He got to his feet and walked to the ladies' room, trying to control the panic that seared the lining of his stomach like vinegar. He knocked on the door and, receiving no answer, opened it and called inside.

"Kylie! Kylie! Are you in there? Kylie!"

There was no answer. He turned and headed for the restaurant's front entrance. Adrenaline raced up his spinal cord, filling his head. He felt as if he were drowning. Oh, no-first Laura, now her! This can't be happening! Oh, no-first Laura, now her! This can't be happening!

He lost the ability to think clearly. He forced himself to breathe as he rounded the corner into the hallway. There, inspecting the various mugs and T-shirts for sale, was Kylie. Relief flooded Lee's bloodstream and made his knees soften and go weak. He stumbled and almost toppled over.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

"What is it?" she whimpered, frightened. He wanted to slap her, to scream at her, to hug her, all at the same time.

"Kylie, never never go off without telling me!" go off without telling me!"

"But I was only looking at the T-shirts."

He didn't want to frighten her, but the words came out harshly.

"Never! Do you understand?" Do you understand?"

Kylie's lower lip quivered, and tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.

"I won't run off-I was right here here," she said as a tear slid down one cheek.

"Do you understand understand?"

Kylie let loose the righteous tears of one wrongly accused.

"I wasn't running away!" she wailed, choking on the words as her throat thickened with tears.

"I couldn't stand to lose you too!" he said, hugging her to him. "Can't you understand that?"

She greeted his words with a long, loud wail that caught the attention of a couple of women as they came out of the ladies' room. One of them wrenched Lee away from Kylie and planted a well-aimed slap across his face. The other one hoisted Kylie into her arms.

"Is he hurting you, poor thing?" she said, wiping the girl's tears with a red polka-dotted handkerchief. Lee stared at the red dots, imagining them to be drops of blood. Circular blood spatter patterns indicate dripping as opposed to flung splatter Circular blood spatter patterns indicate dripping as opposed to flung splatter.

The other woman looked as if she was about to hit Lee again. She was tall and hefty, with shoulders like a linebacker and a helmet of thick, gray-streaked hair. Lee backed away from her, bumping his ribs painfully against a pay phone on the wall.

"I'm her uncle," he said to the woman holding Kylie. She was shorter than her friend, but also thickly built, with fat wrists and ankles, and a plump, dimpled double chin. Both women were wearing the kind of polyester pantsuits only seen on out-of-towners. The shorter one's was geranium red. The linebacker's was marigold orange.

"You may be her uncle, but that doesn't give you the right to engage in child abuse!" the taller one said, squaring off again as if just waiting for an excuse to hit him again.

"It's okay," Kylie said.

"The victim always protects the abuser," the shorter one said, folding her flabby forearms over her formless bosom.

"He was just upset because he didn't want me to disappear like my mommy," Kylie said.

Both women stared at her.

"What?" one said.

Lee considered telling them about his work with the NYPD, but since he had no badge and no gun, felt it would be unconvincing. Instead, he explained about his sister's disappearance.

"Just leave us alone, please," he begged.

With a sniff, the polyestered protectors of justice relented, albeit reluctantly, and retreated back to the dining room, leaving Lee and Kylie alone in the hallway.

"Look, I'm sorry I got upset," he said to her. "It's just-"

"I know," Kylie replied. "Fiona says when you act strange it's because of Mommy."

And what's her excuse when she acts strange? he thought, but said nothing. he thought, but said nothing.

"When do you think she'll come back?" Kylie asked.

Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact, as though she were asking when her mother would return from the grocery store. The question put Lee in an impossible position. If he answered it, he would be lying. But if he disagreed with the premise-that his sister was still alive-he would be going up against his mother. Kylie was much too young to be burdened with the disagreement between him and Fiona. He also would be doing his best to shred any lingering hope that Laura could still be alive and might return some day. He bit his lip and took the coward's way out.

"Tell you what, Kylie, why don't we go back in and see if we can catch the last part of the show?"

Kylie took his hand in hers.

"I know why you were being weird. You didn't want to lose me-right, Uncle Lee?" she said as they passed a grinning skeleton hanging on the wall. The skeleton wore a crimson fez and a matching bow tie.

He felt his throat thicken. "That's right. I didn't want to lose you."

Chapter Forty-two

When they left the restaurant, there was no sign of the plainclothes officer who had been tailing him. Lee figured his shift had ended and the cop who was supposed to relieve him hadn't shown up. He should have called it in, but he was glad to be alone for a change. He drove along the dark country lanes in rural New Jersey as Kylie slept in the backseat. He had promised his mother to bring her back that night so she could go to a school fair the next day. It was a long drive to make at night, but he didn't mind. It gave him a chance to think.

The dark sedan was upon him before he registered what was happening. It seemed to come out of nowhere, its headlights on full high beams, so close behind his car that they reflected into his rearview mirror, blinding him. At first he thought it was his surveillance protection, catching up to him, but when the driver remained close, high beams on full, he realized it wasn't a cop behind him.

"Christ, what is is it with these people?" he muttered as he adjusted the mirror. it with these people?" he muttered as he adjusted the mirror.

His first thought was to pull over and let the car pass him, but that thought was shaken out of his head when he felt the jolt. The sickening realization came instantly: the other car had hit him.

There was no doubt in his mind that it was intentional.

His hands gripped the steering wheel tighter, squeezing it hard as sweat oozed from his palms.

"Oh, God," he said under his breath. "Goddamn it." "Goddamn it." This time it was more of a prayer than a curse. This time it was more of a prayer than a curse.

The car hit him again-harder this time. He heard the crunch as the bumpers met, metal against metal.

In the backseat, Kylie stirred and woke.

"Uncle Lee? Are we there yet?"

He took a deep breath and tried to will the panic out of his voice.

"No, honey-go back to sleep."

Another bump, this time sending his car into the opposite lane, so that he had to fight to control it.

Kylie's voice came from the backseat, wide awake now, sounding as panicked as he felt. "Uncle Lee, what's going on?"

He had no idea what to say to her, how to explain that there was someone trying to kill them both.

"Go back to sleep, okay? Everything's going to be fine."

Even as he said the words he could feel how hollow they were. Everything wasn't going to be fine.

The headlights glared into his side mirror, the beams bouncing back into his face. He squinted and rolled down the window, pushing the mirror away. A blast of cold air hit his face. He heard the engine behind him rev, and braced himself for another jolt. Instead, the headlights disappeared, and he saw the car pull up next to him. The two-lane road twisted and wound through the Jersey countryside, the solid double yellow line indicating that passing was forbidden. Even at this time of night, he knew, this was suicidal behavior. There was no way for the other driver to see an oncoming car before it was too late.

"Jesus," he said under his breath. His leg trembling, he rammed his foot down hard on the accelerator. The little Honda jerked and shifted into first gear, spurting ahead of the car next to him.

"Uncle Lee," Kylie whimpered, "what's happening?"

"There's a crazy driver following us," he replied, trying to sound casual. "Maybe he's drunk or something."

This was a route he had driven countless times, from the day he got his license at the age of sixteen, and he knew every twist and turn in the road. He had often joked that he could drive it in his sleep. It was the one advantage he had over his unknown pursuer, and he prayed that it would count for something now. If the other driver managed to pull in front of him, Lee knew, he could almost certainly force Lee to stop. If Lee attempted to pass him, he could force Lee off the road.

He pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The Honda's engine revved, and the car pulled ahead of his pursuer. The Honda's engine was small but efficient, and had good pickup speed. Lee offered a silent prayer of thanks to Japanese engineering.

The headlights reappeared behind him once again, and he heard the other car's engine gun as its headlights got closer. He prayed that the other car was not a more powerful machine than his four-cylinder rental Honda.

The road lay in front of him, a dark, curling ribbon of concrete. Ahead of him loomed McGill's Hill, curved as the back of a whale, barely visible in the darkness.

He gripped the steering wheel and leaned forward.

"Okay, you bastard," he muttered, "let's see how you like this."

With an abrupt twist of the wheel, he pulled off the road and headed for the stream at the bottom of the hill, his headlights on full beam. The car shuddered and shook as it hit the uneven ground, bumping and jerking along the frozen earth. He could hear Kylie whimpering in the backseat, but he gritted his teeth and drove on at a steady speed. Seeing the frozen stream-shallow enough to be frozen clear through, he knew from experience-he steered the car toward it.

His tires slid onto the frozen stream. The car fishtailed, then righted itself. He pressed the accelerator steadily, in search of what traction was possible with the car's front-wheel drive.

The sedan continued its pursuit, weaving as its tires hit the ice.

Lee's headlights picked up the copse of trees at the bottom of the hill, the grove of poplars so dangerous to generations of sledders. The stream was at its deepest point there, and on the other side of the trees was a deep ditch-invisible at night. He gunned the engine and then jerked the wheel all the way to the right, just missing the first tree. With the wheels spinning in the thin layer of snow covering the ground, he turned the car in a tight circle and avoided the ditch.

His pursuer was not so lucky.

Lee heard the crunch of metal as the other car glanced off the first tree. He glanced out of the rearview mirror just in time to see the car land headfirst in the ditch, tires spinning uselessly in the air.

Anxious as he was to know the identity of his pursuer, his instinct to protect his niece was stronger. He knew that if the driver was wearing a seat belt, he might be only mildly injured. He longed to go back for a look at the license plates, but what if their pursuer had a gun? He couldn't take that chance. He turned the Honda in a tight circle and headed back to the road. A wave of nausea threatened to overcome him as he pulled back onto the road, but he took deep gulps of the icy air coming in through his still open window and sped off into the night.

Kylie had grown very quiet in the backseat, so when he had gone a mile or two, he looked back at her to see if she was all right. She sat staring at him without speaking, her hands clutching the stuffed dinosaur he had bought for her earlier.

"Kylie? Are you okay?" he said.

"What happened to the other car?" she asked. "He hit the tree. Is he going to be all right?"

"I don't know, honey, but I'm going to call the police as soon as I can so they can go rescue him."

"Why did you go off the road like that?"

Because he was trying to kill us.

"Well, I just wanted him to stop following us."

"Why was he following us?"

"I think he must have been drunk or something."

Kylie began to cry. "But what if he died?"

"Don't worry, Kylie-it's going to be all right. The police will take care of him. Everything's going to be all right."

But the more he said the words, the less he believed them. Someone was after him, and he suspected that whoever it was, they wanted him off the case-very, very badly.

Chapter Forty-three

Lee drove for a while without looking back, taking side roads and detours. When he was certain that he wasn't being followed, he pulled off the road to call the police. After dialing 911 and reporting the accident, he started the Honda's engine up again. He was worried about his family's safety. The attack had taken place in their backyard this time, and he couldn't be there to protect them constantly.

Kylie had fallen asleep in the backseat again-with the emotional resilience of childhood, she had forgotten her panic, accepting Lee's explanation that the whole thing was just the crazy actions of a drunk driver. He had no intention of telling her the truth.

As the engine turned over, he was seized by an uncontrollable wave of shivering, and had to turn off the car again for a while to calm down. He realized that all he knew about the other car was that it was a dark sedan-any other details were lost in a blur of action and decision making. He couldn't even say how many people were in the car. It could have been more than one, for all he knew, though he didn't think so. Every instinct in his body told him that the pursuer was one man and one man alone.

When he arrived at Fiona's house it was three in the morning. The grandfather clock in the front hall ticked loudly as he tiptoed in through the front door, Kylie in his arms. Surrounded by the familiar smell of apples and old wood, Lee had trouble imagining the threat they had both just survived-here, at his mother's everything felt so familiar, so comfortable, and so safe.

He closed the heavy door behind him quietly and carried Kylie upstairs to her bedroom. She hardly stirred as he laid her on the bed, removing her shoes and socks and tucking her under a thick layer of blankets and quilts. Fiona Campbell kept a watchful eye on the thermostat, and the house was cold at night. "A cool room at night is better for you than a stuffy one," she would say. "A bit of fresh night air never hurt anyone."

Lee was exhausted but wide awake, so he went down to the living room and lit a fire. He then took out his cell phone and dialed the state police headquarters, located in Somerville, about twenty minutes away. He had a feeling that the state troopers would find an empty car down by the stream, but he wanted the car held and checked for evidence: blood, DNA, anything that could help identify his pursuer. He gave his name to the sleepy operator who answered.