"Yes. Mostly computer work, government fraud. Pretty low key. I applied for extra course work at Quantico and rotation to a big-city division. I'm up for a job in Los Angeles...if I don't screw up here."

"You won't screw up, Tracy."

"You sound so sure."

"Trust me."

She liked being with him. It had been so long since she had talked, really talked to a man.

"So, Frank. What's your story?"

He told her. Everything. About the two wives, his loathing for the snake pit within the Beltway and desire for a new start. His dedication to the job. His life-defining case in Georgia, which earned him his reputation as a prick and shaped his legendary status as an investigator.

When he finished, she said, "It's getting very late, we should turn in."

Zander walked Bowman to her room. She thanked him at her door, was about to say good night when his eyes held hers.

"Tracy, I--"

She saw desperation in his face. In the short time they talked, they both realized they were two painfully lonely people at the crossroads of their lives. Each had something the other wanted, needed, yearned for. Yet each was so afraid. A strange feeling came over her.

Would he be good with Mark?

What was happening? It was like meeting someone wonderful at a funeral. There is time, Bowman thought. If it is meant to be, there is time.

"The morning is almost here, Frank," she said. "We've got to see this thing through to the end."

He nodded and walked off, checking his watch. He was going to his room to review the videotaped interviews of Doug and Emily Baker. In a few hours he expected to be laying charges in the death of their ten-year-old daughter, Paige.

FIFTY-THREE.

Emily was alone, listening to the night wind whipping her tent at the command post. Depriving her of sleep, of rational thought, fraying her soul.

She was slipping from sanity into a yawning abyss.

Paige's face. Rachel's eyes. Falling.

God. Please.

Darkness into darkness. The accusing wind.

Where's Rachel? Where's your sister?

Where's Doug? He's been gone so long. The FBI took him. Zander took him. Leaving her alone with strangers. The agents, who never smiled, were watching her, and it was so cold. Lord, help me. I am begging you. End this, please. If Paige is not alive, I cannot bear to face it again.

My Sun Ray. Her eyes. Her hand brushing mine, slipping from mine.

The wind would not stop.

Remembering her obsession after it happened. After Rachel died, her need to comprehend, to understand, to know...what a human being experiences in the seconds they are falling to their death.

She had to know.

Emily actually studied it.

Terminal velocity. Vestibuar sensory input. Horror in her eyes. The overload of messages through the neurological system. The automatic impulse to defy reality by "grabbing at air" in order to save one's self. Fear in her face. Hands reaching. Suspended in space as the earth rushes to hammer your life into heaven. Knowing death was upon her. The "agonal phase," the instant before death when all that is physical in a being ends. Did she suffer? Emily had spent her life searching to know if her sister could have been comforted by some spiritual phenomenon.

Rachel was only five years old.

Did she suffer? She had to know.

The wind would not tell her.

Where's your daughter, Emily? Where's your husband?

Doug had been alone with Paige. Had been the last to see her.

Emily, I sent her to be with you. I thought she was with you. She followed you with Kobee, I swear, not more than five minutes after you left. I thought all this time she was with you.

His hurt hand. Her T-shirt was wrapped around it. Chopping wood. They had argued so intensely. He was incensed with her for not talking to him about her family history.

No.

Stop thinking like that. She was drunk with exhaustion. Struggling.

She was slipping. Falling.

Paige, come back, please.

FIFTY-FOUR.

Is Paige still alive?

She has to be.

Doug had to hope beyond hope. Not give in to doubt, the traitor. Paige had to know he had not abandoned her.

Bitter winds shook the command center, clattering the window of his room. He lay on a soft, dry cot, under the warmth of a woolen blanket. A huge bowl of vegetable soup and butter biscuits sitting cold, untouched a few feet from him, tempting him, mocking him. He broke down and wept.

If Paige was alive, she was fighting for her life.

He had no appetite.

Oh, Paige, can you ever forgive me?

If you're dead...

Doug stared as his wounded hand.

She had only wanted to talk and I chased her away with an ax in my hand. "Get the hell away from me and go find your damned mother!"

Emily.

Emily had a sister. Her sister was dead. Emily was present with Isaiah Hood when he sister was killed. Do I actually believe my own wife could have harmed my daughter?

The night they arrived in Montana.

He recalled again watching Emily slip out of bed at the Holiday Inn watching the TV item about Hood's execution. He remembered glimpsing her as she rummaged through her purse, retrieving something. She sat by the window, staring at the retrieved item, then into the night, weeping softly.

In the morning when Emily showered, he scoured her bag and found it. Old snapshots. She had sat up studying old pictures. Girls. A group of girls playing in the mountains. Smiling, laughing. Childhood friends, he thought.

One of the girls looked familiar.

It became clear to him now.

The face in the newspaper. The little girl Isaiah Hood had murdered. Emily's sister.

Rachel.

Oh Christ. It's true. The FBI is not lying. He had not wanted to think about it. It was starting to fit together. This was the ghost of her past.

What do the police know that he didn't?

His skin prickled.

They were digging hard into their lives. Revealing nothing.

"Do you know Cammi Walton?"

Yes. Most teachers knew Cammi was having terrible problems with her parents' divorce.

"Did you strike her?"

Had she made a wild accusation about him? It's possible. Her life was in turmoil. She'd had outbursts. He had done nothing wrong.

His lawyer telling him, "The fact is they are trying to build a case against you. They want to charge you."

Doug had to find out the truth about his family.

About his wife.

They know. The FBI knows something.

The wind swirled.

"Will you love me always no matter what, Doug?"

Paige.

Not a trace of her. Not a trace.

Doug searched the darkness for answers.

FIFTY-FIVE.

Tom Reed called his wife, in Chicago, on the chance she would be up so he could say good night to her and their son, Zach.

"He's sleeping like a log. Went to a Cubs game tonight with his uncle. Do you want me to wake him?"

Ann had just returned from her sister's bridal shower.

It was late. Reed was alone in his darkened room at the Sunshine Motel. Missing his family as the night winds blew down from the Rockies near Kalispell. His TV muted on All the President's Men.

"No. Let him sleep. Say, he's been doing pretty good, hasn't he?"

"Yes he's doing quite well since...the thing."

The thing.

That was Ann's name for Zach's abduction and near murder in the case of a madman who held three San Francisco children hostage several months ago. Reed had been reporting on it when "the thing" reached into their lives and nearly destroyed his family.

"Tom, you never answered my question. What do you think happened to that little girl in the mountains?"

He had told her about obtaining Emily Baker's confession-like letters, interviewing Hood, the looming execution, the FBI polygraphing Doug Baker, how everything was mounting with increasing intensity.