Intensity

around the bed to the nightstand and switched off the pharmacy lamp.
        Being in the dark with dead people didn't frighten her. Only the living were a danger.
        The motor home slowed again and then turned left. Chyna leaned against the tilt of the vehicle to keep her balance.
        They must be on State Highway 29. A right turn would have taken them down the Napa Valley, south into the town of Napa. She wasn't sure what communities lay to the north, other than St. Helena and Calistoga.
        Even between the towns, however, there would be vineyards, farms, houses, and rural businesses. Wherever she got out of the motor home, she should be able to find help within a reasonable distance.
        She sidled blindly to the door and stood with one hand on the knob, waiting for instinct to guide her once more. Much of her life had been lived like a balancing act on a spearpoint fence, and on a particularly difficult night when she was twelve, she had decided that instinct was, in fact, the quiet voice of God. Prayers did receive replies, but you had to listen closely and believe in the answer. At twelve, she wrote in her diary: "God doesn't shout; He whispers, and in the whisper is the way."
        Waiting for the whisper, she thought about the battered body in the closet, which appeared to have been dead for less than a day, and about Laura, still warm on the sagging bed. Sarah, Paul, Laura's brother Jack, Jack's wife, Nina: six people murdered in twenty-four hours. The eater of spiders was not an ordinary homicidal sociopath. In the language of the cops and the criminologists who specialized in searching for and stopping men like this, he was hot , going through a hot phase , burning up with desire, need. But Chyna, who intended to follow her master's in psychology with a doctorate in criminology, even if she had to work six years waiting tables to get there, sensed that this guy was not just hot. He was a singularity, conforming only in part to standard profiles in aberrant psychology, as purely alien as something from the stars, a runaway killing machine, merciless and irresistible. She had no hope of eluding him if she didn't wait for the murmuring voice of instinct.
        She remembered seeing a large rearview mirror when she'd briefly occupied the driver's seat earlier. The vehicle had no rear window, so the mirror was there to provide the driver with a view of the lounge and the dining area behind him. He would be able to see all the way into the end hall that served the bath and bedroom, and if the devil's luck was with him, he would glance up just when Chyna opened the door, stepped out, and was exposed.
        When the moment felt right, Chyna opened the door.
        A small blessing, a good omen: The ceiling light in the hall was out.
        Standing in gloom, she quietly pulled shut the bedroom door.
        The lamp above the dining table was on as before. At the front of the vehicle was the green glow of the instrument panel-and beyond the windshield, the headlights were silver swords.
        After moving forward past the bathroom and out of the welcome shadows, she crouched behind the paneled side of the dining nook. She peered across the crescent booth to the back of the driver's head, about twenty feet away.
        He seemed so close-and, for the first time, vulnerable.
        Nevertheless, Chyna wasn't foolish enough to creep forward and attack him while he was driving. If he heard her coming or glanced at the rearview mirror and spotted her, he could wrench the steering wheel or slam on the brakes, sending her sprawling. Then he might be able to stop the vehicle and get to her before she could reach the rear door-or he might swivel in his chair and shoot her down.
        The entrance through which he had carried Laura was immediately to Chyna's left. She sat on the floor with her feet in the step well, facing this door, concealed from the driver by the dining nook.
        She put the butcher knife aside. When she leaped out, she would probably fall and roll-and she might easily stab herself with the knife if she tried to take it with her.
        She didn't intend to jump until the driver either stopped at an intersection or entered a turn sharp enough to require him to cut his speed dramatically. She couldn't risk breaking a leg or being knocked unconscious in a fall, because then she wouldn't be able to get away from the road and safely into