Dark Rivers of the Heart

there just about now."
        For sixteen years, Michael Ackblom-ala "Spencer Grant"-had been denying the deep desire to return to that place, repressing the need, resisting the powerful magnet of the past. Nevertheless, either consciously or unconsciously, he had always known that he must pay a visit to those old haunts sooner or later. Otherwise, he would have sold the property to be rid of that tangible reminder of a time he wanted to forget, just as he had sloughed off his old name for a new one. He retained ownership for the same reason that he'd never sought surgery to have his facial scar minimized. He's punishing himself with the scar, Dr. Nero Mondello had said, in his white-on-white office in Beverly Hills.
        Reminding himself of something he would like to forget but feels obligated to remember As long as Grant had lived in California and had followed a pressure-free daily routine, perhaps he could have indefinitely resisted the call of that killing ground in Colorado. But now he was running for his life and under tremendous pressure, and he had come near enough to his old home to ensure that the siren song of the past would be irresistible. Roy was betting everything that the son of the serial killer would return to the marrow of the nightmare, from which all the blood had sprung.
        Spencer Grant had unfinished business at the ranch outside Vail.
        And only two people in the world knew what it was.
        Beyond the heavily tinted windows of the speeding limousine, in the rapidly dwindling winter afternoon, the modern city of Denver appeared to be smoky and as vaguely defined at the edges as piles of ancient ruins entwined with ivy and shrouded with moss.
        West of Grand Junction, inside the Colorado National Monument, the JetRanger landed in an eroded basin between one parenthesis of red rock formations and another of low hills mantled with junipers and pinyon pines. A skin of dry snow, less than half an inch thick, was raved into crystalline clouds by the downdraft.
        A hundred feet away, a green-black screen of trees served as backdrop to the bright silhouette of a white Ford Bronco. A man in a green ski suit stood at the open tailgate, watching the helicopter.
        Spencer stayed with the crew while Ellie went outside to have a word with the man at the truck. With the JetRanger engine off and the rotor blades dead, the rock- and tree-rimmed basin was as silent as a deserted cathedral. She could hear nothing but the squeak and crunch of her own footsteps on the snow-filmed, frozen earth.
        As she drew close to the Bronco, she saw a tripod with a camera on it.
        Related gear was spread across the lowered tailgate.
        The photographer, bearded and furious, was spouting steam from his nostrils as if about to explode. "You ruined my shot. That pristine swath of snow curving up to that thrusting, fiery rock. Such contrast, such drama. And now ruined."
        She glanced back at the rock formations beyond the helicopter.
        They were still fiery, a luminous stained-glass red in the beams of the westering sun, and they were still thrusting. But he was right about the snow: It wasn't pristine any longer.
        "Sorry."
        "Sorry doesn't cut it," he said sharply.
        She studied the snow in the vicinity of the Bronco. As far as she could tell, his were the only footprints in it. He was alone.
        "What the hell are you doing out here anyway?" the photographer demanded. "There are sound restrictions here, nothing as noisy as that allowed. This is a wildlife preserve."
        "Then cooperate and preserve your own," she said, drawing the S.I.G 9MM from under her leather jacket.
        In the JetRanger again, while Ellie held the pistol and the Micro Uzi, Spencer cut strips out of the upholstery. He used those lengths of leather to bind the wrists of each of the three men to the arms of the passenger seats in which he'd made them sit.
        "I won't gag you," he told them. "Nobody's likely to hear you shouting anyway! "We'll freeze to death," the pilot fretted.
        "You'll work your arms loose in half an hour at most. Another half an hour or forty-five minutes to walk out to the highway we crossed over when we flew in. Not nearly enough time to freeze."
        "Just to be safe," Ellie assured them, "as soon as we get to a town, we'll call the police and tell them where you are."
        Twilight had arrived.