Dark Rivers of the Heart

traffic and shot him, they would flash real or fake ID from one federal agency or another, and no one would hold them responsible for murder. They would claim that Spencer had been a fugitive, armed and dangerous, a cop killer. No doubt they'd be able to produce a warrant for his arrest, issued after the fact and postdated, and they would clamp his dead hand around a drop gun that could be linked to a series of unsolved homicides.
        He accelerated through a yellow traffic light as it turned red.
        The Chevy stayed close behind him.
        If they didn't kill him on the spot, but wounded him and took him alive, they would probably haul him away to a soundproofed room and use creative methods of interrogation. His protestations of ignorance would not be believed, and they would kill him slowly, by degrees, in a vain attempt to extract secrets that he didn't possess.
        He had no gun of his own. He had only his hands. His training.
        And a dog. "We're in big trouble," he told Rocky.
        In the cozy kitchen of the cabin in the Malibu canyon, Roy Miro sat alone at the dining table, sorting through forty photographs. His men had found them in a shoe box on the top shelf in the bedroom closet.
        Thirty-nine of the pictures were loose, and the fortieth was in an envelope.
        Six of the loose snapshots were of a dog-mixed breed, tan and black, with one floppy ear. It was most likely the pet for which Grant had bought the musical rubber bone from the mail-order firm that still kept his name and address on file two years later.
        Thirty-three of the remaining photographs were of the same woman.
        In some she appeared to be as young as twenty, in others as old as her early thirties. Here: wearing blue jeans and a reindeer sweater, decorating a Christmas tree. And here: in a simple summer dress and white shoes, holding a white purse, smiling at the camera, dappled in sun and shadow, standing by a tree that was dripping clusters of white flowers. In more than a few, she was grooming horses, riding horses, or feeding apples to them.
        Something about her haunted Roy, but he couldn't understand why she so affected him.
        She was an undeniably attractive woman, but she was far from dropdead gorgeous. Though shapely, blond, blue-eyed, she nonetheless lacked any single transcendent feature that would have put her in the pantheon of true beauty.
        Her smile was the only truly striking thing about her. It was the most consistent element of her appearance from one snapshot to the next: warm, open, easy, a charming smile that never seemed to be false, that revealed a gentle heart.
        A smile, however, was not a feature. That was especially true in this woman's case, for her lips weren't particularly luscious, as were Melissa Wicklun's lips. Nothing about the set or width of her mouth, the contours of her philtrum, or the shape of her teeth was even intriguing, let alone electrifying. Her smile was greater than the sum of its parts, like the dazzling reflection of sunlight on the otherwise unremarkable surface of a pond.
        He could find nothing about her that he yearned to possess.
        Yet she haunted him. Though he doubted that he had ever met her, he felt that he ought to know who she was. Somewhere, he had seen her before.
        Staring at her face, at her radiant smile, he sensed a terrible presence hovering over her, just beyond the frame of the photograph. A cold darkness was descending, of which she was unaware.
        The newest of the photographs were at least twenty years old, and many were surely three decades out of the darkroom tray. The colors of even the more recent shots were faded. The older ones held only the faintest suggestions of color, were mostly gray and white, and were slightly yellowed in places.
        Roy turned each photo over, hoping to find a few identifying words on the reverse, but the backs were all blank. Not even a single name or date.
        Two of the pictures showed her with a young boy. Roy was so mystified by his strong response to the woman's face and so fixated on figuring out why she seemed familiar that he did not at first realize that the boy was Spencer Grant. when he made the connection, he put the two snapshots side by side on the table.
        It was Grant in the days before he had sustained his scar.
        In his case, more than with most people, the face of the man reflected