The Husband

scar, and then the heavens healed.
    He returned to the car and closed the trunk lid.
    Having gotten the best of two experienced killers, perhaps he should have felt empowered, proud, and fierce. Instead, he had been further humbled.
    To spare himself the stench of blood, he rolled down the windows in all four doors of the Chrysler Windsor.
    The engine started at once: a full-throated song of power. He switched on the headlights.
    He was relieved to see that the fuel gauge indicated the tank was nearly three-quarters full. He didn't want to stop at any public place, not even at a self-service station.
    He had turned the car around and driven four miles on the dirt road when, topping a rise, he came upon a sight that caused him to brake to a stop.
    To the south, in a shallow bowl of land, lay a lake of mercury with concentric rings of sparkling diamonds floating on it, moving slowly to the currents of a lazy whirlpool, as majestic as a spiral galaxy.
    For a moment the scene was so unreal that he thought it must be a hallucination or a vision. Then he understood that it was a field of grass, perhaps squirreltail with its plumelike flower spikes and silky awns.
    The moonlight silvered the spikes and struck sparkles from the high sheen of the awns. A wind eddy, the laziest of spiral breezes, pulsed around the bowl of land with such grace and consistent timing that, were there music for this dance of grass, it would be a waltz.
    In mere grass was hidden meaning, but the stink of blood brought him back from the mystic to the mundane.
    He continued to the end of the dirt road and turned right because he recalled that they had turned left on the way here. The paved roads were well marked, and he returned not to the Campbell estate—which he hoped he would not see again—but to the interstate.
    Post-midnight traffic was light. He drove north, never faster than five miles per hour above the speed limit, an excess that the law rarely punished.
    The Chrysler Windsor was a beautiful machine. Seldom do dead men return to haunt the living in such style.

Chapter 36

     
    Mitch arrived in the city of Orange at 2:20 a.m., and parked on a street that was a block away from the one on which his house stood.
    He rolled up the four windows and locked the Chrysler.
    With his shirttail pulled out to conceal it, he carried a pistol under his belt. The weapon had belonged to the smooth-faced gunman who, having said Die, failed to find the strength to flex his trigger finger one last time. It contained eight cartridges; Mitch hoped that he would not need any of them.
    He was parked under an old jacaranda in full flower, and when he moved into the light from the street lamp, he saw that he walked on a carpet of purple petals.
    Warily, he approached his property along the alleyway behind it.
    A rattling induced him to switch on his flashlight. From between two trash cans that had been set out for morning collection, a city-adapted possum, like a large pale-faced rat, twitched its pink nose.
    Mitch clicked off the light and proceeded to his garage. The gate at the corner of the building was never locked. He passed through it into the backyard.
    His house keys, with his wallet and other personal items, had been confiscated in Campbell's library.
    He kept a spare key in a small key safe that was padlocked to a ringbolt low on the garage wall, concealed behind a row of azaleas.
    Risking the flashlight but hooding it with his fingers, Mitch parted the azaleas. He dialed in the combination, disengaged the lock, plucked the key from the safe, and switched off the light.
    Making not a sound, he let himself into the garage, which was keyed to match the house.
    The moon had traveled westward; and trees let little of that light through the windows. He stood in the dark, listening.
    Either the silence convinced him that he was alone or the darkness reminded him too much of the car trunk that he had twice escaped, and he switched on the garage lights.
    His truck was where he had left it. The Honda's space was empty.
    He climbed the stairs to the loft. The boxes were still stacked to disguise the gap in the railing.
    At the front of the loft, he discovered that the recorder and electronic surveillance gear were gone. One of the kidnappers must have come to collect the equipment.
    He wondered what they thought had happened to John Knox. He worried that Knox's disappearance had already had consequences for Holly.
    When a fit of tremors shook him, he forced his