Dark Rivers of the Heart

been distant rather than nearby, and that he might have heard nothing more than a car door slamming shut, out on the street or in a neighbor's driveway.
        He switched on the flashlight and continued his search in the bathroom.
        A bath towel, a hand towel, and a washcloth hung on the rack. A half-used bar of Ivory lay in the plastic soap dish, but the medicine cabinet was empty.
        To the right of the bathroom was a small bedroom, as unfurnished as the rest of the house. 'The closet was empty.
        'The second bedroom, to the left of the bath, was larger than the first, and it was obviously where she had slept. An inflated air mattress lay on the floor. Atop the mattress were a tangle of sheets, a single wool blanket, and a pillow. The bifold closet doors stood open, revealing wire hangers dangling from an un ainted wooden ole.
        Although the rest of the bungalow was unadorned by artwork or decoration, something was fixed to the center of the longest wall in that bedroom. Spencer approached it, directed the light at it, and saw a full-color, close-up photograph of a cockroach. It seemed to be a page from a book, perhaps an entomology text, because the caption under the photograph was in dry academic English. In close-up, the roach was about six inches long. It had been fixed to the wall with a single large nail that had been driven through the center of the beetle's carapace. On the floor, directly below the photograph, lay the hammer with which the spike had been pounded into the plaster.
        The photograph had not been decoration. Surely, no one would hang a picture of a cockroach with the intention of beautifying a bedroom.
        Furthermore, the use of a nail-rather than pushpins or staples or Scotch tape-implied that the person wielding the hammer had done so in considerable anger.
        Clearly, the roach was meant to be a symbol for something else.
        Spencer wondered uneasily if Valerie had nailed it there. That seemed unlikely. The woman with whom he'd talked the previous evening at The Red Door had seemed uncommonly gentle, kind, and all but incapable of serious anger.
        If not Valerie-who?
        As Spencer moved the flashlight beam across the glossy paper, the roach's carapace glistened as if wet. The shadows of his fingers, which half blocked the lens, created the illusion that the beetle's spindly legs and antennae jittered briefly.
        Sometimes, serial killers left behind signatures at the scenes of their crimes to identify their work. In Spencer's experience, that could be anything from a specific playing card, to a Satanic symbol carved in some part of the victim's anatomy, to a single word or a line of poetry scrawled in blood upon a wall. The nailed photo had the feeling of such a signature, although it was stranger than anything he had seen or about which he had read in the hundreds of case studies with which he was familiar.
        A faint nausea rippled through him. He had encountered no signs of violence in the house, but he had not yet looked in the attached singlecar garage. Perhaps he would find Valerie on that cold slab of concrete, as he had seen her earlier in his mind's eye: lying with one side of her face pressed to the floor, unblinking eyes open wide, a scrollwork of blood obscuring some of her features.
        He knew that he was jumping to conclusions. These days, the average American routinely lived in anticipation of sudden, mindless violence, but Spencer was more sensitized to the dark possibilities of modern life than sunrises and sunsets. in many ways, and his tendency now was to expect savagery as surely as As he turned away from the photograph of the roach, wondering if he dared to investigate the garage, the bedroom window shattered inward, and a small black object hurtled through the draperies. At a glimpse, tumbling and airborne, it resembled a grenade.
        Reflexively, he switched off the flashlight even as broken glass was still falling. In the gloom, the grenade thumped softly against the carpet.
        Before Spencer could turn away, he was hit by the explosion. No flash of light accompanied it, only ear-shattering sound-and hard shrapnel snapping into him from his shins to his forehead. He cried out. Fell.
        Twisted. Writhed. Pain in his legs, hands, face. His torso was protected by his denim jacket. But his hands, God, his hands. He wrung his burning hands. Hot pain. Pure torment. How