Dark Rivers of the Heart

drawn on a bedroom wall, with one of those wide-point felt-tip markers.
        "Not well drawn, you understand, more or less just the outline of a cockroach, but you could see what it was meant to be," Theda said.
        "Just a sort of line drawing but ugly all the same. What on earth were those nitwits trying to prove, scrawling on the walls?"
        Spencer was pretty sure that Hannah-Valerie herself had drawn the cockroach-just as she had nailed the textbook photograph of approach to the wall of the bungalow in Santa Monica. He sensed it was meant to taunt and aggravate the men who had come looking for her, though he had no idea what it signified or why she knew that it would anger her pursuers.
        Sitting at her desk in her windowless jurisdiction, Evejammer telephoned the Orations office upstairs on the round floor of the Las Vegas quarters of Carver, Gunmann, Garrote & Hemlock. The morning duty officer was John Cottcole, and Eve alerted him to the situation at Theda Davidowitzs apartment.
        Cottcole was electrified by the news and unable to conceal his excitement. He was shouting orders to people in his office even while he was still on the line with Eve.
        "His. Jammer," Cottcole said, "I'll want a copy of that disc, every word on that disc, you understand?"
        "Sure," she said, but he hung up even as she was replying.
        They thought that Eve didn't know who Hannah Rainey had been before becoming Hannah Rainey, but she knew the whole story. She also knew that there was an enormous opportunity for her in that case, a chance to hasten the growth of her fortune and power, but she hadn't quite yet decided how to exploit it.
        A fat spider scurried across her desk.
        She slammed one hand down, crushing the bug against her palm.
        Driving back to Spencer Grant's cabin in Malibu, Roy Miro opened the Tupperware container. He needed the mood boost that the sight of Guinevere's treasure was sure to give him.
        He was shocked and dismayed to see a bluish-greenish-brownish spot of discoloration spreading from the web between the first and second fingers. He hadn't expected anything like that for hours yet. He was irrationally upset with the dead woman for being so fragile.
        Although he told himself that the spot of corruption was small, that the rest of the hand was still exquisite, that he should focus more on the unchanged and perfect form of it than on the coloration, Roy could not rekindle his previous passion for Guinevere's treasure.
        In fact, though it didn't yet emit a foul odor, it wasn't a treasure any longer: It was just garbage.
        Deeply saddened, he put the lid on the plastic box.
        He drove another couple of miles before pulling off Pacific coast Highway and parking in the lot at the foot of a public pier.
        But for his sedan, the lot was empty.
        Taking the Tupperware container with him, he got out of the car, climbed the steps to the pier, and walked toward the end.
        His footsteps echoed hollowly off the boardwalk. Under those tightly set beams, breakers rolled between the pilings, rumbling and sloshing.
        The pier was deserted. No fishermen. No young lovers leaning against the railing. No tourists. Roy was alone with his corrupted treasure alone with his thoughts.
        At the end of the pier he stood for a moment, gazing at the vast expanse of glimmering water and at the azure heavens that curved down to meet it at the far horizon. The sky would be there tomorrow and a thousand years from tomorrow, and the sea would roll eternally, but all else passed away.
        He strove to avoid negative thoughts. It wasn't easy.
        He opened the Tupperware container and threw the five-fingered garbage into the Pacific. It disappeared into the golden spangles of sunlight that gilded the backs of the low waves.
        He wasn't concerned that his fingerprints might be lifted by laser from the pallid skin of the severed hand. If the fish didn't eat that last bit of Guinevere, the salt water would scrub away evidence of his touch.
        He tossed the Tupperware container and its lid into the sea as well, although he was stricken with a pang of guilt even as the two objects arced toward the waves. He was usually sensitive to the environment, and he never littered.
        He was not concerned about the hand, because it was organic. It would become a part of the ocean, and the