Intensity

imposed. She edged around the kitchen, staying close to the walls and cabinets, feeling her way as best she could while cuffed and holding the loop of chain in one hand. She shuffled her feet more than her shackles required, hoping to shove the broken drinking glass and the fragments of the plate aside rather than step on them.
        When she reached the doorway between the kitchen and the front room, she found the light switches but was reluctant to flip them up. Glancing back and seeing the Doberman at the window again, she wished that she could leave the kitchen dark.
        She needed to search the drawers, however, so she snapped on the overhead lights. At the window, the Doberman twitched, flattened its ears to its skull, immediately pricked them again, found her with its eyes, and fixed her with its gaze.
        Ignoring the Doberman, Chyna bent forward as far as her fetters would allow, hoisting the chair on her back. She strove to reach the carabiner that linked the shorter chain between her leg irons with the longer chain that had encircled the table pedestal and that still wrapped the stretcher bars of the chair. But even free of the table, she was trammeled in such a way that she could not put her fingers on this coupling.
        She retraced her path along the cabinets. She opened one drawer after another and studied the contents.
        When she passed the telephone jack in the wall, she paused to stare at it, frustrated. If Edgler Vess had a life other than that of a "homicidal adventurer," actually held a job and maintained any social life whatsoever as a cover for his true nature, he would have a telephone; the jack wasn't merely a dead plug left by the previous owners of the house. He must have hidden the phone.
        For a psychotic killer, raging out of control on one level, Vess was surprisingly careful and methodical when it came to covering his ass.
        An agent of chaos, leaving behind rubble in the lives of others, he nevertheless kept his own affairs tidy and avoided mistakes.
        She opened a few of the cupboard doors and peered into cabinets, but she found only pots, pans, dishes, and glasses. She soon gave up on the phone when she realized that Vess, having taken the trouble to unplug and conceal it, would have hidden it outside the kitchen and in a place where she was unlikely to find it even if she'd had hours to devote to the search.
        She continued opening drawers. In the fourth, she discovered a compartmentalized plastic tray containing a collection of small culinary tools and gadgets.
        She parked the chair beside the open drawer and sat down.
        Outside, the Doberman was pacing again, paws thumping faster than before, all but running back and forth on the porch, back and forth, and whining louder as well. Chyna couldn't understand why it was still so agitated. She wasn't breaking dishes or overturning furniture any longer. She was quietly looking in drawers, minimizing the clatter of her chains, doing nothing to alarm the dog. It seemed to realize that she was escaping, but that was impossible; it was only an animal; it couldn't understand the complexities of her situation. Only an animal. Yet it raced worriedly from end to end of the porch, jumped to peer in the window again, fixed her with its fierce black eyes, and seemed to be saying, Get away from the drawer, bitch!
        She plucked a wooden-handled corkscrew from the drawer, examined the spiraling point, and discarded it. A bottle opener. No. Potato peeler. Lemon-rind shaver. No. She found an eight-inch-long pair of heavy-duty tweezers, which Vess probably used to extract olives and pickles and similar items from tightly packed jars. The gripping blades of the tweezers proved too large to be inserted into the tight keyholes on her handcuffs, so she discarded them as well.
        Then she located the ideal item: a five-inch-long steel pin, which she believed was called a poultry strut. A dozen were fixed together by a tightly wound rubber band, and she pulled one loose. The pin was rigid, about a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, with a point at the end of the shank and a half-inch-wide eye loop at the top. Smaller struts were made for pinning shut roasting chickens, but this one was for turkeys.
        The thought of succulent roasted turkey brought the smell of it immediately to mind. Chyna's mouth watered, and her stomach growled, and she wished that she'd eaten some of