"I've been doing some more reading, Gant. Research mostly. Historical..."

"Good for you," I muttered, barely able to contain my anger."Oh yes," he replied. "It is very good for me. You see, it seems that I've been far too narrow in my scope when it comes to extracting confessions."

"I hadn't noticed."

"Take your disciple for instance. He was my first disembowelment. I thought it went very well."

I sucked in a deep breath through my nose and let it slowly out through my mouth, steeling myself before answering him in a cold tone. "I thought you said you weren't able to break him?"

"Oh no, you misunderstood. He confessed. He just never told me where I could find you."

"That's because he didn't know," I spat.

"It doesn't matter. I've found you now."

I looked over at Ben, and he once again waved his hand, indicating that I should keep Porter talking. I frowned hard. I wasn't sure how much more I could take before I completely lost control.

"Maybe you just think you have," I said.

There was a long silence at the other end, and I thought for a moment that he might have hung up, but then his voice issued once again from the earpiece. "You never did tell me if you got my note."

"You know I did."

"I made that selection specifically for you. What did you think?"

"I think you are a sick bastard."

I thought I heard him actually laugh before settling once again into his emotionless voice. "Your wife is very lovely, Gant. For a heretic. I suppose you are aware that the inquisitors of the fifteenth century sometimes found it necessary to, shall we say, 'have their way' with the women they interrogated?"

My fragile pane of composure shattered into jagged shards. The heat that had earlier flushed my face now consumed my entire body. I could feel myself shaking, and I was gripping the handset so tight that my fingers were beginning to numb.

"Listen to me you son-of-a-bitch," I spoke evenly into the mouthpiece. My voice started at a low volume, but with each sentence it grew along an ever-increasing upward arc. "This is between you and me. No one else, got me?! You had better start praying to your God right now. You'd best pray that the police get to you first, because I'm coming after you. I'm coming after you, and I'm going to kill you! DO YOU HEAR ME GODDAMMIT?! I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU.

BASTARD!".

I was holding the phone in front of my face, screaming into it. Adrenalin was pumping through me, and I was shaking uncontrollably. I felt a hand clamp on my shoulder, and I wheeled about, swinging the handset like a club. My hand wassuddenly engulfed by Ben's own. He pushed me against the wall and held me there as he ripped the telephone away with his free hand. He brought it up to his ear and listened, then frowned before dropping it onto the table beside the base and snatching up his cell phone.

"It's clicking, like maybe he hung up," he fired his voice into the device. "Tell me you nailed the bastard... Yeah... Yeah... Okay, I'll hang on..."

My friend looked at me with a mixture of concern and what looked as though it might have been fear in his eyes. He was still holding his cell phone to his ear, but he twisted the mouthpiece down out of the way. "Jeezus, Row... Calm down... 'Kay?"

I was still shaking, but Ben had me stiff-armed against the wall; I wasn't going anywhere. I sucked in a deep breath and glared back at him as I spoke, "The motherfucker just told me he was going to rape my wife!"

I heard a gasp, and when I looked to the side I realized that my outburst had attracted the attention of everyone else in the household. The worst part was that the look on Felicity's face told me that she'd heard every word of what I'd just said to Ben.

I stared back at her pained expression, watching as her earlier fear visibly resurfaced. I mutely chastised myself for losing control, and tried to find something to say to her that would quell her uneasiness, but came up empty.

"Yeah, yeah I'm here," Ben began speaking again as he twisted the cell phone back into place. "He what? You've gotta be kiddin'... Shit... Okay... Yeah..." He let out a heavy sigh. "Yeah... I'll be here... Thanks."

I turned back to face him and found his concerned gaze still locked on my face as he switched off the phone and stuffed it into his pocket. The thick silence in the corridor rose to a crescendo and was then replaced by his almost apologetic voice.

"You okay now, Row?"

"They didn't get him did they?" I asked.

"No. No, they didn't." He shook his head as he spoke. "So, can I let you go now?"

I was still tensed and shaking, but the sight of my wife behind him had forced me to calm quicker than I would have otherwise. I nodded to him, and he tentatively relaxed his stance, waiting a short moment before releasing me entirely.

As soon as I was free, I stepped past him and wrapped my arms around Felicity.

She laid her head against my shoulder and held tight.

"Aye, it was him," she whispered. "He called here, then."

"It's okay," I told her. "It's okay."

Looking past her I could see the rest of the group milling about in the corridor, staring at us with their own brand of fear on their faces.

"They had the number to the pay phone from the caller ID." I spoke aloud to Ben without turning; my tone was just short of an accusation. "It's not like they had totrace it. What went wrong?"

"That wasn't the problem, Row," he answered. "They pinpointed the location right away and dropped every copper in the area on it like the friggin' sky was fallin'."

"So what happened?"

"Jeezus, Row, this bastard is a piece of work..."

"What?"

"He had two pay phones stuck together with duct tape, white man."

"Awww, Gods..." I brought one hand up to massage my forehead as I closed my eyes. "That's why it sounded so hollow. He relayed it."

"Yeah. Not exactly the most high tech. All you gotta do is call one pay phone, tape it to the one next to it, and then dial here with that pay phone..."

"Doesn't really matter, it worked didn't it?" I spat.

"Yeah. Unfortunately it did. They're lookin' at the computers now, tryin' to trace it back, but since he was nowhere around, odds are he was talkin' to ya' on a cell. He was hell and gone from the scene the minute he dialed the fuckin' number."

Chapter 12:.

"I really don't want to monopolize your time," I said as I leaned against the deck rail and looked out across the back yard.

"You are not monopolizing anything, Rowan," Helen Storm answered in the clear and carefully worded fashion I'd grown accustomed to since our first meeting less than one month ago. "Besides, I was ready for a cigarette."

Ben's sister was a self-described chain smoker, and she supported her claim easily. To me it seemed like an odd habit for a psychiatrist, but then, she was also human. We all had our vices-for instance, with me, it was cigars-so I was not about to make a judgment.

In the physical features department, Helen bore more than a passing family resemblance to her brother; the obvious exception being that she stood just shy of a foot shorter than he was. Other than that, they shared the same mysteriously dark eyes and characteristic profiles. Her thick, black hair hung in a straight fall that pleasantly contrasted her softly angular features. It was streaked here and there with strands of grey, which was the only visual indicator that she was the older of the two siblings.

I shrugged inside my coat, giving a slight shiver against a random gust of windthat managed to infiltrate its folds, and then tugged the zipper up another pair of inches in self-defense.

Yellow-brown stands of decorative grasses ringed the inside of the yard, each clump angling upward in shallow arcs to peek just inches over the top of the privacy fence. Snow was now falling in heavy waves, drifting downward, slipstreaming sideways on the wind, and then tumbling to rest on the dormant carpet of Zoysia.

"Nancy probably needs you more than me," I said while looking down and absently inspecting the burning cigar I was twisting between my thumb and forefinger. "She's the one who just lost her husband to a psychopath."

Helen exhaled a stream of smoke and tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette before gesturing. "Look there, Rowan."

I looked up, then swiveled my head, and followed her finger with my eyes. A sturdily-caged bird feeder sat atop a post in a nearby section of the yard with a pair of black-capped chickadees flitting in and out of it. A much larger bird, speckled along its brown back, hung from the side where a suet cake had been affixed.

"That is a northern flicker," she announced.

"Avoiding my question?" I asked, looking back at her with a slight smile.

She shrugged as she spoke. "No, not really, Rowan. I am simply fascinated by birds. Besides, you did not ask a question. You made a comment." She returned the smile as she paused and took a drag on her cigarette. "Now, if I were to treat your comment as a question, first I would point out that Eldon Porter is a sociopath not a psychopath."

"Touche," I answered.

"Secondly, I would tell you that Nancy has exactly what she needs, given the circumstances. Family. As she advances through the stages of grief, her family will be the most effective support system she could ever need. She will talk to me when and if she feels ready to do so. Perhaps she will never need me. I cannot say one way or the other at this stage. That is something that is peculiar to the individual.

You can rest assured, however, that she is not yet ready."

I returned to staring out into the yard as she spoke. The seasonally barren branches of trees twisted in the air, their grey-black bark collecting cottony traces of the falling precipitation. As I stared at them, they began to look as though they were spindly arms reaching out in some agonized death throe; all in all, a visual metaphor for my own tortured mood.

I took a hard drag on the end of my cigar. I normally reveled in the spicy taste of a good madwro-wrapped smoke, but at the moment it wasn't bringing the pleasure I hoped. I allowed the blue-white smoke to stream out slowly between my teeth, making a futile grab for some modicum of enjoyment and finding none.

"Ben asked you to come here for my sake, didn't he?" I asked.

My matter-of-fact tone didn't faze her. "Of course, Rowan, but you knew thatalready."

"Yeah, I guess I did."

"I am certainly willing to be here for all of your friends as well," she added.

"I'm sure they would appreciate that."

"Under the circumstances, however, you are the primary concern."

"I'm okay," I told her.

"I am certain that you are," she replied. "However, I sense that you have concerns of your own."

"Don't we all?" I asked the question in an easy, rhetorical sense. I wasn't looking to be difficult, and I didn't want to come across to her that way.

"Of course," she answered in her own comfortable tone. "Your concerns, however, are far less... shall we say 'mundane', than most."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Guess so."

"Benjamin told me you had some type of seizure earlier."

"You could call it that."

"Do you think that it was something else?"

I looked over at her. "What do you mean?"

"Your comment." She shrugged. "It implies that you think of the episode as something other than a seizure."

"Oh, that." I nodded then shrugged. "I'm not really sure what it was. I know it wasn't very pleasant, but other than that..." I allowed my voice to trail off as I pondered the event.

"Do you feel that it might have something to do with Eldon Porter?" she asked.

"Maybe."

She shuffled for a moment and then looked up at the grey sky. "I love snow. It carries with it such a simple purity."

"It's frozen water crystallized around any number of impurities it picks up in our polluted atmosphere." I stated the fact. "Not sure how that qualifies in the purity department."

She regarded me with a slight chuckle. "I see that you are not in the mood for philosophical metaphors today, Rowan."

"Guess not."

She nodded as she fished out a fresh cigarette and lit it from the smoldering butt of the first. After discarding the spent smoke in the sand bucket, she cocked her head to the side, and watched me for a moment.

"How has Felicity been holding up?" she finally asked, shedding her initially adopted clinical air."Okay I guess. But, you probably know more about that than me."

I based my observation on the fact that my wife had recently taken advantage of Helen's offer of therapy in the wake of the kidnapping and attempted rape she'd experienced.

She clarified the question. "I meant in light of what has happened today."

"She's frightened," I offered with a shrug. "Natural reaction if you ask me."

"I should think so." She nodded. "Porter's threats are coming on the heels of a very traumatic experience for her. She is feeling terribly vulnerable right now."

"How deep does that vulnerability go is the question," I said aloud.

"Meaning?"

"I don't know," I sighed. "I guess I'm lamenting my own feelings."

"Would you like to share those feelings, Rowan?"

"Like? No. But, to be honest, standing here talking with you, I have to say that I feel compelled to, yes."