swiftly backed away from Laura to the wall next to the open door. Unexpressed grief was a 
highoctane fuel for rage, and in an instant she was burning with fury, afire with the 
need to hurt him, slash him, spill his guts, hear him scream, and bring the haunting 
awareness of mortality to his eyes as he had brought it to Laura's.
  He'll come into the room. I'll cut him. He'll come and I'll cut him. It was a prayer, 
not a plan. He'll come. I'll cut him. He'll come. I'll cut him.
  The shadowy room darkened. He was at the door, blocking the meager light from the hall.
  Silently, the knife in her hand jittered furiously up and down like the needle on a 
sewing machine, stitching the pattern of her fear in the air.
  He was at the threshold. Right there. Right there. He would come in for one more look 
at the pretty blond dead girl, for one more feel of her cool skin, and Chyna would get 
him when he crossed the threshold, cut him.
  Instead, he closed the door and went away. Aghast, she listened to his retreating 
footsteps, the creaking as the carpeted steel floor torqued under his boots, and she 
wondered what to do now.
  The driver's door slarnmed. The engine started. The brakes released with a brief faint 
shriek.
  They were on the move.
  Dead girls lie as troubled in the dark as in the light. As the motor home sped along 
the runneled driveway, Laura's shackles clinked ceaselessly, only half muffled by the 
sheet in which she was loosely wrapped.
  Blinded, still pressed to the fiberboard wall beside the bedroom door, Chyna Shepherd 
could almost believe that even in death Laura struggled against the injustice of her 
murder. Clink-clink.
  Periodic sprays of gravel spurted from beneath the tires and rattled against the 
undercarriage. Shortly the motor home would reach the county road, smooth blacktop.
  If Chyna tried to bail out now, the killer was sure to hear the back door bang open 
when the wind tore it out of her grasp, or spot it in his sideview mirror. In these 
winter-dormant grape fields, where the nearest houses were inhabited only by the dead, he 
would certainly risk stopping and giving chase, and she would not get far before he 
brought her down.
  Better to wait. Give him a few miles on the county road, even until they reached a more 
major route, until they were likely to be passing through a town or traveling in at least 
sparse traffic. He wouldn't be as quick to come after her if people were nearby to 
respond to her cries for help.
  She felt along the wall for a switch. The door was tightly shut; no light would spill 
into the hallway. She found the toggle, flicked it up, but nothing happened. The overhead 
bulb must have burned out.
  She remembered seeing a pharmacy-style reading lamp bolted to the side of the built-in 
nightstand. By the time she felt her way across the small room, the motor home began to 
slow.
  She hesitated with the lamp switch between thumb and forefinger, heart suddenly racing 
again because she was afraid that he was going to brake to a full stop, get out from 
behind the wheel, and come back to the little bedroom. Now that a confrontation could no 
longer save Laura, now that Chyna's molten rage had cooled to anger, she hoped only to 
avoid him, escape, and give the authorities the information that they would need to find 
him.
  The vehicle didn't come to a full stop, after all, but hung a wide left turn onto a 
paved surface and picked up speed once more. The county road.
  As far as Chyna could recall, the next intersection would be State Highway 29, which 
she and Laura had driven the previous afternoon. Between here and there, the only 
turnoffs were to other vineyards, small farms, and houses. He wasn't likely to pay a 
visit to any of those places or slaughter any more innocently sleeping families. The 
night was waning.
  She clicked the lamp switch, and a circle of muddy light fell on the bed.
  She tried not to look at the body, even though it was mostly concealed by the 
enwrapping linens. If she thought too much about Laura right now, she'd be sucked into a 
slough of black despondency. She needed to remain energized and clearheaded if she hoped 
to survive.
  Although she wasn't likely to find any weapon better than the butcher knife, she had 
nothing to lose by searching for one. Since the killer was armed with a silencer-equipped 
pistol, he might keep other guns in the motor home.
  The single nightstand had two drawers. The upper contained a package of gauze pads, a 
few green and yellow sponges of the size used to wash dishes, a small plastic squeeze 
bottle of some clear fluid, a roll of cloth tape, a comb, a hairbrush with a 
tortoiseshell handle, a halfempty tube of K-Y jelly, a full bottle of skin lotion with 
aloe vera, a pair of needle-nose pliers with yellow rubber-clad handles, and a pair of 
scissors.
  She could imagine the uses to which he had put some of those items, and she didn't want 
to think about the others. Sometimes, no doubt, the women he brought into this room were 
alive when he put them on the bed.
  She considered the scissors. But the butcher knife would be more effective if she 
needed to use it.
  In the lower, deeper drawer was a hard-plastic container rather like a fishing-tackle 
box. When she opened it, she found a complete sewing kit, with numerous spools of thread 
in a variety of colors, a pincushion, packets of needles, a needle threader, an extensive 
selection of buttons, and other paraphernalia. None of that was helpful to her, and she 
put it away.
  As she got up from her knees, she noticed that the window over the bed had been covered 
with a sheet of plywood that had been bolted to the wall. A couple of folded swatches of 
blue fabric were trapped between the plywood and the window frame: the edge of an 
underlying drapery panel.
  From outside, the window would appear to be merely curtained. Anyone inside, even if 
clever and fortunate enough to struggle free of her bonds, would never be able to open 
the window and signal to passing motorists for help.
  As there was no other furniture in the cramped bedroom, the closet was the only 
remaining place where Chyna could hope to find a gun or anything that might be used as a 
weapon. She circled the bed to the accordion-style vinyl door, which hung from an 
overhead track.
  When she pulled the folding door aside, it compressed into pleats that stacked to the 
left, and in the closet was a dead man.
  Shock threw Chyna back against the bed. The mattress caught her behind the knees. She 
almost fell backward atop Laura, kept her balance, but dropped the knife.
  The rear of the closet appeared to have been retrofitted with welded steel plates fixed 
to the vehicle frame for added strength. Two ringbolts, widely separated and high-set, 
were welded to the steel. Wrists manacled to the ringbolts, the dead man hung with his 
arms spread in cruciform. His feet were together like the feet of Christ on the cross-not 
nailed, however, but shackled to another ringbolt in the closet floor.
  He was young-seventeen, eighteen, surely not twenty. Clad in only a pair of white 
cotton briefs, his lean pale body was badly battered. His head didn't hang forward on his