Dark Rivers of the Heart

confirm his suspicion.
        He left the temple, being careful not to crush the slow black beetle, and turned in the opposite direction from that in which Donner had vanished. He swiftly ascended to higher levels of the backyard, hurried past the side of the enormous house, and got in his car, which was parked in the circular driveway.
        From the manila envelope that Melissa Wicklun had given him, he withdrew one of the pictures of Grant and put it on the seat. But for the terrible scar, that face initially had seemed quite ordinary. Now he knew that it was the face of a monster.
        From the same envelope, he took a printout of the report that he'd requested from Mama the previous night and that he'd read off the computer screen in his hotel a few hours ago. He paged to the false names under which Grant had acquired and paid for utilities.
        Steward Peck Henry Holden James Gable John Humphrey William Clark Wayne Gregory Robert Tracy Roy withdrew a pen from his inside jacket pocket and rearranged first and last names into a new list of his own: Gregory Peck William Holden Clark Gable James Stewart John Wayne That left Roy with four names from the original list: Henry, Humphrey, Robert, and Tracy.
        Tracy, of course, matched the bastard's first name-Spencer. And for a purpose that neither Mama nor Roy had yet discovered, the tricky, scarfaced son of a bitch was probably using another false identity that incorporated the name Cary, which was missing from the first list but was the logical match for his last name-Grant.
        That left Henry, Humphrey, and Robert.
        Henry. No doubt Grant sometimes operated under the name Fonda, perhaps with a first name lifted from Burt Lancaster or Gary Cooper.
        Humphrey. In some circle, somewhere, Grant was known as Mr.
        Bogart-first name courtesy of yet another movie star of yesteryear.
        Robert. Eventually they were certain to find that Grant also employed the surname Mitchum or Montgomery.
        As casually as other men changed shirts, Spencer Grant changed identities.
        They were searching for a phantom.
        Although he couldn't yet prove it, Roy was now convinced that the name Spencer Grant was as phony as all the others. Grant was not the surname that this man had inherited from his father, nor was Spencer the Christian name that his mother had given him. He had named himself after favorite actors who had played old-fashioned heroes.
        His real name was cipher. His real name was mystery, shadow, ghost, smoke.
        Roy picked up the computer-enhanced portrait and studied the scarred face.
        This dark-eyed cipher had Joined the army under the name Spencer Grant, when he was just eighteen. What teenager knew how to establish a false identity, with convincing credentials, and get away with it?
        What had this ematic man been runnin from at even that un a?
        How in the hell was he involved with the woman?
        On the sofa, Rocky lay on his back, all four legs in the air, paws limp, his head in Theda Davidowitzs ample lap, gazing up in rapture at the plump, gray-haired woman. Theda stroked his tummy, scratched under his chin, and called him "sweetums" and "cutie" and "pretty eyes" and "snookums."
        She told him that he was God's own little furry angel, the handsomest canine in all creation, wonderful, marvelous, cuddly, adorable, perfect.
        She fed him thin little slices of ham, and he took each morsel from her fingertips with a delicacy more characteristic of a duchess than of a dog.
        Ensconced in an overstuffed armchair with antimacassars on the back and arms, Spencer sipped from a cup of rich coffee that Theda had improved with a pinch of cinnamon. On the table beside his chair, a china pot held additional coffee. A plate was heaped with homemade chocolatechip cookies. He had politely declined imported English tea biscuits, Italian anisette biscotti, a slice of lemon-coconut cake, a blueberry muffin, gingersnaps, shortbread, and a raisin scone; exhausted by Theda's hospitable perseverance, he had at last agreed to a cookie, only to be preseated with twelve of them, each the size of a saucer.
        Between cooing at the dog and urging Spencer to eat another cookie, Theda revealed that she was seventy-six and that her husband-Berniehad died eleven years ago. She and Bernie had brought two children into the world: Rachel and Robert. Robert-the