Dark Rivers of the Heart

anything on time payments, had never possessed a credit card of any kind, had never opened a checking or savings account, and had never been the subject of a background check by an employer or landlord.
        To be twenty-nine years old without acquiring a credit history in modern America, she would have to have been a Gypsy or a jobless vagrant most of her life, at least since she'd been a teenager.
        Manifestly she had not been any such thing.
        Okay. Think. The raid on her bungalow meant one kind of police agency or another was after her. So she must be a wanted felon with a criminal record.
        Spencer returned along electronic freeways to the Los Angeles Police Department computer, through which he searched city, county, and state court records to see if anyone by the name of Valerie Ann Keene had ever been convicted of a crime or had an outstanding arrest warrant in those jurisdictions.
        The city system flashed NEGATI-VT on the video screen.
        NO FILE, reported the county.
        NOT FOUND, said the state.
        Nothing, nada, zero, zip.
        Using the LAPD's electronic information-sharing arrangement with the FBI, he accessed the Washington-based justice Department files of people convicted of federal offenses. She wasn't included in those, either.
        In addition to its famous ten-most-wanted list, the FBI was, at any given time, seeking hundreds of other people related to criminal investigations-either suspects or potential witnesses. Spencer inquired if her name appeared on any of those lists, but it did not.
        She was a woman without a past.
        Yet something that she'd done had made her a wanted woman.
        Desperately wanted.
        Spencer did not get to bed until ten minutes past one o'clock in the mornin.
        Although he was exhausted, and although the rhythm of the rain should have served as a sedative, he couldn't sleep. He lay on his back, staring alternately at the shadowy ceiling and at the thrashing foliage of the trees beyond the window, listening to the meaningless monologue of the blustery wind.
        At first he could think of nothing but the woman. The look of her.
        Those eyes. That voice. That smile. The mystery.
        In time, however, his thoughts drifted to the past, as they did too often, too easily. For him, reminiscence was a highway with one destination: that certain summer night when he was fourteen, when a dark world became darker, when everything he knew was proved false, when hope died and a dread of destiny became his constant companion, when he awakened to the cry of a persistent owl whose single inquiry thereafter became the central question of his own life.
        Rocky, who was usually so well attuned to his master's moods, was still restlessly pacing; he seemed to be unaware that Spencer was sinking into the quiet anguish of stubborn memory and that he needed company. The dog didn't respond to his name when called.
        In the gloom, Rocky padded restlessly back and forth between the open bedroom door (where he stood on the threshold and listened to the storm that butted in the fireplace chimney) and the bedroom window (where he put his forepaws upon the sill and stared out at the rampage of the wind through the eucalyptus grove). Although he neither whined nor grumbled, he had about him an air of anxiety, as if the bad weather had blown an unwanted memory out of his own past, leaving him bedeviled and unable to regain the peace he had known while dozing on the chair in the living room.
        "Here, boy," Spencer said softly. "Come here."
        Unheeding, the dog padded to the door, a shadow among shadows.
        Tuesday evening, Spencer had gone to The Red Door to talk about a night in July, sixteen years past. Instead, he met Valerie Keene and, to his surprise, talked of other things. That distant July, however, still haunted him.
        "Rocky, come here." Spencer patted the mattress.
        A minute or so of further encouragement finally brought the dog onto the bed. Rocky lay with his head on Spencer's chest, shivering at first but quickly soothed by his master's hand. One ear up, one ear down, he was attentive to the story that he'd heard on countless nights like this, when he was the entire audience, and on nights when he accompanied Spencer into barrooms, where drinks were bought for strangers who would listen in an alcoholic haze.
        "I was fourteen,"