditch.
        This time it was tearing him apart. The grandparents were retired, could live anywhere, so after almost two years they decided to get Michael out of Colorado altogether. A new city, new state, new start.
        That's what they told neighbors-but they wouldn't tell anyone where they were going.
        They uprooted themselves and left their friends for the sake of the boy.
        They must've figured that was the only way he'd have a chance to make a normal life for himself."
        "New city, new state, new start-and even a new name," Roy said.
        "They legally changed it, didn't they?"
        "Right here in Denver, before they moved away. Given the circumstances, the court record of the change is sealed, of course."
        "Of course."
        "But I've reviewed it. Michael Steven Ackblom became Spencer Grant, no middle name or even initial. An odd choice. It seems to have been a name the boy came up with himself, but I don't know where he got it."
        "From old movies he liked."
        "Huh?"
        "Good work. Thanks, Gary."
        Roy disconnected with the touch of a button, but he didn't take off the headset. He stared at the photograph of Steven Ackblom. The man in the shadows.
        Engines, rotors, vibrated powerful desires, and sympathy for the devil in Roy's bones. He shivered with a not unpleasant chill.
        They were all so beautiful in their pain, and all like angels when they died.
        Here and there in the gloom beneath the trees, where shadows held back the sun through most or all of the day, patches of white snow shone like bone in the carcass of the earth.
        The true desert was behind them. Winter had come to this area, had been driven back by an early thaw, and would no doubt come again before true spring. But now the sky was