"Of course there is," she said, frowning.

"How can you be so sure?" I asked.

She paused for a moment, deep in thought. "How could there not be a hereafter?" she asked. "Think about how strong love is, your love of Bill, the way you love Maggie. How can anything that powerful simply disappear?"

Although I understood any theory on life after death was necessarily unproven, the truth was that I longed for something concrete, something to hold on to. Yet, if nothing else, Moms words were comforting.

"Do you think Bill and Dad are close enough to watch over us? To know whats going on in our lives?"

Mom sat back and rocked, mulling over her answer.

"Maybe. I hope so. When your father died, at first I felt so alone. But as time pa.s.ses, Ive grown to feel hes with me." She chuckled, and then admitted, "Sometimes I even talk to him, out loud. But dont worry. So far, I havent heard him talking back."

I nodded at her, but by then I was barely listening, only thinking of Bill and how much I wanted to believe he was close.

If something happened to Bill or Maggie, Id always figured Id somehow know, as Priscilla Lucas said she had known with her husband, some kind of premonition. But when Bill died, I didnt have a clue until the captain showed up at our front door. And as much as I wanted to, as much as I prayed to, I havent felt Bills presence for even a moment since. As far as I could tell, at the instant he died, Bill left us, and Maggie and I were alone. Part of me did believe in heaven, but the way I felt, it had to be many worlds away.

"I wonder sometimes what its like, up there," Mom said. She held up her hands. They were thickening at the joints from arthritis. "I wonder about little things like hot water. It feels so good on my hands, takes the pain away. I wonder if they have hot water in heaven, to ease the pain in these old hands."

"But if its heaven, theres no pain," I said, looking at the grooves in my mothers weathered face. When had she aged so? I wondered. Time had pa.s.sed so quickly, I hadnt noticed.

Wrapped up in our conversation, Mom and I had stopped watching Maggie and Strings. I didnt realize shed left the corral and walked toward the house.

"Where are they then? Wheres heaven?" Maggie shouted. She held Emma Lous brush in her hand, and her eyes were filled with tears. "Ive looked through my telescope at the stars, and I dont see my dad or Grandpa. The astronauts have been to the moon and back and didnt find heaven. Weve even sent satellites to Mars. No ones found heaven. Have they?"

"Oh, Magpie," I said, sorry that Id brought it up. "Please, dont..."

"You sound like Strings. The dinosaurs are extinct, Mom. Dad and Grandpa are dead," Maggie said, sounding as sure as she was of the answers to last weeks algebra test. "There is no heaven. People die and we never see them again."

I got up and walked over to her. Strings looked like he wasnt sure what to do. He was pulling on Emma Lous mane so hard the horse was rolling her long, thin head away from him. "My dad says if you believe in G.o.d you have to believe in heaven and h.e.l.l. That a G.o.d who loves us would never-" Strings started, but Maggie sent him a chill warning glance and he stopped talking.

"Strings, would you go inside and wait for Maggie? I think we need to talk alone," I said.

He looked at me, again at Maggie, and then did as Id ordered, but all the while he walked toward the house, the boy kept glancing back over his shoulder at us.

Once Strings was inside, I put my arms around my daughter and held her tight. "Maggie, I dont know where Dad is. I dont know where heaven is. I miss him, too," I said. Then, despite my own doubts, I had to give her hope. I had to give her something to hold on to. "Maybe sometimes we have to believe in what we cant see. Maybe we have to trust that even if we dont know whats best, G.o.d does."

It sounded odd for me to be talking about G.o.d. Unlike Strings and his family, Mom and I arent churchy people. But that didnt mean that at my core I didnt believe someone, somewhere was in charge. Id seen the worst men could do. Yet deep down, where I know the things I cant explain, is a conviction that as chaotic and evil as this world can be, there is a powerful good, something that challenges us to love and care for one another.

"If there was a G.o.d, Dad would be here with us," Maggie said, no longer crying. She pulled away from me, looking sad and small and determined. I reached out to her, but she ran toward the house. Before I could follow, Mom grabbed my arm.

"The hardest thing, Sarah, is that children grow away from us," Mom said. "Things happen and we cant fix them. Sometimes, we need to give them room to come to terms without our interference. Give Maggie a little time. Sh.e.l.l come around."

I remembered how Id felt when my dad died, the pain, the loss. Then Bill. Still, I wasnt a kid. It must be so much harder for Maggie, I thought.

I stared up at the house, where Maggie had disappeared inside. I wanted to run to her, but maybe Mom was right. Maybe Maggie needed time to sort through her thoughts on her own. Maybe we both just needed more time.

Half an hour later, I checked on Maggie and found her with Strings on the computer in the family room. Ever levelheaded, she was convinced that with minimal research on the Internet she would persuade her friend and her mother that no evidence existed that pointed to dinosaurs still roaming any part of the earth, not a deserted island, the jungles of Africa, and not, as Strings had suggested in the car on the way home from the museum, caves in the center of the earth. Despite the row it was sure to cause with his science teacher, I silently found myself hoping shed fail. I wasnt sure Id like living in a world without the possibility of Stringss dinosaurs any more than I wanted to live in one without believing in G.o.d and heaven.

With Mom busy in the kitchen working on a cheesecake order and with no one to complain, I settled down in front of my own computer in the workshop. After reading an e-mail from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children thanking me for the photos and information on Ben, I tapped into Nexis to do a search on Edward and Priscilla Lucas, followed by another on Annmarie Knowles.

As expected, the mornings papers had bannered the murders. "Lucas family stunned by murders," read the Houston Chronicle. "Bizarre murder claims Edward Lucas and lover," read the Galveston County Daily News, the only one to have uncovered the lurid details surrounding the deaths, including that the bodies were found nude and posed under a b.l.o.o.d.y cross.

Although the official autopsy wouldnt be finalized for another week, the M.E.s office had called me an hour earlier with preliminary findings. Lucas and Knowles had not had intercourse that day, suggesting that they were either escorted to the house by the killer or interrupted shortly after arriving. And, as Id expected, the puncture marks in their hands and feet were inflicted before death by a long, thin blade. The chest cuts, while gory, only broke the skin deep enough to inflict pain and fear and release a river of blood, blood the killer wiped on the wall in the form of a cross. While Annmaries bruised throat showed signs of ligature strangulation, that wasnt what killed her.

A not uncommon irony: both victims had been remarkably healthy and probably could have expected to live well into old age, if not for the bullet that sliced through Luca.s.s brain and the knife that slashed Knowless throat. In this case, the M.E.s office had no difficulty a.s.sessing causes of death.

A call from the crime lab had proved less helpful. As the captain had suspected, the killer had been exceedingly careful. The fingerprints on the scene had all been tied to Knowles, Lucas, and the family maid. Not a single print from an unknown source-namely the killer. The only forensic evidence found consisted of two long blond hairs, one found on Luca.s.s shoulder, the other retrieved from the shower drain. Longer than Annmaries and unbleached, the probability ran high that they had come from the killer. Unfortunately, neither hair had a root, a source of mitochondrial DNA.

How the Galveston newspaper had learned the details of the murders disturbed me. A high-profile case, the word had quickly pa.s.sed down through the ranks that a media blackout was in force. Revealing too much could jeopardize the investigation and prove disastrous in a future trial, once the murderer was found. Obviously the reporter, Evan Matthews, had worked a good source within GPD. A mention in the second paragraph led me to believe Detective O. L. Nelson might be our leak.

"Were looking closely at Edward Luca.s.s family situation," Nelson was quoted as saying. "And we have already held our first interview with his wife."

That Nelson could be callous, opinionated, and difficult, I knew. That he could be outright stupid, however, surprised me. With that announcement in the paper, any possible cooperation we might have antic.i.p.ated from Priscilla Lucas and her lawyer vanished.

Befitting the lofty social status of Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, their Nexus. .h.i.ts riddled the screen. In photo after photo, the couple smiled happily at Houstons finest social events, fund-raisers for the ballet and opera, the symphony, along with a smattering of worthy causes, including breast cancer research and the downtown homeless shelter. In Galveston, Edward Lucas was a member of the exclusive, old-moneyed Mardi Gras krewe the Knights of Momus. A quick reading and it was readily apparent that, as shed said, Priscilla Lucas had no need for her husbands money. A Forbes magazine ranking the nations wealthiest families estimated the Barker Oil fortune in the $500-million range. The Lucas familys commercial real estate empire edged her out with an impressive $800 million. Together the two families controlled more than a billion dollars.

Annmarie Knowles was another story. Search though I might, I found but one mention of her, in the caption of a photo taken the previous fall. In the black-and-white image she stood behind her boss at a groundbreaking for a Galveston condo project, just the latest of the Lucas familys many real estate ventures. Annmarie, it turned out, was only twenty-seven and nearly two decades younger than Lucas. In the photo, she gazed at him with a proud, proprietary smile. I had to wonder: perhaps Priscilla Lucas had seen the same photo and correctly interpreted the young womans intentions. There was no doubt that the widow was a woman with secrets.

Six.

Id grown accustomed to the dream, expecting it in those final moments before sunrise. Bill called out to me, surrounded by flames, not from h.e.l.l but the fire-engulfed car in which hed died. All the danger our jobs are fraught with, but my husband died in a commonplace car accident on a Houston freeway. In the nightmare, he begged me to save him. Unable to reach him, I screamed that I loved him, as he disappeared in the jagged yellow flames. This morning was no different than the others, and I awoke with tear-streaked cheeks.

The Houston offices of the Texas Department of Public Safety, a nondescript beige brick government building just off the West Loop, appeared a refuge when I arrived at seven Monday morning. I swiped my ID card and made a beeline for my office, next to the captains, in the section of the building reserved for the rangers, near the rear, overlooking the parking lot and the radio tower used to transmit to the departments Austin headquarters.

After a Sunday spent working with Maggie on her science project, a computer-generated, 3-D, mock-up of the solar system, ill.u.s.trating the path of a coming lunar eclipse, I was glad to be on familiar ground. Hours of nodding as she discussed her plans, trying not to embarra.s.s myself by asking too many questions, had left me exhausted. My own sixth-grade science fair project had been on a more modest scale, stalks of celery in gla.s.ses filled with food-colored water to ill.u.s.trate how plants draw moisture through roots and stems into leaves. Of course, that was a different era, pre-personal computer.

Although it was all I could think about, I didnt bring up the conversation about death and heaven from the day before. Neither did Maggie. Id considered it a few times, trying to figure out how best to approach the subject of the hereafter, but decided Mom was right. I had no real answers to share with my daughter. Right after the accident, wed gone to a counselor a few times, but that hadnt seemed to help, and wed just stopped going. Maybe there arent any standardized blueprints for surviving grief.

"Lieutenant Armstrong," the captain called out, as soon as he saw me. "Id like you to come in here."

That didnt bode well. The captain called me Lieutenant Armstrong only when I was in trouble, the way Mom called me Sarah Jane.

After hanging up my blazer and throwing my black leather purse in a drawer, I walked into the captains office and found he wasnt alone. One man I recognized, an FBI agent Id met in the past. The other guy I didnt know. Glancing at the captain, I sensed he wasnt happy with whatever theyd been discussing. He was chewing on the inside of the jowls middle age had settled onto his face, another sign of bad news to come.

"You know Agent Ted Scroggins."

"Sure. Hi, Ted," I said, shaking his hand.

"And this is Agent David Garrity. Hes a profiler, like you. Transferred here a few months back from Quantico," the captain continued, motioning toward the other man. The captains voice was even-toned and resolved, hiding what I knew must have been deep irritation, when he said, "Based on the high-profile of the Lucas family, the governor has asked the FBI to work with us on the Galveston double-murder case."

"We dont need-" I jumped in, ready to defend my turf and point out that the case was well in hand, when the captain motioned for me to stop talking.

"This isnt optional. Its an order from the top."

"But weve only had this for a few days. You know theres absolutely no indication at this stage that this is a case we cant-"

"This isnt a reflection on your investigation, Lieutenant." He cut me off, his deep baritone leaving no room for argument. "These two agents are here to offer help and suggestions. Its still your case."

Then, the order: "Go over what weve got so far with them."

"Of course, Captain," I said, frowning. Despite his a.s.surances, Id been a ranger long enough to understand that when the feds moved in, they controlled the investigation. It only made matters worse that I knew Detective Nelson undoubtedly felt the same way about my arrival in Galveston.

Still, as I saw it, I had reason not to be happy with interference, especially from Scroggins. He was in Waco in '93, one of those Bill credited with heating things up to the point David Koresh holed in instead of giving up. After the compound burned to the ground, taking everyone inside with it, Scroggins blamed the local police, including the rangers, painting them all as b.u.mblers.

Since then, Ive had little use for Agent Ted Scroggins.

On the other hand, Agent Garrity I didnt know. Wed never crossed paths during my months studying profiling at the FBI academy in Quantico. Garrity was tall, not a bad-looking man. I would have remembered. So for him, the jury was still out.

"Lets go in the conference room," I suggested.

I collected my files and met them there.

"This is what we know so far," I said, launching into the condensed version of the murders of Edward Travis Lucas and Annmarie Knowles, including forensics, the M.E.s findings, and what Nelson and I had learned from Priscilla Lucas and the murdered womans neighbors.

"Looks like you dont have much more than we could have gotten reading the Galveston newspaper," taunted Scroggins, a scrawny man, balding, with small narrow eyes under thick bushy brows. "What about Nelsons theory, that its a hit ordered by the wife?"

"Im not saying its impossible, but my gut tells me its not her. I just dont buy it," I said, not at all surprised hed already talked to Nelson.

"Seems to me she had motive and the money to finance it, along with knowing where the guy would be and-"

"This was the work of someone who murders for enjoyment, not money," I cut in. "It doesnt impress me as a murder for hire."

"Maybe Priscilla Lucas didnt want to impress you. Maybe she just wanted to dump the philandering old man to take up with the French teacher," Scroggins said, mocking.

"Ted, back off," snapped Agent Garrity, his voice quietly firm.

Scroggins shot him a hostile glance, and a flush of red crawled up his neck and faded into his monks fringe of dark brown hair.

I couldnt help it. I laughed.

"Whats so funny?" Scroggins asked, furious. Garrity at first looked surprised at my reaction but almost immediately seemed amused. He had a good smile, like a next-door neighbor I wouldnt have hesitated to borrow a lawnmower from. Scroggins shot his colleague a cautioning glance, but Garrity ignored him.

"Nothing really. It just struck me as funny," I said. "Guess this is the way you do it in D.C.? Down here we only play bad cop, good cop with suspects. We a.s.sume other officers know the drill."

"Geez, Nelson said youre hard to deal with," Scroggins sputtered. His flush deepened, and he pulled a wrinkled tissue out of his pocket to wipe a sweaty film from his forehead.

Meanwhile, Garrity said nothing but continued to appear pleased with the exchange. With Scrogginss ravings at least temporarily silenced, I took the opportunity to size up the man whod just come to my defense. Well-formed, Garrity appeared fit enough to spend mornings in the gym. His hair, a sandy brown with just the hint of white at the temples, was combed straight back, but it bushed slightly about his neck and ears, giving him a rugged look. His light gray suit hung haphazardly from his body, creased as if hed forgotten or just didnt bother to hang it up the last time hed worn it. The word "rumpled" came to mind, a rather unusual adjective for an agent of the spit-and-polish FBI.

"Ted, the lieutenants right. Were all on the same side here, and we need to take this a step at a time," Garrity said. "Im not saying Nelsons theory is without merit, but weve got some problems with it. On the surface, these murders appear too ritualistic to be a hit. Using bindings and a gun from the site, leaving the bodies posed under a b.l.o.o.d.y cross? What if were dealing with something else here? Dont we have to consider that possibility, before we reserve Priscilla Lucas a prison cell?"

"h.e.l.l, the profilers have spoken." Scroggins shrugged and again faced me, ignoring his fellow agent. "Nelson said you had dismissed his theory about the wife without real consideration, and I can see hes right."

"Im not writing off Nelsons theory," I protested again, reining in my building frustration. "Im like Agent Garrity. I havent ruled out the possibility that Priscilla Lucas is involved. That she didnt come clean about being in the dead womans apartment the night before the murders is suspicious."

"Well, at least thats something," Scroggins said, with an impatient huff. "It seems to me that when the lady wont admit she argued with one of the victims, that means something."

"Something, but not necessarily that she was involved in killing her husband," said Garrity. "Lieutenant Armstrong is right. This is too early in the investigation to settle into one theory and exclude the other."

"Not excluding theories, theres something we all agree on," said Scroggins, with a forced grin.

I took a deep breath, stifling my irritation and said, as nicely as I could muster, "All Im suggesting is that we work both angles, until weve got more proof. Were not facing any kind of deadline on this investigation. Priscilla Lucas isnt a flight risk. Why narrow ourselves down to investigate only one scenario when we have time to take a good look at this case?"

With that, the two agents glanced warily at each other, and I thought back to one of Bills old ranger stories, how in 1934, it took Senior Ranger Captain Frank Hamer 102 days to track Bonnie and Clyde to the Louisiana farm where they riddled them with bullets and ended the careers of the notorious bank robbers. Something about Scrogginss and Garritys reactions suggested we werent going to have that kind of time to solve the Galveston double murders.

"There are factors at work here, aspects of this case we all need to be aware of," Garrity said. "Theres big influence being parlayed all the way up to the governors mansion-in fact, all the way to the White House-by both families. Priscilla Luca.s.s father, Bobby Barker, is calling not only Austin but D.C., trying to use his money and influence to have his daughter ruled out as a suspect. On the other hand, the Lucases have a long history of major political contributions. Theres a laundry list of politicians who owe them favors, and theyre twisting arms in the opposite direction. They want Priscilla Lucas put under a magnifying gla.s.s."

"Why?" I asked. "Because she has a boyfriend? h.e.l.l, in this marriage, she didnt have a monopoly on infidelity."

"There are motives for both families," Scroggins said, with a rather mysterious glance at Garrity. "Its easy to see why Barker wants his daughter cleared, but the Lucases have reasons for wanting her charged. Lets just say that it would be advantageous for their entire family if Priscilla Lucas turned out to be involved in the murders."

I had the unmistakable impression that Scroggins was being intentionally vague, so I said, "Ted, I need to know exactly what youre talking about. Lay it on the line. Were working together on this case. Arent we?" I thought I sounded remarkably calm considering my impulse to pull out my gun and make him start tap dancing.

That fantasy didnt disappear when he bl.u.s.tered, "I understand that, Lieutenant. But you have to understand our position. Were the FBI. We have sources, and were not at liberty to share everything. We cant just-"

While his fellow agent rambled, Garrity must have realized I was teetering on some kind of precipice, because he interrupted. "Our sources tell us that both families were in on the divorce negotiations, and things got pretty nasty. The late husband and the widow were fighting over the kids. And the fight got so dirty that they were each preparing motions charging the other was unfit to raise the children."

"And?" I prodded.

"Lieutenant Armstrong, these murders have put us in the middle of a power struggle between two of the states wealthiest families," Garrity continued. "With her husband dead, Priscilla Lucas avoids a scandal and walks away with not only her lover but her children without a court fight. That means the widow had motive. If thats not enough, theres another reason for Priscilla to want her husband dead."

"And that is?" I asked.

"Money. Big money," he said. "Priscilla Lucas didnt lie when she said she didnt need her husbands money. She just didnt tell you everything. The Barker and Lucas fortunes are tied up in irrevocable trusts. Priscilla and Edwards children are the only ones in either family, the only heirs. The family that wins custody of the Lucas children controls more than a billion dollars."

Scroggins glared at him, while Garrity shifted uncomfortably in his chair, perhaps aware of how it sounded, as if power and money could influence the investigation.

"The point is that money talks. Neither of these families will back down until theyve got what they want, and theyll use everything they have to get it," Garrity said. "In the meantime, this case is a political landmine for everyone with ties to either family, and here were talking a whos who of Austin and D.C. One thing Agent Scroggins and I agree on is that we need more than theories; we need answers and we need them fast, before this case spins out of control."

"And even if you and the guru from Quantico here are doubtful, we cant afford not to take a microscopic look at Mrs. Priscilla Lucas," Scoggins concluded.

The discussion wrapped up. Agent Scroggins left for Galveston to work with Detective Nelson. Their job would be to investigate Priscilla Lucas and determine any role she may have played in the double murders. I couldnt help but muse that from my perspective Scroggins and Nelson deserved each other. Meanwhile, Agent Garrity and I began what I call the needle-in-the-haystack phase. Suspecting a serial killer, to bolster our theory, we needed to find other murders, similar enough to have been committed by the same man. We both knew what we were looking for: murders committed with a knife by an UNSUB, an unknown subject, where victims were tortured and posed in unusual positions. The b.l.o.o.d.y cross, that too was a definite possibility, a high probability of being part of his signature, ritualistically repeated at other murder scenes, an integral element of our killers fantasy and, therefore, his pattern.

Over the weekend, Id completed two questionnaires, one for each murder, and reported the Galveston homicides to ViCAP, the FBIs Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a national database that tracks serial and unsolved homicides. Each characteristic of the killings had to be noted, down to the torture wounds in the victims hands and feet. Below item 84, elements of unusual or additional a.s.sault/trauma/torture to victim, next to carving on victim, I wrote: superficial cuts to form crosses on victims chests. In the proper slot, Id listed the type of knots used to bind the victims, although it appeared theyd offer little help in revealing the killers background. Rather than rare Chinese upholstery knots or surgical knots used by docs in operations, the lab described the ligature around Annmaries neck as anch.o.r.ed with a common slipknot. The bindings on the victims arms and legs were even less helpful, tied as they were with simple overhand knots. While the knots in other homicides might match, they werent unusual enough to link these murders to any others on their own or to suggest anything about the killer.

Under the weapons section, I listed the gun as a weapon of opportunity and the knife as the killers weapon of choice.

Although theyd had to work over a weekend, the research staff at the FBI ranked the case a priority, and Garrity and I already had a screen full of e-mails to follow up on, suggesting cases that shared characteristics with ours.

Computers are an incredible advantage when solving serial crimes, allowing investigators to a.s.sess thousands of cases at once. Yet theyre also a danger. Become too convinced the answer waits somewhere untapped in a database, and a cop can waste precious hours that should be devoted to pounding the pavement and asking questions instead of sitting in front of an answerless screen. We both knew the risk.