Intensity

into the administration's data files and had learned to manipulate them. The second divider was labeled U.S. DEPT OF STATE (PASSPORT AGENCY), and judging by the following notes, Vess was engaged in an incomplete experiment to determine if, by a Byzantine route, he might be able to enter and control the Passport Agency's computerized records without being detected.
        Part of what he was doing, evidently, was preparing for the day when he slipped up in his "homicidal adventuring" and required new identities.
        Chyna didn't believe, however, that Vess's only projects were the altering of his public records and the obtaining of fake ID. She was troubled by the feeling that this room contained information about Vess that could be of vital importance to her own survival if only she knew where to look for it.
        She put down the notebook and swiveled in the chair to face the second computer. Under one end of this table stood a two-drawer file cabinet. She opened the top drawer and saw Pendaflex hanging files with blue tags; each tag featured a person's name, with the surname first.
        Each folder contained a two-sheet dossier on a different law enforcement officer, and after a couple of minutes of investigation, Chyna decided that they were deputies with the sheriffs department in the very county in which Vess's house was located. These dossiers provided all vital statistics on the officers plus information about their families and their personal lives. A Xerox of each deputy's official ID photo was also attached.
        Did the freak see some advantage in collecting information on all the local cops as insurance against the day when he might find himself in a standoff with them? This effort seemed excessive even for one as meticulous as Edgler Vess; on the other hand, excess was his philosophy.
        The lower drawer of the filing cabinet contained manila folders as well. The tabs of these also featured names, like those in the upper drawer, but only surnames.
        In the first folder, labeled ALMES, Chyna found a full-page enlargement of the California driver's license of an attractive young blonde named Mia Lorinda Almes. Judging by the exceptional clarity, it wasn't a Xerox blow-up of the original license but a digitized data transmission received on a phone line, through a computer, and reproduced on a high-quality laser printer.
        The only other items in the folder were six Polaroid photographs of Mia Lorinda Almes. The first two were close-ups from different angles. She was beautiful. And terrified.
        This file drawer was Edgler Vess's equivalent of a scrapbook.
        Four more Polaroids of Mia Almes.
         Don't look.
        The next two were full-body shots. The young woman was naked in both. Manacled.
        Chyna closed her eyes. But opened them. She was compelled to look, perhaps because she was determined not to hide from anything any more.
        In the fifth and sixth photos, the young woman was dead, and in the last her beautiful face was gone as if it had been blown off or sheared away.
        The folder and the photographs fluttered from Chyna's hands to the floor, where they clicked against the wood and spun and were still. She hid her face in her hands.
        She wasn't trying to block from her mind the gruesome image on the snapshot. Instead, she was striving to repress a nineteen-year-old memory of a farmhouse outside New Orleans, two visitors with a Styrofoam cooler, a gun taken from the refrigerator, and the cold accuracy with which a woman named Memphis had fired two rounds.
        Memory, however, always has its way.
        The visitors, who'd done business with Zack and Memphis before, had been there to make a drug purchase. The cooler had been filled with packets of hundred-dollar bills. Maybe Zack didn't have the promised shipment, or maybe he and Memphis just needed more money than they could get from a sale; whatever the reason, they had decided to rip off the two men.
        After the gunfire, Chyna had hidden in the barn loft, certain that Memphis would kill them all. When Memphis and Anne found her, she fought them bitterly. But she was only seven years old and no match for them. With owls hooting in alarm and taking flight from the rafters, the women dragged Chyna out of the mice-infested hay and carried her to the house.
        Zack had been gone by then, having taken the bodies elsewhere, and Memphis had cleaned