Your Heart Belongs to Me

gambler standing up from a baccarat table after being busted to bankruptcy.
    The high Mojave lay in the grip of a chill. Down from the bald faces of the mountains, down from the abandoned iron and lead mines long forgotten, off the broken slopes of pyrite canyons and feldspar ravines, across desiccated desert flats, through the bright barrens of the casinos came a damp wind, not yet strong enough to whip clouds of dust off sere and empty lots or to shake nesting rats out of the lush crowns of phoenix palms, but sure to swell stronger as the day waned.
    At the private-plane terminal, George Zane waited with a twelve-cylinder black Mercedes sedan. The man looked even more powerful than the muscle car.
    As he opened the rear door for Ryan, he said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Perry.”
    “Good to see you again, George. Got some bad weather coming.”
    “Whether we need it or not,” the big man replied.
    In the car, as they turned onto the airport-exit road, Ryan said, “Do you know if Barghest is going to be out tonight? Will we be able to get into his place?”
    “We’re headed straight there,” Zane said. “Turns out he drove to Reno for some kook conference, won’t be back until Wednesday.”
    “Kook conference?”
    “That’s what I call it. Bunch of our best and brightest getting together to talk about the benefits of reducing human population to five hundred million.”
    “What’s that—six billion people gone? How do they figure to make that happen?”
    “Oh,” Zane said, “from what I read, they’ve got a slew of ways figured out to get the job done. Their problem is selling the program to the rest of us.”
    At an intersection, a few sheets of a newspaper were airborne on the breeze, billowing to full spreads, gliding slowly in a wide spiral, their flight as ponderous as that of albatrosses circling in search of doomed ships.
    “Shouldn’t we wait a couple hours, until after dark?” Ryan wondered.
    “Always looks less suspicious to go in during daylight if you can,” Zane said. “Straight on and bold is better.”
    The neighborhood appeared even more conventional in daylight than it had been at night: simple ranch houses, gliders and swings on the porches, well-kept yards, basketball hoops above garage doors, an American flag here and there.
    Dr. Death’s house looked as ordinary as any residence on the street—which made Ryan wonder what might be in some of the other houses.
    As Zane swung the Mercedes into the driveway, the garage door rose. He drove inside, where earlier he had dropped off Cathy Sienna and where now she stood at the connecting door to the house.
    As the garage door rolled down, she greeted Ryan with a professional smile and a handshake. He had forgotten how direct her stare was: granite-gray eyes so steady that she seemed to challenge the world to show her anything that could make her flinch.
    She said, “I didn’t realize you enjoyed yourself so much the last time.”
    “It wasn’t as much fun as Disneyland, but it was memorable.”
    “This Barghest,” George Zane said, “gives crazy a bad name.”
    In the kitchen, Ryan explained that he wanted them to look for places in which Dr. Death might have taken special pains to hide his files of assisted suicides. Trapdoors under carpets, false backs in cabinets, that sort of thing.
    Meanwhile, he would be once more reviewing the ring binders full of photographs of dead faces.
    Judging by the portion of the house that Ryan passed through, the connoisseur had not added to his macabre collection; it was a relief to discover the home office still contained no cadaver art.
    Evidently, even Barghest needed a refuge where dead eyes were not fixed upon him.
    A third ring binder stood on the bookshelf beside the two that had been there sixteen months earlier. Ryan took it down first and stood paging quickly through it, half expecting to be startled by a familiar face.
    Of the eleven recent photographs in the new album, the oldest appeared to be of a man in his seventies. The youngest showed a fair-haired boy with delicate features, his blue eyes taped open, no older than seven or eight.
    A windowpane rattled softly and rising wind soughed in the eaves. Something fluttered in the attic, perhaps a roosting bird.
    Eleven assisted deaths in sixteen months. This ferrier had poled across the Styx with some regularity.
    Ryan returned the album to the bookshelf, retrieved the original two ring binders, and carried them to the