Dark Rivers of the Heart

right.
        Still disappointing. Although changes had occurred, their effect was imperceptible.
        Roy was unable to see how the man's face was any different from what it had been before the adjustment.
        For the next several hours, the image on the screen would ripple every six to ten seconds. The cumulative effect could be appreciated only by checking it at widely spaced intervals.
        Roy backed out of the driveway, leaving the computer plugged in and the VDT angled toward him.
        For a while he chased his headlights up and down hills, around blind turns, searching for a way out of the folded darkness, where the tree-filtered lights of cloistered mansions hinted at mysterious lives of wealth and power beyond his understanding.
        From time to time, he glanced at the computer screen. The rippling face. Half averted. Shadowy and strange.
        When at last he found Sunset Boulevard again and then the lower streets of Westwood, not far from his hotel, he was relieved to be back among people who were more like himself than those who lived in the monied hills.
        In the lower lands, the citizens knew suffering and uncertainty; they were people whose lives he could affect for the better, people to whom he could bring a measure of justice and mercy-one way or another.
        The face on the computer screen was still that of a phantotil, amorphous and possibly malignant. 'The face of chaos.
        The stranger was a man who, like the fugitive woman, stood in the way of order, stability, and justice. He might be evil or merely troubled and confused. In the end, it didn't matter which.
        "I'll give you peace," Roy Miro promised, glancing at the slowly mutating face on the video display terminal. "I'll find you and give you peace."
        While HOOVES OF RAIN beat across the roof, while the troll-deep voice of the wind grumbled at the windows, and while the dog lay curled and dozing on the adjacent chair, Spencer used his computer expertise to try to build a file on Valerie Keene.
        According to the records of the Department of Motor Vehicles, the driver's license for which she'd applied had been her first, not a renewal, and to get it, she had supplied a Social Security card as proof of identity.
        The DMV had verified that her name and number were indeed paired in the Social Security Administration's files.
        That gave Spencer four indices with which to locate her in other data bases where she was likely to appear: name, date of birth, driver's license number, and Social Security number. Learning more about her should be a snap.
        Last year, with much patience and cunning, he'd made a game of getting into all the major nationwide credit-reporting agencies-like TRW which were among the most secure of all systems. Now, he wormed into the largest of those apples again, seeking Valerie Ann Keene.
        Their files included forty-two women by that name, fifty-nine when the surname was spelled either "Keene" or "Keane," and sixty-four when a third spelling-"Keen"-was added. Spencer entered her Social Security number, expecting to winnow away sixty-three of the sixty-four, but none had the same number as that in the DMV records.
        Frowning at the screen, he entered Valerie's birthday and asked the system to locate her with that. One of the sixty-four Valeries was born on the same day of the same month as the woman whom he was hunting-but twenty years earlier.
        With the dog snoring beside him, he entered the driver's license number and waited while the system cross-checked the Valeries. Of those who were licensed drivers, five were in California, but none had a number that matched hers. Another dead end.
        Convinced that mistakes must have been made in the data entries, Spencer examined the file for each of the five California Valeries, looking for a driver's license or date of birth that was one number different from the information he had gotten out of the DMV He was sure he would discover that a data-entry clerk had typed a six when a nine was required or had transposed two numbers.
        Nothing. No mistakes. And judging by the information in each file, none of those women could possibly be the right Valerie.
        Incredibly, the Valerie Ann Keene who had recently worked at The Red Door was absent from credit-agency files, utterly without a credit history. That was possible only if she had never purchased