Dark Rivers of the Heart

asked.
        "No. Better if I do. Keeps me focused here and now… instead of too much back then."
        A roadside sign indicated that they were eight miles from the town of Newcastle.
        Spencer stared out the side window at a landscape that seemed barren in spite of the many trees and murky in spite of the sunshine.
        Ellie said, "Then in the street, beyond the trees, a car roared by, really moving. It went under a streetlamp, and I was close enough to see the man in the front passenger seat. Red hunting jacket. The driver, one more in the backseat-three altogether. After they went past, I ran through the trees, toward the street, going to shout for help, for the police, but I stopped before I got there. I knew who'd done it… the agency, Tom. But no proof ":'What about Danny's files?" 'Back in Washington. A set of diskettes hidden in our apartment, another set in a bank safe-deposit box. And I knew Tom must already have both sets, or he wouldn't have been so… bold. If I went to the cops, if I surfaced anywhere, Tom would get me. Sooner or later. It would look like an accident or suicide. So I went back to the house.
        Back through St.
        George's Wood, the gate at the Doyle house, over the iron fence.
        At our house, I almost couldn't force myself through the kitchen… the hall… to Mom in the foyer. Even after all this time, when I try to picture my mother's face, I can't see it without the wound, the blood, the bone structure distorted by the bullets. Those bastards haven't even left me with a clean memory of my mother's face… just that awful, bloody thing."
        For a while she couldn't go on.
        Aware of Ellie's anguish, Rocky mewled softly. He was no longer bobbing and grinning. He huddled in his narrow space, head down, both ears limp. His love of speed was outweighed by his sensitivity to the woman's pain.
        Two miles from Newcastle, Ellie at last continued: "And in the dining room, Danny and Dad were dead, shot repeatedly in the head, not to be sure they were dead… just for the sheer savagery. I had to… to touch the bodies, take the money out of their wallets. I was going to need every dollar I could get. Raided Mom's purse, jewel box.
        Opened the safe in Dad's den, took his coin collection. Jesus, I felt like a thief, worse than a thief… a grave robber. I didn't pack my suitcase, just left with what I was wearing, partly because I started to get spooked that the killers would come back. But also because… it was so silent in that house, just me and the bodies and the snow falling past the windows, so quiet, as if not only Mom and Dad and Danny were dead, but as if the whole world had died, the end of everything, and I was the last one left, alone."
        Newcastle was a repeat of Modena. Small. Isolated. It offered no place to hide from people who could look down on the whole world as if they were gods.
        Ellie said, "I left the house in our Honda, Danny's and mine, but I knew I had to get rid of it in a few hours. When Tom realized I hadn't gone to the cops, the whole agency would be looking for me, and they'd have a description of the car, the plate number."
        He looked at her again. Her eyes were no longer watery. She had repressed her grief with a fierce weight of anger.
        He said, "What do the police think happened in that house, to Danny and your folks? Where do they think you are? Not Summerton's people.
        I mean the real police."
        "I suspect Tom intended to make it look as if a well-organized group of terrorists wasted us as a way of punishing him. Oh, he could've milked that for sympathy! And used the sympathy to weasel more power for himself inside the Department of Justice."
        "But with you gone, they couldn't plant their phony evidence, because you might show up to refute it."
        "Yeah. Later, the media decided that Danny and my folks… well, you know, it was one of those deplorable acts of senseless violence we see so often, blah-blah-blah. Terrible, sick, blah-blah-blah, but only a three-day story. As for me… obviously I'd been taken away, raped and murdered, my body left where it might never be found."
        "That was fourteen months ago?" he asked. "And the agency's still this hot to get you?"
        "I have some significant codes they don't know I have, things Danny and I memorized… a lot of knowledge. I don't have hard proof against them. But I know everything