I ask you, young ladies, what is it-?"

"It's Christmas!" Charlotte and Emily answered in unison, and their immediate response confirmed that he had them in his spell.

"Someday soon, we'll put up a tree.

Why only one? Maybe two, maybe three!

Deck it with tinsel and baubles bright.

It'll be an amazing and wonderful sight String colored lights out on the roof-pray none are broken by anything's hoof Salt down the shingles to melt the ice.

If Santa fell, it just wouldn't be nice.

He might fracture a leg or get a cut, perhaps even break his big jolly butt."

He glanced at the girls. Their faces seemed to shine in the shadows.

Without saying a word, they told him, Don't stop, don't stop!

God, he loved this. He loved them.

If heaven existed, it was exactly like this moment, this place.

"Oh, wait! I just heard terrible news.

Hope it won't give you Christmas blues.

Santa was drugged, tied up, and gagged, blindfolded, ear-stoppled, and bagged.

His sleigh is waiting out in the yard, and someone has stolen Santa's bank card.

Soon his accounts will be picked clean by the use of automatic-teller machines."

"Uh-oh," Charlotte said, snuggling deeper into her covers, "it's going to be scary."

"Well, of course it is," Emily said. "Daddy wrote it."

"Will it be too scary?" Charlotte asked, pulling the blankets up to her chin.

"Are you wearing socks?" Marty asked.

Charlotte usually wore socks to bed except in summer, because otherwise her feet got cold.

"Socks?" she said. "Yeah? So?"

Marty leaned forward in his chair and lowered his voice to a spooky whisper, "Because this story won't end until Christmas Day, and by then it's gonna scare your socks off maybe a dozen times."

He made a wicked face.

Charlotte pulled the covers up to her nose.

Emily giggled and demanded, "Come on, Daddy, what's next?"

"Hark, the sound of silver sleigh bells echoes over the hills and the dells.

And look reindeer high up in the sky!

Some silly goose has taught them to fly.

The drivergiggles quite like a loon-madman, goofball, a thug, and a goon.

Something is wrong-any fool could tell.

If this is Santa, then Santa's not well.

He hoots, gibbers, chortles, and spits, and seems to be having some sort of fits.

His mean little eyes spin just like tops.

So somebody better quick call the cops.

A closer look confirms his psychosis.

And-oh, my dears-really bad halitosis!"

"Oh, jeer," Charlotte said, pulling the covers up just below her eyes.

She professed to dislike scary stories, but she was the quickest to complain if something frightening didn't happen in a tale sooner or later.

"So who is it?" Emily asked. "Who tied Santa up and robbed him and ran off in his sleigh?"

"Beware when Christmas comes this year, because there's something new to fear.

Santa's twin-who is evil and mean-stole the sleigh, will make the scene, pretending to be his good brother.

Guard your beloved children, mother!

Down the chimney, into your home, here comes that vile psychotic gnome!"

"Eeep!" Charlotte cried, and pulled the covers over her head.

Emily said, "What made Santa's twin so evil?"

"Maybe he had a bad childhood," Marty said.

"Maybe he was born that way," Charlotte said under her covers.

"Can people be born bad?" Emily wondered. Then she answered her own question before Marty could respond. "Well, sure, they can.

"Cause some people are born good, like you and Mommy, so then some people must be born bad."

Marty was soaking up the girls' reactions, loving it. On one level, he was a writer, storing away their words, the rhythms of their speech, expressions, toward the day when he might need to use some of this for a scene in a book. He supposed it wasn't admirable to be so constantly aware that even his own children were material, it might be morally repugnant, but he couldn't change. He was what he was. He was also a father, however, and he reacted primarily on that level, mentally preserving the moment because one day memories were all he would have of their childhood, and he wanted to be able to recall everything, the good and the bad, simple moments and big events, in Technicolor and Dolby sound and with perfect clarity, because it was all too precious to him to be lost.

Emily said, "Does Santa's evil twin have a name?"

"Yes," Marty said, "he does, but you'll have to wait until another night to hear it. We've reached our first stopping place."

Charlotte poked her head out from beneath the covers, and both girls insisted that he read the first part of the poem again, as he had known they would. Even the second time through, they would be too involved to be ready to sleep. They would demand a third reading, and he would oblige, for then they would be familiar enough with the words to settle down. Later, by the end of the third reading, they finally would be either deep in sleep or on the drowsy edge of it.

As he started with the first line again, Marty heard Paige turn out of the doorway and walk toward the stairs. She would be waiting for him in the family room, perhaps with flames crackling in the fireplace, perhaps with red wine and a snack of some kind, and they would curl up together and tell each other about their day.

Any five minutes of the evening, now or later, would be more interesting to him than a trip around the world. He was a hopeless homebody. The charms of hearth and family had more allure than the enigmatic sands of Egypt, the glamour of Paris, and the mystery of the Far East combined.

Winking at each of his daughters, reciting again, "Well, now Thanksgiving is safely past," he had for the moment forgotten that something disturbing had happened earlier in his office and that the sanctity of his home had been violated.

In the Blue Life Lounge, a woman brushes against the killer and slides onto the bar stool beside him. She is not as beautiful as the dancers, but she is attractive enough for his purposes. Wearing tan jeans and a tight red T-shirt, she could be just another customer, but she is not.

He knows her type a discount Venus with the skills of a naturalborn accountant.

They conduct a conversation by leaning close to each other to be heard above the band, and soon their heads are almost touching. Her name is Heather, or so she says. She has wintermint breath.

By the time the dancers retreat and the band takes a break, Heather has decided he isn't a vice cop on stakeout, so she grows, bolder. She knows what he wants, she has what he wants, and she lets him know that he is a buyer in a seller's market.

Heather tells him that across the highway from the Blue Life Lounge is a motel where, if a girl is known to the management, rooms can be rented by the hour. This is no surprise to him, for there are laws of lust and economics as immutable as the laws of nature.

She pulls on her lambskin-lined jacket, and together they go out into the chilly night, where her wintermint breath turns to steam in the crisp air. They cross the parking lot and then the highway, hand-in-hand as if they are high school sweethearts.

Though she knows what he wants, she does not know what he needs any more than he does. When he gets what he wants, and when it does not quench the hot need in him, Heather will learn the pattern of emotion that is now so familiar to him, need fosters frustration, frustration grows into anger, anger leads to hatred, hatred genera The sky is a massive slab of crystal-clear ice. The trees stand leafless and sere at the end of barren November. The wind makes a cold, mournful sound as it sweeps off the vast surrounding prairie, through the city. And violence sometimes soothes.

Later, having spent himself in Heather more than once, no longer in the urgent grip of lust, he finds the shabbiness of the motel room to be an intolerable reminder of the shallow, grubby nature of his existence.

His immediate desire is sated, but his desire for more of a life, for direction and meaning, is undiminished.

The naked young woman, on top of whom he still lies, seems ugly now, even disgusting. The memory of intimacy with her repels him. She can't or won't give him what he needs. Living on the edge of society, selling her body, she is an outcast herself, and therefore an infuriating symbol of his own alienation.

She is taken by surprise when he punches her in the face. The blow is hard enough to stun her. As Heather goes limp, nearly unconscious, he slips both hands around her throat and chokes her with all the force of which he is capable.

The struggle is quiet. The blow, followed by extreme pressure on her windpipe and diminishment of the blood supply to her brain through the carotid arteries, renders her incapable of resistance.

He is concerned about drawing the unwanted attention of other motel guests. But a minimum of noise is also important because quiet murder is more personal, more intimate, more deeply satisfying.

So quietly does she succumb that he is reminded of nature films in which certain spiders and mantises kill their mates subsequent to a first and final act of intercourse, always without a sound from either assailant or victim. Heather's death is marked by a cold and solemn ritual equal to the stylized savagery of those insects.

Minutes later, after showering and dressing, he crosses the highway from the motel to the Blue Life Lounge and gets in his rental car.

He has business to conduct. He was not sent to Kansas City to murder a whore named Heather. She was merely a diversion. Other victims await him, and now he is sufficiently relaxed and focused to deal with them.

In Marty's office, by the party-colored light of the stained-glass lamp, Paige stood beside the desk, staring at the small tape recorder, listening to her husband chant two unsettling words in a voice that ranged from a melancholy whisper to a low snarl of rage.

After less than two minutes, she couldn't tolerate it any longer.

His voice was simultaneously familiar and strange, which made it far worse than if she'd been unable to recognize it at all.

She switched off the recorder.

Realizing she was still holding the glass of red wine in her right hand, she took too large a swallow. It was a good California cabernet that merited leisurely sipping, but suddenly she was more interested in its effect than its taste.

Standing across the desk from her, Marty said, "There's at least five more minutes of the same thing. Seven minutes in all. After it happened, before you and the girls came home, I did some research."

He gestured toward the bookshelves that lined one wall. "In my medical references."

Paige did not want to hear what he was going to tell her. The possibility of serious illness was unthinkable. If anything happened to Marty, the world would be a far darker and less interesting place.

She was not sure that she could deal with the loss of him. She realized her attitude was peculiar, considering that she was a child psychologist who, in her private practice and during the hours she donated to child-welfare groups, had counseled dozens of children about how to conquer grief and go on after the death of a loved one.

Coming around the desk toward her, his own wine glass already empty, Marty said, "A fugue can be symptomatic of several things.

Early-stage Alzheimer's disease, for instance, but I believe we can rule that out. If I've got Alzheimer's at thirty-three, I'd probably be the youngest case on record by about a decade."

He put his glass on the desk and went to the window to stare out at the night between the slats of the plantation shutters.

Paige was struck by how vulnerable he suddenly appeared. Six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, with his easy-going manner and limitless enthusiasm for life, Marty had always before struck her as being more solid and permanent than anything in the world, oceans and mountains included. Now he seemed as fragile as a pane of glass.

With his back toward her, still studying the night, he said, "Or it might have been an indication of a small stroke."

"No."

"Though according to the references I checked, the most likely cause is a brain tumor."

She raised her glass. It was empty. She could not remember having finished the wine. A little fugue of her own.

She set the glass on the desk. Beside the hateful cassette recorder.

Then she went to Marty and put a hand on his shoulder.

When he turned to her, she kissed him lightly, quickly. She laid her head against his chest and hugged him, and he put his arms around her.

Because of Marty, she had learned that hugs were as essential to a healthy life as were food, water, sleep.

Earlier, when she had caught him systematically checking window locks, she'd insisted, with only a scowl and a single word-"Well?"- insisted on hearing about his one bad moment in an otherwise fine day.

She looked up and met his eyes at last, still embracing him, and said, "It might be nothing."

"It's something."

"But I mean, nothing physical."

He smiled ruefully. "It's so comforting to have a psychologist in the house."