She dug her heels in. "We don't have to leave."

"The party's breaking up anyway. We'll beat everybody to the valet parking."

"You're sure?" She wanted to leave. To return to the banquet hall and possibly confront that gloating face again would be untenable. However, this was her audition. She didn't want to blow it and be left at the ranch when he went campaigning.

"I'm sure. Let's go."

They didn't say much on the way home. Avery tucked her feet beneath her hips and turned in the seat to face him. She wanted to touch him, to comfort and be comforted, but she satisfied herself with simply facing him.

Everyone was in bed when they arrived home. Silently they went together to Mandy's room, and, as they had promised, kissed her good night. She mumbled sleepily in response but didn't wake up.

As they moved down the hallway toward their respective bedrooms, Tate said offhandedly, "We'll be attending several formal functions. You probably should take that dress on the trip."

Avery spun around to face him. "You mean you want me to go?"

He looked at a spot beyond her head. "Everybody thinks it would be a good idea."

Unwilling to let him off that lightly, she gave his lapel a tug. His eyes connected with hers. "I'm only interested in what you think, Tate."

He deliberated for several tense moments before giving her his answer. "Yeah, I think it's a good idea. Eddy'll give you an itinerary in a day or two so you'll know what else to pack. Good night."

Bitterly disappointed in his lukewarm enthusiasm, Avery watched him walk down the hall and enter his room. Dejectedly, she went into hers alone and prepared for bed. She examined her dress, looking for damage done by Carole's ex-lover, whoever he'd been, but thankfully found none.

She was exhausted by the time she turned off the lamps, but when an hour went by and she still hadn't fallen asleep, she got out of bed and left her room.

Fancy decided to enter through the kitchen in case her grandfather had set up an ambush in the living room. She unlocked the door, disengaged the alarm system, and quietly reset it.

"Who's that? Fancy?"

Fancy nearly jumped out of her skin. "Jesus Christ, Aunt Carole! You scared the living shit out of me!" She reached for the light switch.

"Oh, my God." Avery sprang from her chair at the kitchen table and turned Fancy's face up toward the light. "What happened to you?" She grimaced as she examined the girl's swollen eye and bleeding lip.

"Maybe you can lend me your plastic surgeon," Fancy quipped before she discovered that it hurt to smile. Touching the bleeding cut with the tip of her tongue, she disengaged herself from her aunt. "I'll be all right." She moved to the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk, and poured herself a glass.

"Shouldn't you see a doctor? Do you want me to drive you to the emergency room?"

"Hell, no. And would you please keep your voice down? I don't want Grandma and Grandpa to see this. I'd never hear the end of it."

"What happened?"

"Well, it was like this." She scraped the cream filling out of an Oreo with her lower front teeth. "I went to this shit-kicker's dance hall. The place was swinging. Friday night, you knowapayday. Everybody was in a party mood. There was this one guy with a really cute ass." She ate the two disks of chocolate cookie and dug into the ceramic jar for another.

"He took me to a motel. We drank some beer and smoked some grass. He got a little too sublime, I guess, because when we got down to business, he couldn't get it up. Naturally, he took it out on me." As she summed up the tale, she dusted her hands of cookie crumbs and reached for the glass of milk.

"He hit you?"

Fancy gaped at her, then gave a semblance of a laugh. " 'He hit you?' " she mimicked. "What the hell do you think? Of course he hit me."

"You could have been seriously hurt, Fancy."

"I can't believe this," she said, rolling her eyes ceiling-ward in disbelief. "You always enjoyed hearing about my romantic interludes, said they gave you a vicarious thrill, whatever the hell that means."

"I'd hardly classify getting hit in the face romantic. Did he tie you up, too?"

Fancy followed her aunt's gaze down to the red circles around each of her wrists. "Yeah," she answered bitterly, "the bastard tied my hands together." Carole didn't have to know that the "bastard" she referred to wasn't the drunken, impotent cowboy.

"You're crazy to go to a motel room with a stranger like that, Fancy."

"I'm crazy? You're the one stuffing ice cubes in a Baggie."

"For your eye."

Fancy slapped away the makeshift ice pack. "Don't do me any favors, okay?"

"Your eye is turning black and blue. It's about to swell shut. Do you want your parents to see it like that and have to tell them the story you just told me?"

Irritably, Fancy snatched up the ice pack and held it against her eye. She knew her aunt was right.

"Do you want some peroxide for your lip? An aspirin? Something for the pain?"

"I had enough beer and grass to dull the pain."

Fancy was confused. Why was Carole being so nice to her? Since coming home from that luxury palace of a clinic, she had been freaking weird. She didn't yell at the kid anymore. She looked for things to do instead of sitting on her ass all day. She actually seemed to like Uncle Tate again.

Fancy had always considered Carole stupid for playing Russian roulette with her marriage. Uncle Tate was good-looking. All the girls she knew drooled over him. If her instincts in this field were any good, and she believed them to be excellent, he'd be terrific in bed.

She wished she had somebody who loved her as much as Uncle Tate had loved Carole when they had first gotten married. He'd treated her like a queen. She had been a fool to throw that away. Maybe she had reached that conclusion herself and was trying to win him back.

Fat chance.Fancy thought derisively. Once you crossed Uncle Tate, you were on his shit list for life.

"What are you doing up so late," she asked, "sitting all by yourself in the dark?"

"I couldn't sleep. I thought cocoa might help." There was a half-empty cup of chocolate on the table.

"Cocoa? That's a hoot."

"A proper insomnia remedy for a senator's wife," she replied with a wistful smile.

Fancy, never one to beat around the bush, asked, "You're mending your ways, aren't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know damn well what I mean. You're changing your image in the hopes that Uncle Tate will get elected and keep you on when he goes to Washington." She assumed a confidential, just-between-us-girls pose. "Tell me, did you give up humping all your boyfriends, or just Eddy?"

Her aunt's head snapped up. Her face went pale. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and wheezed, "What did you say?"

"Don't play innocent. I suspected it all along," Fancy said breezily. "I confronted Eddy with it."

"And what did he say?"

"Nothing. Didn't deny it. Didn't admit it. He responded as a gentleman should." Snorting rudely, she headed for the door that led to the other rooms of the house. "Don't worry. There's enough shit flying aroundhere already. I'm not going to tell Uncle Tate. Unless. . ."

She spun around, her attitude combative. "Unless you pick up your affair with Eddy again. It's me he's gonna be screwing from now on, not you. G'night ."

Feeling smug and satisfied for having made herself so unequivocally understood, Fancy sashayed from the kitchen. One look in the mirror over her bedroom dresser confirmed that her face was a mess.

It didn't occur to Fancy until days later that Carole was the only one in the family who had even noticed that she was sporting a black eye and a busted lip, and that she hadn't ratted on her.

TWENTY.

Van Lovejoy's apartment wasHouse Beautiful'sworst nightmare. He slept on a narrow mattress supported by concrete building blocks. Other pieces of furniture were just as ramshackle, salvaged from flea markets and junk stores.

There was a sad, dusty pinata , a sacrilegious effigyofElvis Presley, dangling from the light fixture. It was a souvenir he'd brought back from a visit to Nuevo Laredo. The goodies insideaseveral kilos of marijuanaawere but a memory. Except for the pihata , the apartment was unadorned.

The otherwise empty rooms were filled with videotapes. That and the equipment he used to duplicate, edit, and play back his tapes were the only things of any value in the apartment, and their worth was inestimable. Van was better equipped than many small video production companies.

Video catalogs were stacked everywhere. He subscribed to all of them and scoured them monthly in searchofa video he didn't already have or hadn't seen. Nearly all his income went to keeping his library stocked and updated.

His collection of movies rivaled any video rental store. He studied directing and cinematographic techniques. His taste was eclectic, ranging from Orson Welles to Frank Capra, Sam Peckinpah to Steven Spielberg. Whether filmed in black and white or Technicolor, camera moves fascinated him.

Besides the movies, his collection included serials and documentaries, along with every inch of tape he had shot himself in the span of his career. It was known throughout the state that if stock footage of an event was needed and it couldn't be found elsewhere, Van Lovejoy of KTEX in San Antonio would have it.

He spent all his free time watching tapes. Tonight, his fascination was centered on the raw footage he had shot at the Rocking R Ranch a few days earlier. He'd delivered the tapes to MB Productions, but not before making copiesofthem for himself. He never knew when something he'd shot years earlier might prove useful or valuable, so he kept copies of everything.

In post-production, MBP would write scripts, edit, record voice-overs, mix music, and end up with slick, fully produced commercials of varying lengths. Van's camera work would look sterilized and staged by the time the commercials went out over the air. He didn't care. He'd been paid. What interested him were the candid shots.

Tate Rutledge was charismatic on or off camera. Handsome and affluent, he was a walking success storyathe kind of man Van usually despised on principle. But if Van had been a voter, the guy would get his vote just because he seemed to shoot straight from the hip. He didn't bullshit, even when what he was saying wasn't particularly what people wanted to hear. He might lose the election, but it wouldn't be because he lacked integrity.

He kept thinking that there was something wrong with the kid. She was cute enough, although, in Van's opinion, one kid looked like another. He usually wasn't called upon to videotape children, but when he was, his experience had been that they had to be threatened or cajoled into settling down, behaving, and cooperating, especially when shooting retakes or reverse questions.

That hadn't been the case with the Rutledge kid. She was quiet and didn't do anything ornery. She didn't do anything, period, unless she was told to, and then she moved like a little wind-up doll. The one who got the most response out of her was Carole Rutledge.

It was she who really held Van enthralled.

Time and again he had played the tapesathose he'd shot of her at the ranch, and those he'd shot on the day she left the clinic. The lady knew what to do in front of a camera.

He'd had to direct Rutledge and the kid, but not her. She was a natural, always turning toward the light, knowing instinctively where to look. She seemed to know what he was about to do before he did it. Her face begged for close-ups. Her body language wasn't stilted or robotized, like most amateurs.

She was a pro.

Her resemblance to another pro he had known and worked with was damned spooky.

For hours he had sat in front of his console, replaying the tapes and studying Carole Rutledge. When she did make an awkward move, he believed it was deliberate, as if she realized just how good she was and wanted to cover it up.

He ejected one tape and inserted another, one he had shot so it could be played back in slow motion. He was familiar with the scene. It showed the threesome walking through a pasture of verdant grass, Rutledge carrying his daughter, his wife at his side. Van had planned his shot so that the sun was sinking behind the nearest hill, casting them in silhouette. It was a great effect, he thought now as he watched it for the umpteenth time.

And then he saw it! Mrs. Rutledge turned her head and smiled up at her husband. She touched his arm. His smile turned stiff. He moved his armaslightly, but enough to shrug off her wifely caress. If the tape hadn't been in slow motion, Van might not have even noticed the candidate's subtle rejection of his wife's touch.

He didn't doubt when the post-production was done, the shot would be edited out. The Rutledges would come out looking like Ozzie and Harriet. But there was something wrong with the marriage, just like there was something wrong with the kid. Something stunk in Camelot.

Van was a cynic by nature. It came as no surprise to him that the marriage was shaky. He figured they all were, and he didn't give a flying fig.

Yet the woman still fascinated him. He could swear that she had recognized him the other day before he had introduced himself. He was constantly aware of expressions and reactions, and he couldn't have mistaken that momentary widening of her eyes or the quick rush of her breath. Even though the features weren't identical, and the hairstyle was wrong, the resemblance between Carole Rutledge and Avery Daniels was uncanny. Carole's moves were right on target and the subconscious mannerisms eerily reminiscent.

He let the tape play out. Closing his eyes, Van pinched the bridge of his nose between two of his fingers until it hurt, as if wanting to force the notion out of his head, because what he was thinking was just too weirda"Twilight Zone" time. But the idea was fucking with his mind something fierce and he couldn't get rid of it, crazy as it was.

Several days ago he'd walked into Irish's office. Dropping into one of the armchairs, he'd asked, "Getachance to watch that tape I gave you?"

Irish, as usual, was doing six different things at once. He ran his hand over his burred gray hair. "Tape? Oh, the one of Rutledge? Who've we got on that human bone pile they found in Comal County?" he had shouted through his office door to a passing reporter.

"What'd you think about it?" Van asked, once Irish's attention swung back to him.

Irish had taken up smoking again since Avery wasn't there to hound him about it. He seemed to want to make up for lost time. He lit a new cigarette from the smoldering butt of another and spoke through the plume of unfiltered smoke. "About what?"

"The tape," Van said testily.

"Why? You moonlighting as a pollster?"

"Jesus," Van had muttered and made to rise. Irish cantankerously signaled him to sit back down. "What'd you want me to look at? Specifically, I mean."

"The broad."

Irish coughed. "You got the hots for her?"

Van remembered being annoyed that Irish hadn't noticed the similarities between Carole Rutledge and Avery Daniels. That should have been an indication of just how ridiculous his thinking was, because nobody knew Avery better than Irish. He had known her for two decades before Van had ever laid eyes on her. Mulishly, however, Irish's flippancy compelled him to prove himself right.

"I think she looks a lot like Avery."

Irish had been pouring himself a cup of viscous coffee from the hot plate on his littered credenza. He gave Van a sharp glance. "So, what else is new? Somebody remarked on that as soon as Rutledge got into politics and we started seeing him and his wife in the news."

"Guess I wasn't around that day."

"Or you were too stoned to remember."

"Could be."

Irish returned to his desk and sat down heavily. He worked harder than ever, putting in unnecessarily long hours. Everybody in the newsroom talked about it. Work was a panacea for his bereavement. A Catholic, he wouldn't commit suicide outright, but he would eventually kill himself through too much work, too much booze, too much smoking, too much stressaall the things about which Avery had affectionately berated him.

"You ever figure out who sent you her jewelry?" Van asked. Irish had confided that bizarre incident to him, and he had thought it strange at the time, but had forgotten about it until he had stood eyeball to eyeball with Carole Rutledge.

Irish thoughtfully shook his head. "No."

"Ever try?"

"I made a few calls."

Obviously, he didn't want to talk about it. Van was persistent. "And?"