Dark Rivers of the Heart

knowledge that Ackblom would fully comprehend him even while Rink and Fordyce would think he was engaged only in Machiavellian games.
        Roy did not go so far as to reveal his personal commitment to compassionate treatment of the sadder cases that he met in his many travels.
        Stories like those about the Bettonfields in Beverly Hills, Chester and Guinevere in Burbank, and the paraplegic and his wife outside the restaurant in Vegas might strike even Rink and Fordyce as too specific in detail to be impromptu fabrications invented to win the artist's confidence.
        "The world would be an infinitely better place," Roy opined, restricting his observations to safely general concepts, "if the breeding stock of humanity was thinned out. Eliminate the most imperfect specimens first.
        Always working up from the bottom. Until those permitted to survive are the people who most closely meet the standards for the ideal citizens needed to build a gender and more enlightened society.
        Don't you agree?"
        "The process would certainly be fascinating," Ackblom replied.
        Roy took the comment to be approving. "Yes, wouldn't it?"
        "Always supposing that one was on the committee of eliminators," the artist said, "and not among those to be judged."
        "Well, of course, that's a given."
        Ackblom favored him with a smile. "Then what fun."
        They were driving over the mountains on Interstate 70, rather than flying to Vail. The trip would require less than two hours by car.
        Returning across Denver from the prison to Stapleton, waiting for flight clearance, and making the journey by air would actually have taken longer.
        Besides, the limousine was more intimate and quieter than the jet.
        Roy was able to spend more quality time with the artist than he would have been able to enjoy in the Lear.
        Gradually, mile by mile, Roy Miro came to understand why Steven Ackblom affected him as powerfully as Eve had affected him. Although the artist was a handsome man, nothing about his physical appearance could qualify as a perfect feature. Yet in some way, he was perfect.
        Roy sensed it. A radiance. A subtle harmony. Soothing vibrations.
        In some aspect of his being, Ackblom was without the slightest flaw.
        For the time being, the artist's perfect quality or virtue remained tantalizingly mysterious, but Roy was confident of discovering it by the time they arrived at the ranch outside Vail.
        The limousine cruised into ever higher mountains, through vast primeval forests encrusted with snow, upward into silvery moonlight-all of which the tinted windows reduced to a smoky blur. The tires hummed.
        While Spencer drove the stolen black pickup east on Interstate 70 out of Grand Junction, Ellie slumped in her seat and worked feverishly on the laptop, which she had plugged into the cigarette lighter. The computer hat the had filched from the motel. Periodically she consulted a printout of the parcel map and other nformation that she had obtained about the ranch.
        "What're you doing?" he asked again.
        "Calculations."
        "What calculations?"
        "Ssshhhhh. Rocky's sleeping on the backseat."
        From her duffel bag, she had produced diskettes of software which she'd installed in the machine. Evidently they were programs of her own design, adapted to his laptop while he had lingered in delirium for more than two days in the Mojave. When he had asked her why she had backed up her own computer-now gone with the Rover-with his quite different system, she had said, "Former Girl Scout. Remember? We always like to be prepared."
        He had no idea what her software allowed her to do. Across the screen flickered formulas and graphs. Holographic globes of the earth revolved at her command, and from them she extracted areas for enlargement and closer examination.
        Vail was only three hours away. Spencer wished that they could use the time to talk, to discover more about each other. Three hours was such a short time-especially if it proved to be the last three hours they ever had together.
        HEN HE RETURNED to his brother's house from his walk through the hilly streets of Westwood, Harris Descoteaux did not mention the encounter with the tall man in the blue Toyota. For one thing, it seemed half like a dream. Improbable. Besides, he hadn't been able to make up his mind whether