She sat with both feet on the floor at her desk, hair tousled and in her eyes. Sarah had gone shopping and this phone was the only way she was sure Tempe still existed, or ever had.

"And that would be ... what?" asked Ferris Mendenhall.

"Do you have any knowledge of something called the Ca.s.sandra Study?"

"No. I can't say that it sounds at all familiar. This is a study of what?"

"I a.s.sume it has something to do with Helverson's syndrome, but beyond that I haven't a clue."

"Where'd you come across the term?"

"I didn't. Clay did. It was mentioned in the latest mailing from whoever it is in Boston that ... well, you know. Whoever."

"Mmm hmm." Mendenhall sounded irritable. He had said little on the subject of this rogue informant, but she could tell that the longer such a presence was felt, the more he loathed it. It was an element out of control, beyond his sphere of influence. It was, therefore, a small and hateful nugget of chaos. "In what context was this study mentioned?"

She did not need the paper before her to recollect it, so scant was the mention, but still it would have been preferable. Clay, though, had refused to leave the report behind when bringing it along this morning. At least he was sharing information again, which she counted as a major triumph. Possibly a miracle.

"It was in an overview on general conclusions drawn from the latest case studies on Helverson's subjects," she said. "The most up-to-date entries. Including Clay's. But there was this pa.s.sing reference to something called the Ca.s.sandra Study. It said that the study's first significant data wouldn't be available for another three to four years. There was no definition. As if it'd be generally understood by the intended readership."

Mendenhall sighed; here we are on Christmas Eve and I do not need this. "You know, Adrienne, someone is getting a lot of satisfaction out of what's basically cloak-and-dagger bulls.h.i.t."

"I agree."

Whoever it was wanted Clay to know about this study, wanted him to learn for himself rather than having it spoon-fed via the mail. Its importance would be magnified a hundredfold if someone had to go digging for it. There was nothing at all incidental about this, the dropping of a single hint in all those pages.

"And Clay Palmer's given you no indication of having been told anything about whoever's been sending him information, is that what I'm to understand?"

"Either he doesn't know or he's keeping it from me. I tend to believe he doesn't know. Whoever it is maintains power by remaining anonymous. But it's not coming from a prankster's mindset. Whoever it is obviously feels a strong need to protect him- or herself. And won't drop the mask until feeling a.s.sured of Clay's dependence. So he'll continue to protect that anonymity."

Mendenhall told her that he would get on the phone with someone at Arizona a.s.sociated Labs, see if they could shed any light on this study. Told her she had done the proper thing in phoning him instead of routing a call directly to AAL. He knew how to bureaucratically finesse his way around far better than she.

She thought he was about to say goodbye when he said, "You sound tired, Adrienne. You sound exhausted." His voice in her ear like a nagging conscience that hadn't quite gotten it right.

"No I don't, I sound drained. That's what you hear. There's a difference."

"Hmmm." She could almost hear him frowning into the phone, closed-mouthed, his droopy moustache twitching. "Is there anything you need to talk about, unload?"

She nearly laughed, straightening at her desk with her hair tossed back from her forehead, swishing along her shoulders, her head rolling limply back. Was there anything she needed to unload?

I have broken enough regulations to probably get me barred from practice. A week ago I stood present while a young man nearly liquefied himself and I did nothing to prevent it. I have watched as almost every inner support of my sole patient got torn from beneath him, and for some reason he still trusts that I have his best interests at heart. And I believe that I am ready to accept whatever comes from him next because I feel as if I've been hit and hit and hit again until I just can't be surprised anymore...

So precisely where would you like to begin?

"It's just been an intense emotional week for everyone around here, Ferris," she said. "And I'm not going to be home for the holidays. I'll get over it."

"I'll call back when I have anything for you. And if it's not later today, then, um ... merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas," she said. Automatic, a parrot's reply, and she hung up.

She found herself staring across the room to the painting that Clay had given her. Graham's bridge to nowhere, an iron island in the sky for seekers marooned. She could almost hear the turbulent river below; had he meant it to be life itself, amniotic waters become raging eddies of confusion? Of course he had - she could see it so clearly now. Graham could view life in no other way. None of them could, try as they might. They all clung valiantly to a precipice, attempting to climb, but the waters rose as inexorable as a tide to sweep them away, one after another.

She could see it in the way Clay had come to her following Graham's suicide. He had needed their session the way recovering addicts crave methadone. He'd come to her this morning and wrenched his way through news of Erin's departure, and his eyes, she imagined, looked like those of schizophrenics in the glory days of electroshock therapy. A blinding light and a lockjaw taste of metal, a whiff of burnt ozone in the forebrain, then a blank slate with hazy recollections of something wrong, somewhere, with someone. Clay had no fight left, it seemed, merely the capacity for acceptance. He was beaten and she had allowed it to happen.

Ferris Mendenhall called back after more than three hours, in the middle of the afternoon. Across the city, across the miles separating them, Adrienne imagined millions of people succ.u.mbing to the sloppy temptations of office parties. Would that she had no more worries than making a guileless fool out of herself. But no, no harmless sin for us, we guardians of the mind.

"I found out what the Ca.s.sandra Study is," Mendenhall said with slow contemplation. "When you were doing your cramming on genetics, and the double-Y ... well, do I need to fill you in on the study that was run out of the Boston Hospital for Women between 1968 and 1975?"

"No," she whispered. "Oh Ferris. They're not doing it again, are they?"

"Yes and no."

Boston again. What was it with that city? The study to which he referred had been the project of a Harvard child psychologist and a pediatrician. They had karyotyped newborn boys in the maternity ward of the Boston Hospital for Women; those found to have an XYY genotype had been marked for systematic tracking, for years. Each boy's behavioral development was to be recorded by home visits, schoolteacher questionnaires, periodic psychological tests; no abnormality would remain undetected. They proposed what was termed antic.i.p.atory guidance: counseling to help families cope with whatever problematic behavior might arise.

Their project - and all similar studies - ended after seven years, largely from public outcry over shoddy ethics. Apparently the researchers had never considered the harm done to children by the application of stigmatizing labels, or the potential harm of overreacting to the typical aggression displayed by nearly all little boys. Apparently they had never considered the likelihood of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yet someone was doing this again, with Helverson's subjects?

Yes and no.

"It was initiated two years ago," Mendenhall said. "Standard screenings of newborns in forty-seven hospitals in twenty-five cities across the country. All they're supposed to do is track the Helverson's babies. There's to be no contact, no counseling, no intervention ... just statistical a.n.a.lysis of what happens to them down the road. It all goes into a central database at MacNealy Biotech in Boston. The parents aren't even informed when a baby's found to have the extra chromosome."

"So they've already located more, then?"

"Oh yes," he said, a fatalistic grumble of a laugh.

Her stomach tightened. "How many?"

"After two years, as of last week ... six hundred and eighty-three. With a sixteen percent birth increase from year one to year two. Now, that may only be a statistical blip. A big blip, but..."

Adrienne sat, just sat. Holding the phone and listening to its soft electronic silence swallow her whole. Fill her empty hollows. Six hundred and eighty-three. And counting. In two years.

And these were just the known births. Someone who loved to crunch numbers would have compared that birth rate with national averages, maybe that of all industrialized nations, even globally. They would have estimates, how many were really out there. Unfound and unnamed, on no rosters. But out there.

The ones already studied? The adults? The Clay Palmers, the Mark Alan Nances, the Timothy Van der Leuns? They seemed like such rarities because they had been discovered by accident; oh, but what an informed and directed effort could pinpoint.

And in that gulf between the first adults who had been found to carry their rogue chromosome, and these infants, how many resided? How many teenagers, how many grade-schoolers had found themselves maladapted to a world not made for them? How long before they began to make that world over, in their own image?

Six hundred and eighty-three, and birth rates on the rise.

They were filling cribs, and soon enough would fill streets. Perhaps that turbulent makeover had already begun.

"Adrienne? You still with me?"

"Yeah." Always functioning.

"I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. Although it's nothing you weren't expecting eventually." Mendenhall cleared his throat. "AAL informed me this afternoon that they'll be cutting your funding at the end of the year. Which gives you another week to wrap things up with Clay Palmer."

"Wrap things up?" she said. "The kind of issues we're dealing with can't just be wrapped up." Her volume was rising. "It's the height of callousness to pretend otherwise."

"You knew this was coming, Adrienne." Mendenhall's voice had gone flatter, sterner. "Therapy never led the priority list. You knew that when you agreed to this."

She drew a strong breath through her nose, let it out the same way, right into the mouthpiece. "Thank you for giving me the news, Ferris. You're a good administrator ... and that's about it."

She hung up, and wouldn't it have felt better to rip the phone from its wall plug, hurl it across the room? Of course it would. Clay would have done so.

She left her desk and drifted along in subconscious circles, slow and lazy, mildly dazed. After a few moments of staring out over the deck, Adrienne shoved open the sliding door and stepped across the redwood and the snow.

It was still coming down out here, clinging to her sweater and melting cold upon her skin, while the pines looked choked with it. She walked to one side of the deck, where the peculiarities of wind had sculpted days' worth of snow into a low, rounded drift. She sank into it as she might into a sagging throne.

Her legs and behind soon began to feel the creeping chill; maybe would go numb before long. She could stay here until Sarah came home and forced her in, brushed away the caked snow and asked what she was trying to do, catch pneumonia and ruin Christmas?

G.o.d rest ye merry lesbians, let nothing you dismay.

Adrienne tilted her head back upon the icy pillow and looked straight into the milky gray depths of the sky. No color, no warmth, no fury, nothing up there at all. Just snowflakes coming down to brush her cheeks, soft as angels' tears.

Six hundred and eighty-three.

And did the heavens think to grieve?

Twenty-Seven.

Patrick Valentine picked him up at Logan Airport two days after Christmas. A Monday - he was hoping to avoid the crush of too many holiday travelers, but by the looks of the crowded gates and terminal, a lot of people were stretching out a long weekend. Lots of shopping bags in hand, clutched as proudly and carefully as if they contained gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Oh, it was touching.

He had yesterday, among their kind, played the game once more, the game devised a month ago. The Colt Python in the pocket; one bullet, one spin, one disciplined squeeze of the trigger. He had come to think of the game as snake-in-the-gra.s.s. Yesterday's flood of gift refunds and exchanges supplied a bounty of backs from which to choose. It had taken two hours of department store roaming before finding the one that screamed to be taken.

Another click. In the end, another reprieve.

Another month of sweet antic.i.p.ation.

Next time he would ruin someone's Super Bowl, maybe.

As the late-afternoon flight from Seattle began to disgorge its pa.s.sengers through the gate, Valentine scanned faces. Fifty or more he discarded until experiencing a frisson that went deeper than mere recognition. A face familiar because it was his own, twenty years younger and half-concealed behind heavy round shades of metal and amber gla.s.s, almost like blast lenses for a nuclear test site: Daniel Ironwood.

Valentine took several steps forward while other pa.s.sengers split around him, like a swift stream encountering a rock, and he barred Daniel Ironwood's path. Face-to-face, they stared.

Strangers who liked to people-watch in airports would think them relatives. Naturally, the resemblance was there, if no warmth upon first meeting. Those same curious sleek faces and contoured skulls. They could be father and son, and anyone who stared, impolite or compelled by the sight of such fine-boned peculiarity, might believe them estranged. Years gone by since they last embraced, perhaps, while the younger grew to manhood on an opposite coast, turning into more of his jaded elder than he would ever have dreamt possible.

How deceiving looks could be.

Daniel dug into a coat pocket for a crumpled pack of Salems, popped one into the corner of his mouth, and lit up. "f.u.c.king airline regs, that must be the longest I've been without a smoke since I was twelve."

"Let's get your luggage," said Valentine, and led the way.

"Is she with you? She didn't come with you? What's her name - Ellie?"

Valentine glanced back over his shoulder, saw Daniel quicken his pace to keep up. "No, Ellie's not with me." Laughing then, "What's the matter, turbulence up there give you a hard-on?"

Daniel said nothing, might have glared with embarra.s.sment or offense, but the dark gla.s.ses contained it well. No doubt he found them a survival tool, never betraying a thought if he could help it. Blank faces go unnoticed, unchallenged. Blank is a little bit like dead, and in dead there is a certain strength, for dead means nothing left to lose. Daniel would know this, had done his time as a juvenile offender; teen-age burglaries and robberies, a rape.

"This is weird, I don't mind telling you," he said. "This feels really really weird."

"I don't care how it feels, as long as it doesn't cause you any problems." And Valentine remembered the one from Indianapolis, that colossal disappointment back in late summer; the shame and impotence that seemed to have even embarra.s.sed Ellie, who had until then seemed shockproof.

"And how's it make you feel? Doesn't it leave you feeling just a little like a pimp?"

Valentine laughed, clapped a hand down on Daniel's shoulder, drew them closer as they walked until he could feel the young man's body stiffen against him, resistant. Lean, hard ... the same body he'd once had until growing into a thicker muscularity with stubborn traces of fat around the middle. The cancer rooted in his groin had changed him in all ways - metabolically, intellectually, even his inner essence.

And with this son given him by destiny, he wanted to lean in until Daniel squirmed, his rough stubbled cheek sc.r.a.ping Daniel's smoother one as the kid smelled the coffee on Valentine's breath. He would slap his cupped hand down over Daniel's crotch and squeeze just to the point of pain. Protect these, he would say. Because in that sac lives a hope that I lost a long time ago.

Would a pimp do that?

"Pimps make money," he told Daniel instead. "You're costing me. Remember that and maybe you'll eventually figure out how I really feel."

"Right," Daniel said. He shrugged off Valentine's hand. "You don't plan on ... you know ... watching us go at it, or anything like that. Do you?"

And that really tore it, such an insinuation beyond the pale of reason. Valentine clenched his jaw and dragged him by the arm halfway across the terminal's walkway, thumped him against the wall by a row of telephone carrels before Daniel really knew what was happening. They drew pa.s.sing glances, but Valentine could not have been more oblivious. Face-to-face, then, nose-to-nose. Heavy sungla.s.ses or not, Daniel Ironwood could not hide his sudden trembling with fear. Yeah, taste it now, and learn not to be a little brat, and maybe it'll spare us a worse clash down the road.

"Is that why you think I flew you here?" Valentine whispered into the tightly impa.s.sive face. "I'm not a voyeur, I'm not a pervert. I didn't bring you here for my pleasure - I can't feel it in the first place. I brought you here to do a job, first, and maybe learn something. Now, are you going to keep that in mind?"

Nothing.

"Or are we going to have to go through frequent reminders?"

"I'll remember," said Daniel, and when they stepped away from the wall, Valentine noticed that he kept a half step behind; the farther they walked, the more he appreciated the ambiguity in that. Back there, Daniel Ironwood could either be playing the subservient or plotting to club him across the back of the head.

A fine specimen, Daniel Ironwood.

Maybe there was hope for the future after all.

He took Daniel to Charlestown so he could shower and clean up, dump off his luggage, anchor his life for the next couple of weeks. They grabbed a quick dinner at a pub a few blocks from the house, and by then evening was chilling into a hard, crisp night. It was time. Introductions were in order.

They drove back across the Charles and up to the penthouse where he kept Ellie, and it generally went well. No mad burst of pa.s.sion and fireworks, no instantaneous surge of l.u.s.t. But he preferred a low-key beginning, had hoped for it, because if their hormones locked into immediate and earnest sync, what would prevent them from really pairing off, deciding his money did not matter, and striking off on their own?

Like ungrateful children.

So there they sat, in the living room, television and stereo playing in jarring discord. Ellie nervously flipped through channels for the first thirty minutes, then seemed to calm herself. Valentine had taken a sniff of her on arrival, of that razored violet hair, and it appeared that she'd washed it today. Good girl. Daniel was at first no calmer than Ellie, sat behind the big marble table as if it were a fortress, chain-smoking himself into a fuming cloud.

No mention was made of the real reason for their coming together, but its undercurrents charged the air all the same. Valentine watched with viper's eyes, watched their body language toward each other, made note of their eye contact - fleeting at first, then held longer. They spoke of doctors, psychiatrists; an unusual turning point, but ... whatever works.