Engaged the heavy deadbolt.
  Then she realized her mistake. The front door had been unlocked because the killer had 
gone out that way. If he found it locked now, he would know that Laura wasn't the only 
person alive in the house, and the hunt would begin.
  Her sweaty fingers slipped on the brass thumb-turn, but the bolt snapped open with a 
hard clack.
  Earlier, he must have parked the vehicle near the end of the halfmile-long driveway, 
out toward the county road, and must have walked to the house.
  Now tires crunched through gravel. Air brakes issued a soft whoosh and a softer whine, 
and the motor home came to a full stop in front of the house.
  Remembering the oval rug that had turned under her feet and had nearly sent her 
sprawling, Chyna dropped to her knees. She crawled across the wool, smoothing the rumples 
with her hands. If the killer tripped over the disarranged rug, he would know that it 
hadn't been in that condition when he'd left.
  Footsteps arose outside: boot heels ringing off the flagstone walkway.
  Chyna came to her feet and turned toward the study. No good. She couldn't know for sure 
where he would go when he reentered the house, and if he stepped into the study, she 
would be trapped in there with him.
  His tread echoed hollowly from the wooden porch steps. Chyna lunged across the foyer, 
through the archway, into the dark living room-and immediately came to a halt, afraid of 
stumbling into furniture and knocking it over. She edged forward, feeling her way with 
both hands, vision hampered by the muddy-red ghost images of the motor-home headlights, 
which still floated faintly across her retinas.
  The front door opened. Less than halfway across the living room, Chyna squatted beside 
an armchair. If the killer entered and switched on the lights, he would see her.
  Without closing the door behind him, the man appeared in the foyer, beyond the arch. He 
was dimly linmed by the glow from the second-floor hallway. He passed the living room and 
went directly to the stairs.
  Laura. Chyna still had no weapon. She thought of the fireplace poker. Not good enough. 
Unless she caved in his skull on the first blow or broke his arm, he would wrest the 
poker away from her. She had the strength of terror, but maybe that wouldn't be enough.
  Rather than rise to her feet and blunder blindly across the living room, she stayed 
down and crawled because it was safer and quicker. She reached the dining-room archway 
and angled toward where she thought she'd find the kitchen door.
  She thumped into a chair. It rattled against a table leg. On the table, something 
shifted with a clink-clink, and she remembered seeing carefully arranged ceramic fruit in 
a copper bowl.
  She didn't think that he could have heard these sounds all the way upstairs, so she 
kept going. There was nothing to do but keep going anyway, whether he had heard or not.
  When she reached the swinging door sooner than she had expected, she got to her feet.
  Though the infiltrating moonlight was already dim, it suddenly faded away, causing the 
flesh on the nape of her neck to crawl with a dire expectation. She turned, pressing her 
back against the doorframe, certain that the killer was close behind her, silhouetted in 
front of a window, blocking the lunar glow, but he wasn't there. The silver radiance no 
longer painted the glass. Evidently the storm clouds, rolling out of the northwest since 
before midnight, had finally shrouded the moon.
  Pushing on the swinging door, she went into the kitchen. She wouldn't need to switch on 
the overhead fluorescent panels. The upper of the double ovens featured a digital clock 
with green numerals that emitted a surprising amount of light, enough to allow her to 
find her way around the room.
  She recalled having seen a section of butcher-block countertop to one side of the 
stainless-steel sinks. The sinks were in front of the wider of the two windows. She slid 
her hand along the cold granite counters until she located the remembered wooden surface.
  The house above her seemed filled with a higher order of silence than ever before.
  What the bastard doing up there in all that silence, up there in all that silence with 
Laura?
  Under the butcher block was a drawer where she expected to find knives. Found them. 
Neatly slotted in a holder.
  She withdrew one. Too short. Another. This one was a bread knife with a blunt round 
end. The third that she selected proved to be a butcher knife. She carefully tested the 
cutting edge against the ball of her thumb and found it satisfyingly sharp.
  Upstairs, Laura screamed. Chyna started toward the dining-room door but sensed 
intuitively that she dared not go that way. She rushed instead to the back stairs, even 
though they couldn't be climbed without making noise.
  She switched on the light in the stairwell. The killer could not see her here.
  From the second floor, Laura cried out again-a terrible wail of despair, pain, horror, 
like a cry that might have been heard in the poisongas chambers at Dachau or in the 
windowless interrogation rooms of Siberian prisons during the era of the gulags. It was 
not a scream for help or even a begging for mercy, but a plea for release at any cost, 
even death.
  Chyna clambered up the stairs into that scream, which presented her with real 
resistance, as if she were a swimmer struggling toward the surface of a sea, against a 
great weight of water. As cold as an Arctic current, the cry chilled her, numbed her, 
throbbed icily in the hollows of her bones. She was overcome by a compulsion to scream 
with Laura as a dog wails in sympathy when it hears another dog suffering, a primal need 
to howl in misery at the sheer helplessness of human existence in a universe full of dead 
stars, and she had to fight that urge.
  Laura's scream spiraled into a bawling for her mother, though she must know that her 
mother was dead. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommeeeeee. “ She was reduced to the dependency of an 
infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar 
succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb.
  And then sudden quiet. Bleak silence. On the landing, halfway to the second floor, 
Chyna was surprised to realize that the thousand-fathom weight of the scream had brought 
her to a standstill. Her legs were weak; her calf and thigh muscles quivered as if she 
had ran a marathon. She seemed on the brink of collapse.
  Because it might signify the end of hope, the silence was now as oppressive as the 
scream. She bent her head under a hush as heavy as an iron crown, hunched her shoulders, 
and huddled miserably upon herself.
  It would be so easy to lean against the wall, slide down to the floor, put the knife 
aside, and curl defensively. Just wait until he had gone away. Wait until a relative or a 
friend of the family arrived, discovered the bodies, went for the police, and took care 
of everything.
  Instead, after pausing only a few seconds on the landing, Chyna forced herself to 
continue the climb, heart pounding so hard that it seemed as if each blow might knock her 
down.
  Her arms shook uncontrollably. In her white-knuckle grip, the butcher knife carved 
wobbly patterns in the air in front of her, and she wondered if she would have the 
strength, in any confrontation, to thrust and slash effectively.
  That was the thinking of a loser, and she hated herself for it. During the past ten 
years she had transformed herself into a winner, and she was determined not to backslide.