Dark Rivers of the Heart

Penelope might be there for hours or even days before they were found.
        They were good people and did not deserve the indignity of being discovered stiff, gray, and reeking of decomposition.
        He carried his galoshes and shoes to the front door, where he quickly put them on again. He remembered to pick up the lock-release gun from the foyer floor.
        He walked through the rain to his car and drove away from there.
        According to his watch, the time was twenty minutes past ten.
        Although it was three hours later on the East Coast, Roy was sure that his contact in Virginia would be waiting.
        At the first red traffic light, he popped open the attache case on the passenger seat. He plugged in the computer, which was still married to the cellular phone; he didn't separate the devices because he needed both.
        With a few quick keystrokes, he set up the cellular unit to respond to preprogrammed vocal instructions and to function as a speakerphone, which freed both his hands for driving.
        As the traffic light turned green, he crossed the intersection and made the long-distance call by saying, "Please connect," and then reciting the number in Virginia.
        After the second ring, the familiar voice of Thomas Summerton came down the line, recognizable by a single word, as smooth and as southern as pecan butter. "Hello?"
        Roy said, "May I speak to Jerry, please?"
        "Sorry, wrong number." Summerton hung up.
        Roy terminated the resultant dial tone by saying: "Please disconnect now."
        In ten minutes, Summerton would call back from a secure phone, and they could speak freely without fear of being recorded.
        Roy drove past the glitzy shops on Rodeo Drive to Santa Monica Boulevard, and then west into residential streets. Large, expensive houses stood among huge trees, palaces of privilege that he found offensive.
        When the phone rang, he didn't reach for the keypad but said, "Please accept call."
        The connection was made with an audible click.
        "Please scramble now," Roy said.
        The computer beeped to indicate that everything he said would be rendered unintelligible to anyone between him and Summerton. As it was transmitted, their speech would be broken into small pieces of sound and rearranged by a randomlike control factor. Both phones were synchronized with the same control factor, so the meaningless streams of transmitted sound would be reassembled into intelligible speech when received.
        "I've seen the early report on Santa Monica," Summerton said.
        "According to neighbors, she was there this morning. But she must've skipped by the time we set up surveillance this afternoon."
        "What tipped her oflp.
        "I swear she has a sixth sense about us." Roy turned west on Sunset Boulevard, joining the heavy flow of traffic that gilded the wet pavement with headlight beams. "You heard about the man who showed up?"
        "And got away."
        "We weren't sloppy."
        "So he was just lucky?"
        "No. Worse than that. He knew what he was doing."
        "You saying he's somebody with a history?"
        "Yeah."
        "Local, state, or federal history?"
        "He took out a team member, neat as you please."
        "So he's had a few lessons beyond the local level."
        Roy turned right off Sunset Boulevard onto a less traveled street, where mansions were hidden behind walls, high hedges, and wind-tossed trees.
        "If we're able to chase him down, what's our priority with him?"
        Summerton considered for a moment before he spoke. "Find out who he is, who he's working for."
        "Then detain him?"
        "No. Too much is at stake. Make him disappear."
        The serpentine streets wound through the wooded hills, among secluded estates, overhung by dripping branches, through blind turn after blind turn.
        Roy said, "Does this change our priority with the woman?"
        "No. Whack her on sight. Anything else happening at your end?"
        Roy thought of Mr. and Mrs. Bettonfield, but he didn't mention them.
        The extreme kindness he had extended to them had nothing to do with his job, and Summerton would not understand.
        Instead, Roy said, "She left something for us."
        Summerton said nothing, perhaps because he intuited what the woman had left.
        Roy said, "A photo of a cockroach, nailed to the