Dark Rivers of the Heart

that they were buying any part of his cover story or that they were convinced by his impeccable phony credentials.
        Hard as he tried, he couldn't figure out how to schmooze with Mormon cops. He wondered if they would respond well and open up to him if he told them how very much he liked their tabernacle choir. He didn't actually like or dislike their choir, however, and he had a feeling that they would know he was in just to warm them us. The same was true of the Osmonds, the premier Mormon show-business family.
        He neither liked nor disliked their singing and dancing; they were undeniably talented, but they just weren't to his taste. Marie Osmond had perfect legs, legs that he could have spent hours kissing and stroking, legs against which he wished that he could crush handsful of soft red roses-but he was pretty sure that these Mormons were not the type of cops who would enthusiastically join in on a conversation about that sort of thing.
        He was certain that not all of the cops were Mormons. The equal-opportunity laws ensured a diverse police force. If he could find those who weren't Mormons, he might be able to establish the degree of rapport necessary to grease the wheels of their investigation, one way or another, and get the hell out of there. But the non-Mormons were indistinguishable from the Mormons because they'd adopted Mormon ways, manners, and mannerisms. The non-Mormons-whoever the cunning bastards might be-were all polite, pressed, well groomed, sober, with infuriatingly wellscrubbed teeth that were free of all telltale nicotine stains. One of the officers was a black man named Hargrave, and Roy was positive that he'd found at least one cop to whom the teachings of Brigham Young were no more important than those of Kali, the malevolent form of the Hindu Mother Goddess, but Hargrave turned out to be perhaps the most Mormon of all Mormons who had ever walked the Mormon Way.
        Hargrave had a walletful of pictures of his wife and nine children, including two sons who were currently on religious missions in squalid corners of Brazil and Tonga.
        Eventually the situation spooked Roy as much as it frustrated him.
        He felt as if he were in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
        Before the city and county patrol cars had begun to arrive-all well polished and in excellent repair-Roy had used the secure phone in the disabled helicopter to order two more customized JetRangers out of Las Vegas, but the agency only had one more at that office to send him.
        "Jesus," Ken Hyckman had said, "you're going through choppers like they're Kleenex." Roy would be continuing the pursuit of the woman and Grant with only nine of his twelve men, which was the maximum number that could be packed into the one new craft.
        Although the disabled jetranger wouldn't be repaired and able to take off from behind the Hallmark store for at least thirty-six hours, the new chopper was already out of Vegas and on its way to Cedar City.
        Earthguard was being retargeted to track the stolen aircraft.
        They had suffered a setback, no argument about that, but the situation was by no means an unmitigated disaster. One battle lost-even one more battle lost-didn't mean they would lose the war.
        He wasn't calmed by inhaling the peach vapor of tranquillity and exhaling the bile-green vapor of rage and frustration. He found no comfort in any of the other meditative techniques that for years had worked so reliably. Only one thing kept his counterproductive anger in check: thinking about Eve Jammer in all her glorious sixty-percent perfection.
        Nude. Oiled. Writhing. Blond splendor on black rubber.
        The new helicopter wouldn't reach Cedar City until past noon, but Roy was confident of being able to tough out the Mormons until then.
        Under their watchful eyes, he wandered among them, answered their questions again and again, examined the contents of the Rover, tagged everything in the vehicle for impoundment, and all the while his head was filled with images of Eve pleasuring herself with her perfect hands and with a variety of devices that had been designed by sexually obsessed inventors whose creative genius exceeded that of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein combined.
        As he was standing at a supermarket checkout counter, examining the computer and the file box of twenty software diskettes that had been removed from the back of the