"Go," Heath made herself say.

E walked farther down the parking lot. A few rows before the street, she stopped and hid in the shadow of a pickup truck, the kind that look like they're on steroids and have never hauled anything heavier than the ego of their owner. Both E and Heath would stay out of sight until twenty minutes of nine. At that time, Heath would make her way across the grassy square and pretend to window-shop in the stores to either side of Cecelia's Coffee Shop. At ten minutes of nine, Elizabeth would enter the square from the parking lot, walk straight across the center of the lawn where the most light and people were, and take a seat at one of Cecelia's outdoor tables. If no tables were free, she would stand with her back against the wall of the coffee shop, watching the square, until she was contacted. Artie, the only person other than Walt that they were sure would be a stranger to the cybercreep, would already be in place, seated at an outdoor table absorbed in the American obsession of drinking caffeinated beverages while staring at electronic devices.

If the creep did contact Elizabeth, and did not attempt anything hostile, both Heath and Artie would photograph him with their devices. Artie and Anna would tail him when he left. No attempt to capture him would be made near Elizabeth. Less dangerous that way.

If the creep made hostile motions, Artie would take him down.

Heath ran through this in her mind as her legs were propelled off of the concrete and, with scarcely a hitch, onto the lawn. Canes were a great help. People tended to make way for a wheelchair, not so much for canes, but some. When they didn't, she batted them gently with the end of the cane, and apologized. Dem Bones was miraculous, but running obstacle courses and doing ballet had yet to be programmed into it.

Crowds. Dense crowds.

This bothered Heath more than the time and the place.

Artie was armed, and licensed to carry concealed weapons when off duty, as was Anna. The density of the crowd made that problematic. A bullet could easily pass through the villain and into two or three innocents before it came to a stop. At the moment, Heath didn't care if it mowed down all of Pajama Land, as long as E was safe.

Anna would care, as, Heath presumed, might Artie. Better no guns, she told herself as she maneuvered around a big man with a bushy beard wearing blue footy pajamas and a Red Sox baseball cap. E would be too close to the action; it would be too easy for a bullet to go astray. If the cybercreep had a gun- No, Heath told herself firmly. That was not a thought she had allowed herself to entertain for the past forty-eight hours, and she wasn't going to entertain it now. If the bastard had a gun he wouldn't need all this meeting business. He could wait outside their house, or E's school in Boulder, and just blow her away at his convenience: no waiting, no air travel, no coffee date.

Sweating so profusely her hands were slick on the rubberized handles of the canes, Heath reached the far side of the square where Cecelia's was located. Twelve o'clock-that was what had been decided so they could tell one another where to look: The green was a clock face, Cecelia's was twelve o'clock, the grassy point-now the cinema-was at nine o'clock, the parking lot where she and E entered six o'clock, and the west part of town three o'clock.

Heath was across the narrow street from the coffee shop at twelve o'clock, the outdoor movie theater at nine o'clock on her left. For a minute or two she stood still, breathing, trying not to sweat, to fit in as a general-issue tourist at a pajamarama. If such a thing existed.

After a moment she spotted Anna. Had she not seen her in costume before she left Boar, she wouldn't have recognized her. Munching popcorn, Anna was leaning against a tree at about ten o'clock, ankles crossed. Her long braid was concealed beneath a loose flowing shirt over wide-legged soft palazzo pants. A Greek fisherman's cap, the cheap kind available in most of the souvenir shops, was pulled low on her forehead. The greatest disguise was the makeup. Anna Pigeon wore red lipstick, smoky eye shadow, and mascara. Beautiful and urban on someone else, it was oddly disturbing on the ranger, rather like seeing false eyelashes on a young Clint Eastwood.

Anna had to have seen her; Heath looked like the Mayflower, as envisioned by Peter Max, under full sail, but her gaze wandered past and through without a flicker of recognition.

Encouraged by the sight of her friend, Heath managed the step off the curb and crossed the street to the shops. Artie looked up as she passed. He didn't recognize her. Heath felt a mild lift of her spirits.

Facing a children's bookstore as if she were shopping, she watched the reflection of the front row of cars in the big parking lot at six o'clock appear and disappear as waves of people ebbed and flowed over the green space. She didn't see Elizabeth until she was halfway across the square, seeming very small in the big shirt and dark, tight jeans. Shoulders slightly hunched, she looked around as she walked, peering into the faces of the people she passed.

That was okay. Cybercreep would expect Elizabeth to appear frightened. After all, he'd spent weeks carefully fraying every single one of the girl's nerves. One of these happy people in bunny slippers was feeding on E's fear at that very moment. Anger, so intense it dimmed her vision, flooded Heath's entire being.

Her vision didn't clear. The world was viewed through a glass dimly. Heath's head swam; her balance faltered.

Lights had gone from the windows. Gone from the square.

Her tenuous vision of her daughter's reflection had vanished.

FORTY-THREE.

First the streetlights around the green went dark, then the lights on the storefronts. The sky had faded from lavender to deep blue. The pajama-clad throng melted into amorphous shuffling grays and blacks, an occasional spark of red or green as beams of flashlights startled color from a sleeve or back.

Sharp pieces of the previous night flickered through Anna's brain: shadows shifting into ninjas, gun falling from her hand, darkness sucking her down. Dizziness overtook her. Blindly, she reached out for the tree trunk. Coarse bark brought her back to her body; the ancient strength of the tree steadied her.

Slowly, Anna squatted, carefully set her box of popcorn on the ground, then rose, stepping away from the tree.

Music began, a loudspeaker playing the Broadway overture to The Pajama Game.

Specters that had been born on the residue of Rohypnol faded. This was not a flashback, not a vast conspiracy to throw Elizabeth into the dark. The movie was about to start. Simple, prosaic, Pajama Game in pajamas, quaint, colorful, charming, and a huge pain in the ass.

Irritation burned in the pit of Anna's stomach. She had not foreseen this. A blind woman should have known that when the movie started the lights would go down. Cybercreep had known it. The people in the square had known it. Anna was the fool. Had she time, she would have cursed herself. Taken by surprise, none of them might have time, especially Elizabeth.

A chill of hypervigilance shivered through Anna. Cold tingled in her feet and hands and the top of her scalp. Whatever was going to happen would happen now, while people were on the move, while the lights were down and the area still crowded.

Counting on the invisibility cloak created by her shade tree and the lowered lights, Anna leapt onto a park bench. Her skinned left heel cursed her with a stab of pain. She ignored it. From the higher vantage point, she could see over the milling crowd. Most were drifting toward the lawn in front of the movie screen. A few continued to shop, eat, and talk in the shadows beneath awnings of stores and branches of the maples in the park. Blankets were being shaken and spread. Last purchases were being made at the snack bar.

Soft, fleecy, plaid stuffed animals in the arms of children and some adults, pillows and blankets in baskets: This was not the stuff of creepiness. Who looked like a sexually perverted bully in footy pajamas? Fuzzy slippers and terry robes could disguise a lot of sinister intent.

Despite the sudden change in atmosphere, Elizabeth was staying on track, walking a little slower than before but still heading straight-or as straight as she could through the pajama swamp-for Cecelia's.

Good girl, Anna thought.

Keeping E in her peripheral vision, she began searching in ever wider concentric circles out from her goddaughter, automatically discarding the very young, the very old, and families holding hands as parents walked children toward the cinema. A young man, rising and walking in the opposite direction of the crowd, his stride that of a man on a mission, caught her attention. Walter Whitman. He had been sitting on a low stone wall between the grassy movie space and the sea. As she could have predicted, he was making a beeline for Elizabeth. Clearly he, too, had been watching her.

Heath was in front of the children's book store beside the coffee shop, her back to the windows. By the panicked way her head bobbed and craned, she had lost sight of her daughter.

On the west side of the grass, at about two o'clock on their imaginary clock face, a single man wearing khakis, a short-sleeved blue shirt, and sandals with socks stood on the sidewalk. In the dim light, age was hard to guess, but he had a full head of dark hair and stood, hands in pockets, with the slouch of a man in his twenties or thirties.

Anna punched WM2 into the text line on her cell phone, then hit SEND. Artie, attention torn from his laptop by the change in illumination, turned back to it. Heath took her cell phone from a pocket in her smock and looked down into the pale blue square of light. Then both looked for the white male at two o'clock.

A shake of the head let Anna know Heath didn't recognize him, but then she wouldn't necessarily.

Artie stayed with WM2. Anna continued her scan. Elizabeth was nearly across the grassy area, about fifty feet from the coffee shop. Two of the tables had been vacated by moviegoers. Once E was seated, she could take out her cell phone, put it on the table, and see the texts. Anna had wanted her to keep her hands free at all times and, when approaching the meeting place, to do nothing that might scare Cybercreep away.

Three doors down from Cecelia's, a dumpy woman emerged from an ice cream shop, her head a puff of pink lace in a many-tiered curler cap, her robe a tatty old blue-and-white-striped cotton. Plump doughy hands clutched a large satchel to her chest. By the contours of her figure, Anna guessed it must be filled with Red Hots, Jujubes, Goobers, and other treats one only ate at the movies.

A stride or two behind Elizabeth, and five yards to her right, a man paralleled E's path. Paunchy, hair thinning, stoop-shouldered: Anna put him in his early forties. He wore red-and-blue plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a pale blue, zip-front, lightweight jacket. On his feet were hiking boots. His face was unremarkable except for a simian brow that didn't match the ordinariness of his other features.

WM//E3, Anna texted. She knew they would understand the white male at three o'clock and hoped they would understand the parallel mark.

Artie glanced in WM3's general direction. Sitting, he wouldn't be able to see the man. Heath was having trouble spotting the guy as well, her head moving back and forth and looking suspicious as hell.

BCOOL, Anna typed. Shrinking in on herself, Heath settled. Then the shrinking ceased. Heath regained her stature the way a resurrection fern will after a good rain. Heath had seen Elizabeth.

E had reached the road that separated the shops from the grassy space. Walter, Anna noted, was making his way toward Cecelia's using the sidewalk. A clever boy. Anna was sorry she'd nixed his coming.

No one else stood out from the thinning crowd. No beady-eyed perverts slinking around in their pj's. Had the cybercreep seen Heath or Anna and disappeared back into whatever hole he lived in? Was he standing them up to throw them off guard the next time he called for E to meet with him, or the time after that, so he could strike when they were no longer alert?

The crowd on the green had thinned to twenty or so stragglers. Stores were still doing a desultory business. The man in sandals went into the ice cream shop. Paunchy ceased to parallel E's path and veered onto an intersecting course. The woman in the curler cap stumped stolidly down the sidewalk, evidently bent on getting a Frappuccino to wash down the candy.

Elizabeth reached the coffee shop. She slid into a chair at one of the abandoned tables, took out her cell phone, and began fiddling with it.

The man with the paunch stopped fifteen feet shy of Cecelia's. Standing on the curb before the narrow street, he squinted as he stared across the road to where E was sitting. Artie moved his laptop so he could watch him without seeming to take his eyes off the screen.

Paunchy shoved both hands into the pockets of his windbreaker, his protruding brow shadowing his face.

Anna's brain, still tainted with the Rohypnol, reeled: the doughy hands, the oversized bag clutched to the woman's breast. This was important, this was trying to take her mind from its set track.

The man on the curb pulled a black rod from his pocket. Anna couldn't make out what it was, but it wasn't flat; it wasn't a cell phone. Pink Curler Cap was almost to Heath, her small sneakered feet marching determinedly along the dull gray concrete of the sidewalk.

Anna's brain locked between the dumpy little woman in the old housecoat and the man with the black rod. Walter bolted through the fog swaddling her mind to smash into the man on the curb. The boy didn't hit him with a football tackle or a fist; he plowed into him like a ship at ramming speed, the entirety of his strong young body smashing into the smaller man, knocking him ten feet onto the green.

"Get off me! Get off me!" the man screamed as Walter followed him down and pinned him to the turf with his weight. "Help! Help!" the man cried. No one moved to help. Anna had worked in tourist destinations most of her life. Tourists had no connection to other tourists, no knowledge of who was who, no faith in their instincts. They seldom sprang into action. There were too many unknowns in an alien environment.

The rod had flown from the downed man's hand. Rolling across the asphalt of the road, it flashed a bluish beam of light. A flashlight; the man had taken a flashlight from his pocket to fight the gloom.

Artie was on his feet and running toward where Walter held the shrieking little man down.

Doughy hands. White. Plump. Dimples for knuckles.

Anna had seen her before, at the first coffee shop meeting. She'd had curly red hair then, but the same hands, the same bag. Whirling, she saw the woman in the pink curler cap drawing on a welding glove, the glove she'd seen peeking from the bag the last time.

One hand gloved, the other dipped into the capacious bag and came out with a can, the flat, squareish, metal kind that holds lighter fluid. She was passing Heath, whose attention was fixed on the tangle of men yelling and wrestling on the green.

"Run, E!" Anna shouted. "Run!" Galvanized by decision, Anna shot across the lawn, legs pumping, lungs filling to bellow again: "Run!"

Heath's head jerked in her direction. "The woman!" Anna screamed.

Ten yards separated her from her goddaughter.

The woman with the lighter fluid dropped her bag. Pinching the can in both hands, she aimed a stream of fluid at Elizabeth's face.

FORTY-FOUR.

From out of a swirling mist of blind panic, Elizabeth emerged into focus. Heath felt her blood pressure drop twenty points. Without a glance at her mother, E slid into a chair at a table near Artie. She took her cell phone from her pocket and laid it on the small round tabletop. Heath's fingers closed around her own phone in the pocket of her brightly embroidered tunic. It took all of her self-control not to snatch it out and text E just to feel some small line of connection.

Tearing her eyes from her daughter, Heath forced herself to continue her search of the people straggling from shops or toward the cinema. Anna's WM3 was stopped at the curb. This man had pervert written all over him, from his baggy-butt pajama bottoms to his beetling brow.

Seemingly from nowhere a dark shape, like that of a black bird of prey stooping on an unwary rabbit, crashed into the man so hard his feet left the ground and he flew sideways several yards. Elizabeth squeaked. Heath might have squeaked herself. It was Walter. God bless him, Heath thought. God bless the boy.

Abandoning his laptop, Artie leapt from his table and went to help E's boyfriend. Elizabeth, per Anna's orders, was remaining seated until the all-clear was sounded, but her eyes were as round as a startled child's as she watched her tormentor exposed and laid out by two men.

Heath hadn't recognized the man. He didn't even look familiar. Such was the virulence of the attacks he'd mounted, so imbued with specific hatred, she'd expected Elizabeth's stalker to have a personal agenda. How could a total stranger develop such an oozing rotten loathing of a lovely young woman he'd never even met?

Then again, they might have met. Perhaps a fleeting exchange in a Best Buy or at a Walgreens. Twisting it in his mind, the man had imagined a relationship. Elizabeth failed to play her part, so he imagined betrayal. Then he plotted revenge.

Relief washed through Heath, weakening her, floating her physical fatigue to the surface. Fortunately, they would soon know why and who. Knowing would lay a lot of ghosts to rest. Knowing would keep Heath, and more importantly E, from wondering if black slime underlay the warm smiles and kind words of friends and acquaintances. Heath doubted knowing would promote understanding. Perverts had a perverted way of looking at the world. In their heart of hearts, they believed everyone would behave as badly as they did if they got the chance. Virtue was only a mask. Reality, the pervert believed, was what he lived.

Before Heath could finish drawing in her sigh of relief, she heard a scream.

"Run!"

Anna was pelting across the green, sprinting toward the coffee shop.

Elizabeth looked up from her cell phone.

"Run!" Anna screamed a second time.

Elizabeth half stood, then sat down again, evidently remembering her orders to stay put.

A short woman in a pink curler cap passed Heath, blocking her view of the men struggling on the lawn.

"The woman!" Anna cried.

Confused, Heath turned toward Elizabeth. The stumpy little figure was stopped at Elizabeth's table, standing so close, E couldn't get up without overturning her chair. A large, shiny, purple tote bag slid from the woman's arm, exposing an enormous paw.

It was a hand in a welding glove. In that hand was a can of what looked like lighter fluid.

Heath was easily ten feet from her daughter. Without thought, she dropped her canes and lunged. The legs Leah had crafted from electronics and metal responded to the sudden weight of her upper body moving forward. Dem Bones propelled her at nearly a run. Torso foremost, metal and hinges activated to their utmost, Heath was hurtling toward Elizabeth's attacker, utterly out of control.

The woman raised the can, pointed the nozzle at Elizabeth, and started to squeeze. E shoved her chair back and tried to rise. Heath slammed past the frumpy woman and careened into Elizabeth. Both of them went down in a tangle of arms, legs, and chairs.

"Whore, Jezebel!" a woman's voice drilled into Heath's back. Sizzling and popping like a firecracker booth going up in flames seared the air. The small of Heath's back began to burn.

A loud thud and the crashing of more chairs cut off the shrieked epithets. "Stay down!" she heard Anna yell. "Stay down, God damn you."

"It's on me!" A high-pitched scream. "It's on me."

"Artie!" Anna again. And, "Keep her down."

A gasp came from nearby, and then Heath heard a small voice in her ear. "Mom, you're squishing me."

All of her weight and all of her electronics were pinning Elizabeth to the pavement. Heath tried to lever her upper body off, but her arms were shaking, muscles as weak as overcooked pasta. "I can't move," Heath panted. "Push me."

Small strong hands shoved against her shoulders. Heath was raised far enough that she could see her daughter's face. So beautiful. "Are you all right, E?" Heath's voice quavered with tears. Some good she was in a crisis. Dead wailing weight.

"I think so," Elizabeth said uncertainly.

"Help me! It's on my face!" the obscene woman screamed.

Elizabeth pushed Heath until she could roll off. There she lay on her back, helpless as a stranded beetle, the electronic legs still twisted.

Anna moved into the airspace above. "You okay?" she demanded.

"Yes," Heath managed.

"You?"