"Aren't you headed the wrong way?"

"There's more room to turn around at the gorge lookout."

There was plenty of room here for anyone who knew how to drive, but Dinah didn't object. His dawdling would be a relief after that ride with Zenia. He obviously had no compunction about backbiting and she egged him on. "Zenia doesn't like the villagers and vice versa. Do you know why?"

"Kanaris has always been a haven for leftists and Zenia and Phaedon represented the anticommunist junta. There were demonstrations for Marilita after her arrest and some of the villagers hung banners proclaiming their gratitude that she had struck a blow against tyranny. Over the years, whenever the opportunity presents, Zenia takes pains to remind them." He chortled. "What is the line? The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons."

Dinah was awed by the sheer duration of the feud. If the sons of the sinners were still alive, they'd be grandfathers by now.

Egan turned into the small, unpaved area marked with a crooked wooden sign in Greek and a badly carved horse with wings.

"What does the sign say?"

"Pegasus Point." He completed his U-turn and started to leave.

"Wait. I'd like to take a look if you don't mind."

He stopped the car and pulled up the hand brake. "You can see all that's worth seeing from the car."

"How deep is it?"

"Two hundred and forty meters."

Dinah multiplied by three and peered down. "Is there a stream or river at the bottom?"

"There used to be a small stream. Zenia's father owned all of this land, but when I was a lad, the villagers regarded the gorge and the forest as their hunting ground. After Phaedon's death, Zenia posted trespassing signs. There's an easement for the hiking trail along the perimeter, but going into the gorge is prohibited. Of course, no one pays any heed to the postings. They do what they can to repay Zenia for her malice."

Dinah was about to question him about the mnimosyno, but a plume of dark, oily smoke caught her eye. It rose out of the wooded depths below like a snake swaying to a charmer's flute. Was someone burning his garbage way down there? The smell that assailed her nostrils wasn't animal or vegetable. It was noxious, burning rubber and plastic.

She jumped out of the car and leaned over the railing. The source of the smoke was an overturned car. She could see one blue door twisted askew like a broken wing. Thor's car was that exact same blue.

A sick feeling washed over her. "Do you have a cell phone, Egan?"

"Of course." He got out of the car and walked over to the railing. "What's the problem?"

"Call for help. Call an ambulance. I'm going down."

She ran along the railing, looking for a gap or a trail. Where the railing ended, she saw a chute of broken trees and scree where the car had plunged over the side. She sideslipped down a short way, climbed over a log, and sideslipped another few yards. She strained her eyes. Was it Thor's car or another blue car? Except for size, most modern cars looked alike to her and this one had landed upside down. Maybe she was catastrophizing and Thor was merrily going about his business in town this morning. What would he be doing on this side of the gorge anyway? If he'd come to talk with Zenia, either she or Egan would have mentioned that he'd been there. She felt a spasm of relief, followed immediately by a spasm of guilt. What happened here spelled catastrophe for somebody.

Above, she heard Egan talking in a high, excited voice. He alternated between Greek and English. She wished she could hear and understand the other end of the call. Did Samos have a helicopter to airlift an injured person out of this gorge? Did they have a Jaws of Life to pry apart the wreckage if someone was trapped?

Her feet slipped out from under her and she went down hard on her backside and the palms of her hands. When she got up, her hands were skinned and bleeding and embedded with grit. She wiped them on the knees of her pants and scouted around for an easier descent. A wheel had come off the car on its downward plunge and rolled at least a hundred yards diagonally through the scrub until it collided with a tree and fell over on its side. The path it took appeared less steep than the one she was on and she cut across the slope in that direction. If she were going to stay upright, she would have to zigzag down the mountain like a skier.

Belatedly, she remembered water. Why did she never have the stuff when she needed it? Not only was she getting hotter and thirstier by the minute, but water might have been the only help she could have offered the crash victim. She reached for her phone to call Egan, but she'd left it in her purse in the car. She remembered how Thor had agonized over the Utoya massacre in Norway. If the cops had carried guns, kids could have been saved. The same sense of incompetence afflicted her now. If she carried water or a phone or knew anything at all about how to control bleeding or prevent shock, she might be able to save...whoever was in that car.

Her shoes had collected a painful lot of sand and pebbles and she could feel the beginnings of a blister on her left heel, but she had too much downward momentum to stop now. Her hands felt sticky from blood and pine resin where she had been grabbing onto trees to keep from falling and her face stung from heat and sweat. She dashed a drop of sweat out of her eyes and realized that she'd lost her Wayfarers.

The heat and stink of burning plastic and rubber grew stronger and she advanced cautiously. The roof and front seat compartment had crumpled nearly flat and the rear end was charred. The gas tank must have exploded. She scrambled over a downed tree and crept around to look at the front grill. It was a Peugeot. Thor's Peugeot.

She slumped onto the ground. Nobody could have walked away from that one. He was dead. A few hours ago she'd cursed her fate over a lousy set of slashed tires. Now the Fates had shown her what they could do when they got serious. Breathing hurt, as if she were inhaling shards of glass. She wanted to cry, but she couldn't. There'd be plenty of time to cry, plenty of time to reflect on the fact that her last words to him had been mean and petulant. Time to think about all the ways she'd let him down. She forced herself to stand up, tried to steel herself against the sight of his dead body, but prayed anyway. Don't let him be dead. Please, please, please don't let him be dead.

She walked around to the driver's window. The glass had disintegrated into a mass of green rubble and there was only a small gap between the squashed roof and the chassis. Careless of the glass, she lay down on her belly. The airbag had deployed and the mass of deflated nylon curtained the interior. Was the airbag what caused that gunshot smell? She pushed the fabric aside and saw detached hunks of the dashboard. The steering wheel had mangled like a coat hanger. The seat was empty.

Had he been thrown from the car or jumped free before impact? Was he lying down here somewhere injured and unable to climb out?

"Thor?" She yelled his name over and over again, but there was no answer. It was as if he'd gone up in the plume of smoke still snaking up from the rear of the Peugeot.

Chapter Fifteen.

Dinah sat on the unbroken section of the railing over the gorge and tried not to moan out loud. She drank a liter of water furnished by a baby-faced emergency medical technician who looked as helpless as she felt. The other technician, an older guy with a gaunt face and a sour mouth, was reading Egan the riot act in Greek. From what she could gather, the gist of his gripe was that they had driven their big white ambulance up this snaky mountain road to rescue a man who wasn't here. To his credit, Egan seemed to be giving as good as he got. What he lacked in stature, he made up for in hauteur.

She poured a little of the cool water on her stinging hands and scoured the slopes of the gorge for the hundredth time. This was the steeper, more sparsely wooded side. Looking across the gorge floor, she could see sections of a less precipitous trail winding up through the pines. She had climbed halfway to the top calling his name, but there was no sign that he'd walked out that way and she turned back.

Tears welled as Sergeant Papas and two other policemen drove up and got out of their car. She hopped off the railing, but her legs felt limp and she reached back and braced herself on the rail. She knew that Papas spoke English because Thor had spoken to him in English. She burst into a torrent of words. "He's not down there. His car is totaled and he's not there. I called and walked around and around. He must have been thrown free, but he's unconscious. Maybe in the trees above the floor."

Papas stepped to the railing and took in the wreckage below. "Did you see blood on or near the car?"

Her heart leapt up. "No. No, I didn't see blood. My car was vandalized this morning. Maybe somebody stole his car and pushed it over the cliff. Did he call you? Did he report his car stolen?"

"There have been no reports of a stolen car." He had a husky voice, low but oddly gentle. He had a somber face and deep-set, shrewd little eyes. He scoped out the gorge floor through binoculars. "It's possible the car landed on top of him and you were unable to see."

She couldn't let herself think along those lines or she'd lose it. "Do you have equipment to extricate him if he's trapped?"

"It's on the way."

"And if he was thrown clear, is there a search and rescue helicopter on the island? Can you radio for more searchers?"

"If we need to." Papas raised the binoculars and scanned the horizon. "Perhaps this is a strategy."

"What?"

"Perhaps the Inspector wants to disappear."

"Why would he want to disappear?" She rolled this two cents over in her mind. Pancake his car over the side of a cliff? It wasn't practical. It wasn't Norwegian. "He wouldn't do something like this," she said. "He absolutely wouldn't do something like this without telling me."

Papas gave her a quizzical look.

She disregarded the implied skepticism. "If you'll notice the tread marks, Sergeant, he seems to have been driving down the mountain from the other direction. Where does this road lead?"

"Nowhere. It deadends in less than a kilometer at an abandoned marble quarry. He may have gone to the end of the road to turn around."

"Does anyone besides Zenia Stephanadis have a house on this road?"

"No." He hung the binoculars around his neck, put on his dark glasses, and scribbled a number on the back of a card. "Here is my phone number. If the Inspector is in the lagkadi, we will find him."

She drew in a ragged breath and watched him trek off into the abyss with the other two men.

The sour-mouthed EMT thumbed his nose at Egan and shouted after Papas. There was a curt exchange, after which the EMT climbed behind the wheel of the ambulance.

"What did they say?" Dinah asked Egan.

"The ambulance driver says he can't wait. They must be on call for other emergencies."

"But it'll take time to get another ambulance back up here. Thor may need help right away."

"Samos has limited resources," said Egan.

The nice EMT threw Dinah an apologetic look and swung up into the passenger seat. After a number of short forward and backward lunges, the ambulance took off back down the mountain.

Dinah tried to pull herself together. Zenia had said that Thor asked her about the junta last night. She turned to Egan. "Was Thor at Zenia's house last night?"

"No. I believe she did have one phone call."

"What about this morning? Did he come by before I got there?"

"If he drove past, he didn't stop in."

"And you didn't hear screeching brakes or the sound of the impact?"

"No, nothing. Of course, Zenia wouldn't hear Gotterdammerung."

Dinah had the sense that Zenia cultivated the myth of deafness as part of her dramatic persona. She heard more than she let on. "Is there a Norwegian Embassy in Greece?"

"Yes, but aren't you being premature?"

"In what way?"

"I should give more thought to the Sergeant's hypothesis if I were you. Policemen engage in all manner of covert operations. This is probably a ruse of some sort. Your inspector is probably lying doggo with a telephoto lens, spying on the gang that he's investigating."

She gave Egan a leery look. "What makes you think he's investigating a gang? How do you know he's investigating anyone?"

"Isn't he? Zenia led me to believe that the policeman who'd let Marilita's house was here to make inquiries and everyone had better be on guard."

"On guard against what?"

"Discovery, I should say. The people of Kanaris have always had a predilection to illicit pursuits and the poor economy has worsened everyone's finances. I thought he was probably investigating illegal drugs or money laundering or some such." He ran a finger around the inside of his collar and flexed his wrinkly neck. "I've already phoned Zenia with the news about Ramberg, by the way. Poor old puss. She sounded quite distressed." He went back to the cliff edge to watch the police searching down below.

Dinah grabbed her purse out of his car, pulled out her phone, and dialed Thor's number. He had his phone with him all the time. If he was anywhere near the Peugeot, the searchers would hear it ring and move in the direction of the sound. Or if he had it turned off, they could use GPS tracking to locate him. But the phone didn't ring. She didn't even get his voice mail.

She called K.D., who picked up on the first ring. "Has Thor called? Has he been there?"

"No, but I'm super glad you called. I've been thinking about our problem and the answer is so totally simple. I should have remembered. An attorney that Daddy used to work with lives in Athens, Alex Drake. He has a daughter my age and I'm sure he'd love to have me stay..."

"Shut up, will you?"

"Well, snap. You sound kind of lathery."

She told K.D. about Thor's car at the bottom of the gorge.

"Oh. My. God."

"He wasn't inside," said Dinah.

"You think he may still be alive then?"

"I don't know. I hope."

"I'll wait here, Dinah. If I hear anything or if anyone calls, I'll let you know right away."

Dinah joined Egan at the railing. She tried to think logically. Either Thor had somehow been able to scrabble out of the wreckage and was lying hurt somewhere, or Papas and Egan were right and he had faked the crash. She would like to believe that Thor had disappeared for some cloak-and-dagger reason, but her intuition...no, her common sense told her that he hadn't. If he wanted to disappear, it would be supremely stupid to cause a flaming crash guaranteed to draw police and spectators for miles around.

If somebody wanted to kill him and make it look like an accident, they'd leave his body in the car. But if they just wanted him temporarily out of the way so he didn't interfere with their plans, he might have been dragged off and locked up in somebody's wine cellar. Killing an international cop would cause more trouble than it was worth. Whatever the situation, the people he was working for needed to know that he'd gone missing.

She Googled the National Criminal Investigative Service of Norway. N.C.I.S. Incredibly, a telephone number popped up. She moved out of range of Egan's ears and dialed it. Not knowing which person or office to communicate her concerns to, she left an urgent message with the receptionist that one of their agents was missing on the island of Samos in suspicious circumstances and she requested that someone in authority return her call ASAP. She repeated her cell phone number twice, very clearly, and hung up. It crossed her mind that this phone call could end Thor's career if N.C.I.S. was finicky about their agents confiding in their girlfriends, but she couldn't think about that now.

She scrolled through the list of embassies in Athens, but stopped. Interpol. Thor had said that N.C.I.S. coordinated with Interpol. They probably had dozens of agents operating in Greece. She Googled Interpol for a contact number and found this: When to contact Interpol. Never. Interpol does not provide investigative services directly to individuals. However, it never hurts to ask local law enforcement of member countries if they are coordinating with Interpol.

Egan turned back from the railing. "The search could go on for hours. I need to be getting on. Where shall I drop you?"

"I'm not leaving until they find him."

"As you wish. But if I were you, I would take care to have independent transportation available in the event you decide to remain on the island. Zenia and I have work to do on the film. We can't be counted on to provide you taxi service."

Egan snailed along as if he were leading a funeral procession. Dinah fidgeted and pressed her feet against the floorboard as if she could impel the Hyundai forward. She felt stymied and feverish. The air conditioning gave her goose bumps. Thor would have loved it.

Where was he? If he had faked the crash, for whatever reason, he would have left her a letter. Even if he believed she was breaking off the affair, he would have left her a letter. She hadn't looked inside the Picanto. He could have taken her keys before she woke up this morning, placed a letter in the car where it wouldn't be seen by Alcina, and returned the key. Maybe he was delivering a letter when the tire slashers showed up. They might have stabbed him, stuffed him in the trunk of his own car, driven it up here, and sent it hurtling off into the gorge. She shivered. The trunk had been mashed flat.

A sheep pounced out of the trees into the middle of the road. Egan braked hard and they watched as one by one, a whole raucous, baa-ing flock bowled down a steep dirt path and bunched in front of the car like a rockslide.

Dinah ducked her head and looked up through the dust cloud to her left. "Where are they coming from?"

"From overgrazed pastures to new." Egan pulled up the emergency brake. "Rather quaint. One forgets how pastoral parts of the island still are."

A young man with long, curly hair bopped out of the woods, rotating his shoulders and wagging his head to whatever music his iPod was channeling into his ears. When he saw the car, his face broke into an ebullient smile and he plucked the buds out of his ears. "Kalimera!"

Dinah rolled down her window, stuck her head out, and returned his good day. "Kalimera. Can you herd them to the side of the road, parakalo? We're in a dreadful hurry."

He frowned and shook his head.