Heath heard Elizabeth repeat, "I think so."

"What's that smell? What's making that noise?" Anna asked. Elizabeth was sitting up now; Heath could see her if she craned her neck sideways.

"I don't know," E said.

Heath drew in a breath, tasting the air: singed fabric, burning plastic, a biting acridity. She listened to the sizzling crackling noise coming from beneath her. The small of her back burned like fire. Though there was no flame and no smoke, the woman must have managed to ignite the lighter fluid before Anna tackled her. Some of it must have struck Dem Bones' power pack, where it sat across Heath's hips.

Heath sighed. "I think the smell is me on fire. I'm afraid the racket is the sound of a couple hundred thousand dollars' worth of electronics being destroyed."

Anna had her rolled over and her shirt ripped up the back before Heath could say anything else.

"Artie, call an ambulance," Anna said.

"What's burning? Where is it burning?" Elizabeth was asking.

"No fire," Anna said. "Acid. Battery acid is my guess. E, go into the coffee shop and bring as much clean water as you can and scissors or a sharp knife. Do it now, and do it quickly." Heath felt her hips being jerked sideways and heard what sounded like fabric ripping. Facedown, a view of nothing but table legs and an overturned chair, Heath felt helpless.

Nothing made her angrier than feeling helpless.

"Talk to me!" she said through clenched teeth.

Instead of a reply she felt a cold wet cloth drop onto the small of her back. "Dab gently. As much water as you can without dripping. We don't want to spread the stuff," Anna said.

"Got it," E said.

"Artie, see if you can get Cybercreep to shut the hell up and get some water on her face to dilute the acid," Anna said.

"Talk to me or I'm going to bite you!" Heath said.

"Sorry, Mom." E's voice was shaking as bad as Heath's. "The can had battery acid in it. A little got on your skin above Dem Bones. Anna has cut away the shirt and the straps so we can get anything that has acid on it away from your skin. It ate right through your skirt. It's like horror movie special effects. Dem Bones is practically melting. Most of it got on the power pack."

Heath groaned. "There goes your college education."

A wet sobbing litany of "My face, my face, oh no, my face, she wouldn't be pretty without her face, little baby-faced whore, he wouldn't look at her with no face, not my face, no, no..." burbled in a monologue from the other side of the table.

"Are the cuffs on?" Anna asked.

"In front, so she can wash her face," Artie said.

"Help me sit up," Heath told Elizabeth. Before E could start to argue, Heath said, "Please," in a tone that was so pathetic she was almost embarrassed to use it to manipulate her only child.

As they'd done a thousand times before, Elizabeth braced her knees to either side of Heath's and, locking wrists, pulled her to a seated position. Once Heath was stable, E moved behind her and knelt, making herself into a living backrest.

Not more than a couple of yards away the woman in the pink curler cap was sitting on the ground, dribbling words and snot as she dabbed at her face with fat little white hands forced closed with silver handcuffs. Acid had splashed onto one of her cheeks and the side of her mouth. The flesh was red and beginning to blister.

This mewling miserable creature was the person who had filled E's life with threat and filth, then tried to burn her face off with battery acid.

"Who in the hell is this?" Heath asked.

Anna, who was standing slightly behind the woman talking on her cell phone, reached down without interrupting her conversation and pulled off the curler cap and, with it, a red curly wig.

Blond hair tumbled out. Blue-framed glasses fell from her nose. Heath didn't recognize her, although, through the snot, the blistering, and the smeared, mud-colored lipstick, she did seem familiar.

"Mrs. Edleson?" Elizabeth gasped.

FORTY-FIVE.

The adrenaline dumped into Anna's system during the excitement of capturing Elizabeth's cybercreep had drained away. Despite the fact that she had slept a good portion of the day, Anna was so tired she could scarcely breathe. Drugged sleep did not refresh the way natural sleep did. Rather than resting, she felt as if she'd spent those hours in a morass of thick oily dreams and mind-numbing traps from which she could not escape into consciousness.

Hunched over the steering wheel of the patrol car used by erstwhile ranger Denise Castle, Anna was aware of her vision tunneling until all she could see was the red taillights in the lane ahead as she followed the second of two ambulances to Mount Desert Hospital.

In the first, with two female officers from the Bar Harbor Police Department, was Mrs. Sam Edleson, the flesh of half her jaw and lower lip eaten away by the acid she'd intended to use to disfigure Elizabeth. Often the why of a crime remained unknown long after the who, what, when, where, and how had been solved. Not so this time. Regardless of the pain talking must have caused with her ruined lip, Terry Edleson wouldn't shut up about why.

According to her, E had lured poor chinless Sam to the dark side with her wanton ways. So bewitched was Sam that he talked of Elizabeth, raved about her firm young flesh, and spied on her through the hedge between the houses.

Abused himself.

First, goodwife Terry had tried to warn E of the dangers of harlotry by destroying her reputation on the Internet, using pornographic images to shock her into good behavior, as well as to make it clear to Sam just what sort of girl he was obsessed with.

Such was the power Elizabeth held over Sam that he actually liked the pornographic images.

Go figure.

Then came the night when Elizabeth was at the Edleson house, when Tiffany had been sent out with her little brother, the night when Elizabeth had all but forced darling Sam to sexually assault her. That was when Terry realized she had to take it to the next level.

She began making threats.

Even then Elizabeth failed to loose her hold on Sam's libido. A couple of off-duty cops roughed Sam up. A rude "uniformed female" visited Terry in her home. That was the handwriting on the wall, Terry told Anna and the Bar Harbor policewomen, and in big black letters it said ELIZABETH WOULD NEVER LEAVE SAM ALONE.

Unless she was made hideous with acid burns to her face.

When her smooth soft flesh was furrowed and scarred, her gentle mouth melted, her brown fawn eyes white with blindness, then and only then would Sam be free.

At that moment, except for the fact that it was illegal to execute an insane individual, Anna could have wrung Terry's fat little neck with as little remorse as a turkey farmer on Thanksgiving eve.

Breathing deeply, Anna banished the wretched Mrs. Edleson from her mental jurisdiction. If the woman died in the ambulance, her face rotted off, if she went to hell, to prison, or back to Boulder-it was all the same to Anna.

Rohypnol hangover and fatigue ruined her powers of concentration. Fantasies of a long sauna to sweat out the toxins, a massage to unknot the muscles, and a husband's shoulder to lay her head on were about all she was willing to hold in her tattered cerebrum for more than a second or two.

That and the taillights.

The second ambulance, the one Anna followed with such dogged determination, carried Heath, E, and Gwen. The area of Heath's back affected by acid burns was small. Most of the acid had struck Dem Bones' power pack, only a small amount hitting bare skin. Cool water, quickly applied, kept the burns superficial, probably second degree at worst. Anna had no way of knowing what Heath's leaping, lunging, falling, and floundering with chairs and girls and electronic exoskeletons had done to the unfeeling half of her friend's body.

The dual red eyes of the taillights wavered as Anna's eyes watered and strained. Blinking, she pushed her face closer to the windshield. The movement set off the scrapes on her butt and heel, scabs cracking, blood oozing. Considering the possibilities, she'd gotten off lightly. Yesterday's contusions, and the shoulder she'd used to take down Terry Edleson, were the worst of it.

After a miserable eternity, the ambulances turned off the winding road out of the town of Bar Harbor and into the front lot of Mount Desert Hospital. As hospitals went, Mount Desert was small. Its age and the warm brick facade robbed it of the sterile futility the sight of most hospitals stirred in Anna's breast.

The ambulances pulled up beneath a bright sign reading EMERGENCY. In a fog, Anna nearly rear-ended the vehicle carrying Heath before she realized the flare of taillights meant it had stopped. Cursing softly, she backed out, drove around the corner into the dimly lit lot, and parked the borrowed Crown Vic.

Levering herself out of the driver's seat, Anna grunted. Gone were the days she could tackle someone and wrestle them to the ground without paying for it. Tomorrow, no doubt, she would discover a medley of bruises where Terry had managed to get in a few licks before she was subdued.

As she walked back to the emergency room entrance, she nearly bumped into Peter Barnes. Staring up at the towering form blocking out the light, she was momentarily disoriented. "Did I call you?" she asked stupidly.

"No," Peter said, taking her arm as if she needed steadying. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," Anna said. "Who called you?"

"Nobody. Anna, let's go in and sit down, maybe get somebody to look at you." He began steering her into the harsh lights of the ER waiting room. "Lily will be here in a sec. Why don't you tell me how it went tonight with your stalker, why you're here."

Peter was talking in the gentle tones used to calm crazy people, or people too sick to stand any kind of shock.

"It went fairly well," Anna said. His assumption of her frailty annoyed her, but since she couldn't think of anything she'd rather do than sit down for a minute, she let him lead her to a chair.

"Who got hurt?" Peter asked.

"Heath, but not badly, I don't think. The perp has facial burns, fairly severe I hope. The stalker was Elizabeth's best friend's mother. A woman who baked the girls cookies. Her husband had a hard-on for Elizabeth, so his wife trashed her on the Internet. A couple of weeks ago, he tried to molest Elizabeth, and the woman went psycho. Blamed E. Tried to squirt acid in Elizabeth's face."

Anna let her head drop back and closed her eyes against the fluorescent lights.

"But you're not hurt?" Peter insisted.

"You mean in addition to being dead?" Anna asked.

"Yes, in addition to that." Peter's chuckle, low and throaty, almost like the purr of a cat, washed reassuringly over her.

"Bumps and bruises," she said. "Other than that, nary a scratch."

"Oh my God! What happened to you!" came an exclamation.

She opened her eyes. Lily Barnes.

It finally occurred to her to wonder why, if she hadn't called him, Peter was here, and why Lily was here at all.

"What happened to you?" Anna countered, wincing as she dragged her butt over the plastic, pulling herself up straight in the chair "Olivia got real sick," Lily said. "Vomiting, diarrhea, then a seizure. God, it was terrifying. The doctor thinks she may have an allergy or ingested something toxic. We've been wracking our brains. Paint on the bassinet? Dog fur? I'm going to have to go over the whole house with a Q-tip."

"Is she okay?" Anna asked, rubbing her eyes. Fine grit scraped across the sclera as if she'd spent the day at a windy beach.

"Yes. She's sleeping. The doctor thinks she'll be fine. They just want to keep her overnight for observation because of the seizure," Lily said. The young woman's brave smile looked ragged around the edges. Sinking down, she settled on the edge of the chair next to Anna. Lily laid her hand gently on Anna's arm and, with seemingly genuine concern, asked, "What happened to you?"

A nurse pushed through the glass double doors on the far side of the waiting room. One of the doors flashed Anna's reflection at her. The mystery of why people kept asking what happened to her was solved. In the fracas, her braid had come undone; her hair was hanging witchlike around a face drawn and white with fatigue. Unused to wearing makeup, she'd rubbed her eyes until they were ringed with black mascara. What lipstick remained on her lips was only in the crevices, like red stitches.

Anna laughed abruptly. "I'm better than I look." She laughed again. A worried frown formed two lines between Peter's dark eyebrows. "No. I'm good," Anna said to put him out of his misery. "Just tired and, obviously, frighteningly disheveled. No new wounds. I'm sorry about poor little Olivia."

"Why don't you stay at our house?" Lily offered. "It's nearly an hour's drive to Schoodic. We have plenty of room."

Anna accepted gratefully. "I'll be over after I check on Heath," Anna said. "I'll try and be quiet."

"Don't worry," Peter said. "I doubt we'll be getting a whole lot of sleep until we have Olivia home safe and sound." A pained expression crossed his face. "I hate to ask..." he began.

"Ask," Anna said.

"Denise forgot a model in her office. She bought it when we went to Hawaii once. I was going to drop it by her apartment as a sort of good-bye peace offering. Given the situation, would you mind?"

Anna would, but she didn't have a baby in seizures, and a checkered past with the model's recipient.

"Not a problem."

"You go ahead and find your friend. I'll stick it in your car." Peter took her keys. "I'll leave these at the front desk."

Anna nodded her thanks and went to find Heath.

FORTY-SIX.

Denise watched Peter and Lily leaving the hospital. Hand in hand. Enough to make a person want to puke. When Denise and Peter had been together, Peter wouldn't hold hands in public. Too much like a Hallmark card, he said. Big ranger man was self-conscious showing his softer side, he joked. What a load of crap.

Didn't matter. Tonight he was going to lose that softer side. She wasn't after revenge, Denise told herself. The fact that Peter would suffer was just a perk. Denise was all about justice.

The radio she'd conveniently forgotten to return to the NPS when she retired lay on the passenger seat. She looked from Peter Barnes to the radio. All day she'd had the thing on, waiting for the shit storm about the missing Anna Pigeon to hit the airwaves. Nothing. Either nobody noticed the pigeon's comings and goings or they weren't talking about it. Maybe they booted it upstairs and were quietly waiting for the FBI to come and save their collective ass. Denise didn't believe that. The NPS considered itself the search-and-rescue experts. They would have mounted a search. Everybody would have been on the radio all day to show how important they were.

Never mind, Denise told herself. Not her problem. Silence was golden.

After the adorable Mr. and Mrs. Barnes had driven out of the parking lot, Denise punched a number into her disposable cell phone and waited. Three rings. Four. What was Paulette doing that was so important she couldn't answer the goddam phone?

"Hello," came a whisper in Denise's ear.

"Time to take a smoke break," Denise said. "Bring a face mask, hairnet, and one of those sterile coat thingies." She punched the END CALL button without waiting for her sister's response.

From various trips to Mount Desert Hospital on EMT business, and, once, to have her tonsils out-a thing like mumps or measles, a real bitch when you were an adult-Denise had a fairly good idea of the layout. What she needed from Paulette was specific locations of patients, things that were fluid and couldn't be easily predicted. That, and where there were cameras, if there were any.

Ten minutes later by the dashboard clock in the new SUV, Paulette finally saw fit to emerge from the rear door of the hospital beside the Dumpster. In the wan light of the single security bulb, she looked around furtively, the items Denise had asked for clutched to her breast. Even in pink teddy-bear scrubs she managed to look as guilty as hell.

"Holy shit," Denise breathed. Paulette had to be kept out of any kind of heat that might be generated by this night. She probably lacked the capacity to lie about her age or weight, let alone a felony murder and all the rest.

Denise tried to tell herself that this was good, this was the honest half of herself, this was her innocence lost, but she wasn't buying it. Paulette needed to grow a backbone if they were going to have a good life together. At least for the first couple of years. After that they could let down a little, relax, and enjoy themselves.

Finally deciding the coast was clear, Paulette trotted toward the Volvo.