"But we won't get married?"

"h.e.l.l, no, we'll defy lesbian tradition. We not only won't get married, we won't even go into therapy together right away. We'll just date. How's that for unconventional?"

"Okay."

Stacy took one of the dance fliers and a WAVAW leaflet. "Do you want to go home now?"

"To tell the absolute truth, no. I'm not in the mood to deal with company, especially if it's Lydia reading the Tarot."

"Lavender. I don't get it. If you didn't invite her and you don't want her there why don't you just tell her to leave?" Stacy put her book down on the counter and the staffer slowly began writing out a receipt.

"You're right, you don't get it. To get Lydia out of that house I would actually have to move her things out bodily and change the locks on the door. It's not that she would refuse, she just wouldn't get around to doing it. She stretched a week-long stay between apartments into a four month odyssey that way. It will take less energy to just wait her out." Alison stopped talking to look at a case of jewelry that was mounted next to the door. "Look at these," she said, pointing to pair of dangling earrings. "They look just like the ones Tamara was wearing in that photo."

"Oh, yeah, I remember those. They're made by somebody local. I've seen a couple of women with them." Stacy was more interested in a.n.a.lyzing her than the earrings. "I don't understand. I would think that you had to be fairly a.s.sertive, if not actually pushy, in your line of work."

"Well, sometimes it just doesn't carry over to the old private life. It's like strict teachers who raise really bratty kids. I suppose you always satisfy your lovers completely and never get bored with one another, huh?"

"Now that you put it that way. I have clothes that need mending, too. How about coming over and working on your quilt? I really have to work, though. You have to go home if you're going to be bad." Stacy unlocked the driver's door, got in and leaned across to the pa.s.senger's side. Alison opened die door and slipped in.

"I will be Nancy Drew practicing local crafts," she promised. "She used to do that, you know. If she was solving a mystery in Scotland she'd be out dancing the Highland fling in a kilt sooner or later." There was a book sitting in the middle of the seat. She was sure it hadn't been there before, because it was lying right on top of her seatbelt. "Where did this come from?"

Stacy glanced down. "Oh, my photos!" She took a manila envelope that was sticking out from between the pages. "Mark must have left it while we were in the bookstore. I've been wanting to see these. Look, it's my flier." She showed Alison the slick paper printed in blues and grays. There were two photos of quilts alone and two of Stacy working, interspersed with text and the name of the gallery.

"What does the guy do, follow you around?"

"Oh, no, he must have just seen my car. He knew how much I was looking forward to seeing these."

"Has he got a crush on you or what?" Alison really didn't want to talk about Mark, felt a distinct crabbiness at the mere mention of his name.

Stacy laughed. "Hardly. I've know him since he was a kid. Or, rather, I knew him when he was a kid, and then I met him again when he was older, when he came back from living with his mother. I only met her a couple of times, and I don't remember her well, but according to Pam...."

"Who is?"

"My upstairs neighbor. Haven't you met her? I'll have to introduce you. She's nice. She was one of Mark's co-mothers. His real mom basically gave him away for several years while she was trying to get her own stuff together, and Pam and three other woman took care of him. But according to Pam, I'm a dead ringer for his real mother. So, I think that if he has a crush it's not the kind that you mean, more like he sees me as a mother figure."

"But you're what, ten years older than he is?"

"More like fifteen, and you know how that is at that age. He probably isn't sure if they had cars when I was a kid. Apparently things didn't work out well with his birth mom. She wasn't real nurturing. I really haven't got the whole story...Pam is kind of sensitive about it. But I would guess that there was a lot of unsettled stuff between them when she died, and I think that he's kind of trying to reshape their reality with me. You know, kind of act out what he wished their life was like so that he doesn't have all these bad memories to deal with. I think that's why the leather stuff freaked him out so bad last year-that wasn't the way he wanted Mama to be."

"It sounds to me as if he'd be better off getting some therapy and dealing with the old s.h.i.t," objected Alison.

"Well, I think so, too and I've even suggested it. But you can't make somebody go to therapy."

"Not unless you're one of the Crusaders."

"Eech, don't remind me." Stacy shivered as she pulled away from the curb. "Look where that gets them. Carla was lucky that she got away. I'll bet that group is full of people who are right on the edge of freaking out because their hearts are telling them one thing and they're having the opposite screamed at them. But who am I to tell somebody to get into therapy? I've got some pretty dismal scenes from my own childhood that could stand working out and I haven't gone yet myself. It's hard enough to find a d.y.k.e you can afford, but I've also got to find one who doesn't think being in the scene is sick."

"Mmm," said Alison, and because she really didn't want to waste any more time talking about Mark, and didn't even want to touch the topic of whether she should be in therapy, she asked, "When's your next soccer game?"

Alison pushed her front door open gingerly. Of course it was unlocked. She was going to have to impress upon her uninvited house guests that a crisis existed and security measures would have to be stepped up. She was relieved to see no sign of Lydia though it was apparent that she had cooked another meal, leaving the second mess on top of the first. Well, Alison could think while she washed the dishes.

Suppose Stacy's theory about the copycat murders was correct? Suppose Dominique was indeed the first killer, and the other two were unrelated, chances seized by the as yet faceless person to whom Stacy referred as the Sword of G.o.d? The t.i.tle was good, it gave Alison a kind of image of the kind of person it might be. Someone like the man who walked sternly through Cheeseman Park on sunny days when every f.a.ggot in town was working on his tan, carrying a homemade sign that said, 'h.o.m.os.e.xuality is a sin.' Or maybe more like the kids who cruised around in. the cat that proclaimed in white paint, 'Jesus didn't smoke, why should you?' on one side and 'G.o.d didn't create Adam and Steve,' on the other. She saw them sometimes at King's Soopers, or when she was getting a salad at the Pizza Hut. She avoided them, even though she was quite sure that 'd.y.k.e' was not painted on her forehead in luminescent letters. There was something too creepy about them.

Had Malcolm, perhaps, had that same look when, with a nod, he had ordered her hands pinned behind her back? Stacy had said that he had beaten her, tried to imprison her. He had struck back at her by marrying her lover, and, out of his obsession, had formed the Crusaders operation. Was he still striking back at her through other women? Was he in fact.... She stood still, her hands in the soapy water. Was he striking back by killing Stacy's clients, hoping to set her up to take the rap? She thought long and hard, her brow furrowed as she automatically scrubbed a handful of silverware. She hadn't thought of that angle before, and she liked it because it cleared Dominique. She still preferred that the killer be a completely loathsome man, rather than another d.y.k.e. Then she shook her head. Dominique might not be guilty, might only be an unfortunate woman with a drinking problem and the knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she could not make the story fit. If Malcolm or his buddies had killed the women to frame Stacy where did Carla fit in? For a moment she wondered if that attack had been a mistake. No, that was stretching it, wasn't it? And, additionally, wouldn't he have planted some evidence, leaked something to the police? As far as she knew Stacy had not even been questioned, and there were certainly no grounds at all to arrest her. No, if any of the killings were the work of the Crusaders, Stacy's theory made more sense-that they were removing certain women to save others.

So what could she do to advance either of the theories, to get them to the point where Jones and Jorgenson, via her father, might pay some attention? She could talk to Krista and see if Melanie had indeed been trying to convince her to leave the straight and narrow. She could try to establish the whereabouts of the Crusaders on the night that Carla was attacked. She already knew that they were on the scene the night that Melanie was killed. That reminded her of an idea she'd had earlier in the day. She wanted to call the gay paper and see if they had taken any more photos at the Ms. Leather contest than the ones printed. Perhaps she could arrange to look at them uncropped.

The light was blinking on her answering machine. For a moment she hesitated, imagining that it was more reprimands from her father or another call from Sergeant Obrachta demanding that she get her a.s.s into the station and explain herself. But, though she had barely gotten home, the message might be from Stacy. One of the nice things about a new relationship-dating, Alison corrected herself-was that you could get away with phoning ten times a day, ten minutes apart if you wanted to.

The first voice confirmed her worst fears. "This is Sergeant Obrachta. I know you are not out of town. You had better be in here by ten o'clock tomorrow to tell me why I shouldn't recommend a suspension." The phone was slammed down.

Oh. She guessed she wouldn't plan anything for the morning. The second message began. No identification.

"Denise is in jail." Beth's voice was toneless, completely washed of color. Alison winced. d.a.m.n it, she supposed something else must have been found at the scene of the crime to tie her in. She'd have to see if Robert could find out for her. What a case the DA could make of a dominatrix gone berserk, cutting just a bit harder than she was used to. She shuddered. She would call Beth a little later to see if she was all right and had a friend who could stay with her.

She was sorry now that she had ever turned on the d.a.m.n machine. At least the third message was Stacy's sweet voice. She waited for some teasing, a mushy comment about how she had enjoyed their day. Instead, what Stacy said was, "Alison? There's something really strange about this leaflet."

Sitting in the front of Seven Yellow Moons' van, Alison sighed. On her own she would have not chosen to go out tonight. But Lydia and Seven Yellow Moons, who had not been in a city for months, were determined, and she could not let them go alone in good conscience. She really did believe there was safety in numbers, especially if one of those numbers was toting a gun. Lydia might irritate the s.h.i.t out of her, but she would still feel terrible if she were the next victim. So she had agreed to go with them to the Blue Ryder which had reopened under tight security by WAVAW as well as frequent patrol by the city police. The latter fact she knew she had to thank her father for. She had also arranged to have Stacy meet them there with the leaflet.

Somehow she had gotten the prize front seat, and she could hear Mich.e.l.le and Lydia sniping at each other from where they sat on the floor of the back. Mich.e.l.le was feeling jealous, and when Mich.e.l.le was unhappy, everyone was unhappy. "What is it?" she snapped when Seven Yellow Moons pulled to a stop.

At the entrance to the parking lot of the Blue Ryder stood three women holding flashlights. They were wearing plastic orange safety vests, trimmed with white reflective tape, over their jackets. Behind them, and off to the side, were another half dozen women similarly dressed, cl.u.s.tered around a Coleman lantern. The middle woman, whom Alison was sure she had seen before, but could not place, waved the van to a stop. Seven Yellow Moons rolled down her window.

Mich.e.l.le seemed to find the sudden silence something that needed to be filled. "You know," she said, "I just don't know how you didn't know your tire was going flat, Alison. You must have driven on the rim for at least a couple of blocks to destroy it like that."

"I don't know either, Mich.e.l.le," she answered patiently. "Ask me a couple hundred more times and maybe I'll be able to come up with something." A second woman was approaching her window. This one Alison recognized as Trudy's friend from WAVAW. She cranked her window down.

"Hi," said the woman, giving no sign at all of recognizing her. "Do you guys know about the lesbian killings? Know that it might be dangerous to be out?"

"Yeah." Alison answered without explanation. Something about the first woman's voice sparked a memory in her and she half-turned to look at her across Seven Yellow Moons. She was one of the leather d.y.k.es from the Ruby-fruit, the one whom Mich.e.l.le had pointed out in the paper as an ex-lover of Melanie's. Behind her Alison could see one of the halfbacks from Stacy's soccer team, and beyond that, one of the staffers from Womynbooks. It looked as if everyone had agreed to forget their personal differences in order to provide protection tonight.

"You'll get an escort from your car to the bar, and one when you leave." The woman was speaking with some difficulty because she was holding a silver policeman's whistle in one corner of her mouth. Alison noticed that she was carrying a can of mace in her free hand. Alison glanced at the group beyond her, whom she a.s.sumed was the escort and saw that most of them were carrying similar cans, though a few had baseball bats instead. "There's a roped off area in front of the bar where you can go if you need to get some air, but otherwise you'll only be allowed to go back and forth when you arrive and leave. Please, everybody," she said earnestly, "this isn't a night for making out in the car. Do it at home behind locked doors."

There was a dollar cover. "Oh, it's country/western night," Alison said, hearing the strains of Sweethearts of the Rodeo.

Mich.e.l.le looked sour and Lydia appeared positively aghast. For a moment it seemed as if she might ask for her four quarters back, but Alison jostled her gently past the table, intent on finding Stacy.

At first she couldn't believe how many women were there. It was like Sat.u.r.day night, like Halloween, like New Year's. She would have thought that any d.y.k.e with a choice would have stayed safe at home. But, then, maybe that was why they were here. Maybe they needed to celebrate being alive, maybe they wanted to show that they could not be terrorized off the streets.

Alison remembered a s.n.a.t.c.h of a Holly Near song, something about fear turning to rage and fighting back. She turned before she entered, to ask if they could use her on a later shift: in the parking lot, but their four-woman escort had faded back into the night.

She lost her friends almost immediately. Fine, she wanted to find Stacy and see what she meant about the fliers. Beneath her own arm she was clutching an envelope of photos. Mich.e.l.le, who had connections everywhere, had gotten them for her from a friend on the gay rag. They had stopped to pick them up on the way. If she could find a place to do it she would like to take a look through them. Perhaps it would help in planning her strategy for the next day. As she weaved her way through the bar she was struck, first, by the wild party spit-in-their-face mood and secondly, by the number of women she knew. As in the parking lot, the bar seemed a wonderful mixture of groups she had never seen mingle before. There were leatherd.y.k.es doing the two-step with women from the newspaper. The lesbian mothers' group was mingling and overflowing into a huge group of soccer players, who were in turn mixed with women she had seen before only on stage, performing with the women's chorus. She wondered suddenly if Stacy's upstairs neighbor, Pam, was there. For some reason which she couldn't put her finger on, she thought that it would be a good thing for her to talk to Pam. But she forgot the whim in the next moment when she spotted Stacy on the sunken dance floor. She was one of the many women who had not forgotten it was country western night and who had come dressed for the occasion. She was wearing an emerald green shirt, silky, that had a long white fringe around the western yoke and down both sleeves, and she was dancing a very credible two-step with, of all people, Carla. Carla also had on a western shirt and-this surprised Alison-a denim skirt that stopped about three inches above the tops of her cowboy boots. She had a red bandana tied around her neck and a matching one around her head. Alison leaned over the railing to watch.

The singers mourned, for the last time, being midnight girls in a sunset town. As the dancers were leaving the floor Alison managed to catch Stacy's eye and waved. Both of the floor exits seemed hopelessly clogged and so Stacy, trailing Carla, jostled her way over to the railing.

"Have you ever seen anything like this?" Stacy practically had to shout over the music.

"Never." Now that they were up close, Alison could appreciate the details on their outfits. Carla's boots really caught her attention. Obviously second hand, they must have belonged to some rodeo queen in better days. They were dyed red and the top st.i.tching had been done in multicolored thread.

"Hot boots, Carla," she yelled admiringly, wishing for a moment that she were decked out too. Carla preened happily.

"Have you got the night off?"

Carla stood on tiptoe to yell back. "No, the bar's closed tonight! Because of the murders!" She sounded just as pleased as if she'd unexpectedly gotten an extra snow day. It probably hadn't occurred to her the financial beating Margie would take because of it. It did, however, partly explain why there was such a crowd.

"Hey, you haven't been telling anybody about the stuff we talked about, have you? About the case?"

Carla looked hurt. "Me?" she said, touching her chest as if she simply couldn't believe the accusation. Stacy caught Alison's eye and they nodded. She had told every detail to everyone she'd met.

"Come on up," Alison urged Stacy. "I want to find a place where we..." She almost said ...can look at the papers, but, catching Carla's eager, 'what's-going-to-happen-next?' look changed it to, "...can talk."

Stacy glanced over at the exit which was still clogged. It looked as if a fight between a woman in a confederate army shirt and another in a gingham dress was going to break out on the steps at any moment. Stacy reached up and grabbed the bra.s.s railing and hauled herself over the bars, very nearly knocking over a pitcher of beer on a nearby table with her boots in the process. Carla, not the least upset about being left without a partner, danced happily away from the rail. Alison wondered for a moment if packing etiquette permitted carrying a d.i.l.d.o beneath a skirt. But fascinating as the information might be, it was not the time to pursue it. Alison reminded herself of this reluctantly, admiring the way that the fringe on Stacy's shirt swung as she walked. This was time for business, not for thinking of how the green satin would slide beneath her fingers, her mouth; how the pearl snaps down the front would all burst open with one good tug....

"Come on," yelled Stacy, "I want to see what you think of this." Stacy took Alison's hand to lead her through the crowd. Alison was painfully aware of more than one set of eyebrows raised in their direction. Stacy shoved through the h.o.a.rds of women in front of the bar to an unlit corner. She pushed open a door Alison had never seen before.

They found themselves in a tiny office. "Well, ate we one of the elite?' Alison asked with a lifted eyebrow.

"Oh, I've had a drink here with Jenny a time or two."

Which means exactly what? And am I going to do this every time she says anything, wonder if she means what the words say or something else? Am I going to be jealous of tricks? Alison opened her mouth and then closed it again. This was not the time for heartfelt confessions, particularly since they had decided that they were only dating. On the other hand, why not start out the way she intended to continue?

"So," she said briskly to Stacy, as if they were at a c.o.c.ktail parry with several hours to kill on chitchat, "are you monogamous?"

Stacy, who had taken a folded leaflet from her pocket, looked startled. "Aren't we playing detective right now?" she asked.

"Well, yes, but we want to show the audience that we're people, too. Kind of the Cagney and Lacey approach-you know, where Mary Beth talks about her son joining the Marines and Christine talks about her drinking problem."

"Are you sure that our audience wouldn't prefer to hear about my new kitten and the trouble he's having hitting the kitty box?"

"Positive. We're playing after eight to an adult audience. It's dying to know if we're compatible at all, just for dating, of course, or if I should go back to my lonely existence as third wheel to Mich.e.l.le and Janka."

"Well, if you mean do I date more than one woman at a time, yes I do. Not that I am now, but I fiercely reserve the option. If you mean do I have more than one relationship-a relationship being when you've decided it's true love and it's going to last forever, not like all those false alarms with those other s.l.u.ts, and people invite you places together and you've made at least one joint purchase-at a time no, I don't. I don't have f.u.c.k buddies, either. I find that I can't maintain emotionally. However, I don't count my work as anything but work, so if you're asking, am I going to forsake my job and become a saved woman the minute I fall in love and start thinking of joint mortgages, no, I'm not. Incidentally, I don't date or see any of my customers socially or take on anybody in those categories. So, hypothetically speaking, my main squeeze would not need to eye the soccer team or my neighbors questioningly."

"Oh. So what's with the leaflet?"

"We end like this?"

"The audience is tired of our personal problems. It wants to move on with the plot."

Stacy shook her head. "Fine, but it may have to sit through a long boring personal scene later in which the d.y.k.e detectives bicker over the fact that one is supposed to spill her guts while the other puts out nothing."

"Oh, that's scheduled much, much later in the season. Now the scene is the exciting clue of the leaflet."

"Okay. Did you bring yours? You are going to be so amazed when you see what a good job of detecting I did on my own."

Alison laid her own leaflet on the desk.

"Okay, the difference is that this second flier has different contact numbers on it. See? Now I thought, maybe it's no big deal...."

Alison felt rather let down. "You're right, maybe it's no big deal."

"But then I thought, well, it if funny, at any rate. Look at this." Stacy held her leaflet up to the light. "See here? Look at the numbers really close. You can see where they've been changed. Somebody typed the new numbers on a piece of paper and then cut the little piece out and glued it over the old ones. Then they copied the whole thing. But you can see the shadow where they did it right here at the edge."

"Yeah, I've done that myself on term papers. So what's the excitement? They decided to add optional numbers on the later leaflets so the first two phones wouldn't be overloaded."

"It just seemed funny to me," Stacy repeated. "See, the reason that I even noticed was that, when I glanced at the leaflet at your house, I recognized both of the phone numbers. The first one is Trudy's, and I recognized it because it's on our soccer phone tree and it's real easy to remember. See, the last digits are 1234. The second one is the Gay Community Center's line. I worked there last year."

"Well, I think that was very Delafield-like, but I still don't see the point."

"There's no reason to change either of those numbers. They both have call forwarding. If Trudy, say, wanted to go out to a bar she could have her phone forwarded there, or she could have it forwarded to someone else's number and that person could take the calls. Same with the GCC. It's not like these calls are going to one person, anyway, because if they were, and she left to give a ride or something, then there'd be no one home for the next caller. They're going to somebody who's acting like a dispatcher I'll bet that tonight anybody calling from that first flier is being bounced right to this bar."

"So you think someone put out a set of bogus fliers with different numbers," Alison said slowly. "What's the point in that?"

"Well, what if there was another reason that you wanted to get d.y.k.es in your car? What if, instead of helping, you wanted to do something else? Like maybe rough them up a little or...."

Alison's mouth dropped open. "No," she whispered.

"Yeah. Here would be this woman all trusting and ready to chat. h.e.l.l, she might even ask you to come in while she checked her house out."

"But surely no one would get in a car with a strange man," Alison protested.

"If he said he was from the Gay Community Center? That the Men's Chorus or the study group was helping their sisters out? Or it wouldn't even have to be a man. What if you were a woman, an ex-d.y.k.e maybe even, who really believed that your sisters were going to h.e.l.l and that the best thing for them would be a little reprogramming, even if it had to be forced? You'd be willing to run your station wagon into enemy territory to make a pickup and then join the guys later, wouldn't you?"

"The Crusaders," Alison breathed.

"And this number just happens to have the same prefix as their hotline."

"Did you call it?"

Stacy shuddered. "No. I know it's stupid, I know they don't know where I am and where I live, but I just couldn't bring myself to call. It was like-I don't know, inviting a vampire in your window. You know, they can be out there flapping against it, but you're safe as long as you don't ask them in. I felt like if I connected with them over the wire this voice would come on saying, "Ha, ha, ha, you s.l.u.t, we've got you now!" She shrugged apologetically. "What can I say? I guess the audience gets a glimpse at my paranoia."

"Hey, I don't blame you. You've been through enough with those people. But do me a favor. Is your little lawyer friend here tonight?"

"She was earlier."

"See if you can get her in here."

Stacy saluted. "I take it your rank is higher than mine?"

"Always. Every time you get a promotion I get a better one."

As the door opened a wave of music swelled into the small room, shaking Alison as if by a heavy wind. She put both hands on the desk to brace herself and shouted, "And grab Trudy!" h.e.l.l, everybody in the world was out there. She didn't see why Trudy wouldn't be. She had little hope, though, that Stacy heard her. She would have to send her out again, for they needed to make sure that the WAV AW women hadn't changed the number themselves as she had first supposed. Stacy might be gone as long as ten or fifteen minutes fighting her way through the crowd. That gave her enough time to look at the photos.

There were two sheets, covered with strips of photos no bigger than the negatives, but less than half were of the Rubyfruit the night of the Ms. Leather contest. The others were of other current events: The Lesbian Follies and what appeared to be a square dancing group. They were tempting, but she focused resolutely on the former. Not that it did much good. They were so small that she could see what was happening only generally; she could not pick out faces and detail. There was another, bigger shot of the bikers, with the Crusaders in the background. That must have tickled the fancy of the photographer, because the next shot showed six women dressed in leather tight in front of the protesters. There were a couple of shots of the contestants inside the bar. One looked as if the flash had misfired.