I imagine this girl on a November afternoon at the top of a hill, in the woods, the lake spread out below her, glittering in the long winter light. Today she is not fashionable.

She is wearing a pair of boys' Wranglers, a longsleeve Tshirt, hiking boots, an orange down vest. She is not worried about how she looks now. She is with the one man she is not afraid of.

The air is cold enough to let steam escape from the cavity of the whitetail deer she and her father are field dressing.

She thinks of it as a joint effort. In fact, she does all the work, while her father stands nearby, drinking from a thermos, watching the lake.

He has green eyes, like hers, but they are cloudy, troubled. His hair has thinned over the years to a weak shade of pumpkin. His features are angular, like the eroded ridges of a chewed cuttlebone. She thinks of him as tall and strong, but he has already started his decline. The smoking and drinking, the bouts of depression-all this has begun to take its toll.

She cuts the connecting tissue from the liver of the deer, holds the organ in her gloved hands-a heavy thing, milky black like petroleum, quivering as if it still held life. She checks for disease spots. Finding none, she sets the liver on ice along with the heart.

Her father always insists on this-save the heart. Save the liver.

She tells him that the liver is healthy, hoping this will please him, but he just stares at the lake. She wishes his thermos held coffee, but she knows it is whiskey with lemon and sugar.

Her job done-the entrails scooped out, the carcass cleaned with fresh water-she wedges a stick into the deer's empty chest to keep the rib cage apart.

Her gloves are sticky with blood, but she doesn't mind the work-the cutting, the cleaning. There is something satisfying about seeing the mess, the chaos of organs-and slowly cleaning it out, tying off the tubes, avoiding spills that could spoil the meat, sorting the innards, leaving a clean and empty shell, neatly framed by the symmetry of ribs.

"Would you like me to clean your doe?" she volunteers.

Her smile is sincere. She hopes for a smile in return. She has been so efficient-learned everything he taught her, done everything to make him proud.

She recalls the time when she was about eight, going with her father to Crumley's Store. He had ruffled her hair, told his friends that he needed no son, that he had his best hunting buddy right here. She protects that memory-drinks from it when she's thirsty, keeps her hands cupped around it like an exposed pilot light.

Now, her father is not five feet away from her-wearing the hunting parka she bought him for his birthday, tattered jeans, the deer rifle he has had as long as she can remember, even before her mother died.

It takes him several minutes just to remember she is there. He has been watching the waterline, as if suspecting that even now, so many years later, the lake is rising, eroding what is left of his inheritance. Only recently, a third business failed on his property- another lessee defaulting on their contract. What little money he has invested in stocks is doing poorly. He doesn't share the worst of this with his daughter-not yet-but she knows something is wrong. She knows the lake is sapping his life.

At last he says, "I'm sorry, sweetheart."

And he looks as if he wishes to say something more, but his voice dissipates as quickly as the steam from his mouth.

She remembers that brief moment of clarity in his eyes, twenty minutes before, when he aimed the gun, brought down the doe with a single wellplaced shot. She wishes there were another whitetail deer to kill.

Her buck is a much greater trophy, but she is willing to field dress his doe as well. She wants to be shoulder to shoulder with her father in the work, touch his hands, smell his breath, even if it reeks of whiskey.

Instead, he sets his gun against the tree. He kneels, grasps a handful of dry leaves and cedar nettles, lets them slip through his fingers. There, at the highest point of their property, at a place where the food can never touch, he seems to be praying, and she knows instinctively that whatever his prayer, it will not be answered. Fourteen years on the lake have taught her to expect that.

So she cleans her knife blade-the sharp steel, four inches, well weighted. She goes to the doe and turns it belly up, feels along the white fur until she finds the point for incision below the sternum.

She makes the cut as her father once showed her-inserting her fingers under the skin, making a V, cutting with the blade up, being careful not to puncture the intestines.

She can tell the doe was nursing, and she knows she must remove the mammary organs right away. Milk goes bad quickly. Nothing will spoil the taste of the meat worse than that.

She works with the knife, trying to be hopeful, trying to believe that she is drawing closer to her father, that he is not slipping away, becoming less and less present the more deer tissue she slices through.

She ignores the smell and the blood. She cuts away the mess- lets the offal spill out, prepares her father's doe lovingly.

And the less he pays attention, the more meticulous she is, the more she needs the knife and the wellmade incision, the liver without spots, the heart cut away and drained of blood.

Imagine her on that hill, and you will realize why she treats men as she does. Her affections were cut away long ago, examined for impurities and set on ice, claimed at the point of a hunting knife.

CHAPTER 13.

"I can't talk to you," Dwight Hayes said.

He'd already helped himself to one lukewarm bottle of beer from the sixpack on the floor of my truck, and was starting on his second.

"Of course you can't," I said. "Which way on 135?"

"North."

We did a U on San Gabriel, went under the highway, took the entrance ramp. I said, "What was your little disagreement with Pena?"

One street lamp went by. Two. We passed the UT campus on the left, the Longhorn stadium lit up for an event.

"Bastard hit me," he said. "He hit me."

"Relax. You're in better company now."

Dwight was silent for a few hundred street lamps. "Is it true what Miss Lee said about-you and her?"

"I don't know. What did Miss Lee say?"

"Never mind," he decided.

We kept driving. Dwight directed me east on Highway 290.

"How long have you worked for Pena?" I asked.

His eyes were heavylidded from all the beer, irritated, as if I'd just woken him up.

"Forever. I'm his technical adviser."

"I take it you're not talking about scuba gear."

"I sniff out the most promising software startups. I look for market potential, point him in the right direction."

"Like the startup in Menlo Park. Like Techsan."

He looked at me, miserable. If guilt had a smell, it was permeating the truck.

"You've seen what happens to the people Pena attacks," I guessed. "The people you sicced him on. Over and over."

"You want to kick me out?" he asked. "It's okay."

Unlit subdivisions went by, closedup malls, empty fields.

"Maia Lee is right," I suggested. "She's a good person. You should think about talking with her, Dwight."

It was too dark to see his face.

"I thought Techsan would be different," he said. "There was no reason . . . Ruby and Matthew got along so well at first."

"Got along how, exactly?"

"Ruby was the one Matthew approached, back in March. She took him diving out on the lake. They seemed to like each other, came to some kind of agreement in principle.

I thought-the program was solid. The algorithms were excellent. I thought Matthew would make them a fair offer, make an easy buy."

"But your employer doesn't enjoy easy buys."

Another mile of darkness. Dwight pointed ahead to a blinking yellow light, told me to take that exit.

"You were with Pena the night Adrienne Selak drowned," I said. "I suppose you can't talk about that either."

"She was nice. She was good for Matthew. I don't think- He wouldn't have killed her.

No way."

"You don't think. I thought you saw Adrienne Selak fall. You made a statement on Pena's behalf."

"I meant- He never would have hurt her."

"You sure that's what you meant?"

Dwight let my question die in the air.

We ended up in an aging subdivision of northeast Austin, just south of 290. The houses were 1970s prefab, the lawns all gone to crabgrass. It was the kind of neighbourhood that looked best at night, which is exactly the time the local police would tell you not to go there.

Dwight drank his lukewarm beer, told me where to turn.

"The police talk to you about Jimmy Doebler?" I asked.

"A detective came to Pena's suite at the Driskill. That Lopez guy. Matthew was working late the night of Jimmy's murder- video conference."

"And you?"

"I was home. Too many goddamn witnesses."

Before I could ask what he meant, he directed me into the driveway of a greentrimmed twostory. Television light glowed behind curtained windows. A strip of duct tape ran up one cracked pane like a lightning bolt. The yard was dirt with a few sad clumps of dandelions and one sickly pecan tree filled with webworms, a tippedover tricycle on the sidewalk. A bangedup gray Honda sat next to the curb.

I'm not sure what I'd been expecting as a dropoff point, but this wasn't it.

"You've got a family?" I asked.

Dwight scowled. "You don't need to come in."

Then he opened the truck door and fell into the driveway.

I got out my side and came around to help.

Dwight was cursing the pavement.

"Should've warned you about that first step," I apologized.

"I'm fine," he snapped.

He pushed my hand away, stumbled to his feet. I followed him to the front door.

I heard children before we even got to the porch. A girl and a boy were yelling. Feet stomped. Porcelain crashed and a woman's limp voice escalated over the noise: "No, no, no."

Dwight turned toward me. "I'm okay now."

Then the door opened and a grinning Latino boy about eight said, "Mr. Hayes, tell her to stop hitting me!"

A younger AfricanAmerican girl pounced on the boy in a flurry of small fists. Both children yelled, did a oneeighty, and raced up the green shagcarpeted stairwell that faced the front door. Their thumping feet on the poorly constructed steps sounded like mallets on a cardboard box.

Dwight took a deep breath. Then he plunged into the house like he was entering the first circle of hell. He followed the children up the stairs.

"Dwight?" a woman's voice called after him. "Are you hurt, son?"

Dwight got to the top and turned the corner. He yelled, "Get the hell out!"

The Latino boy and his nemesis, the little girl, came rushing down the stairs, grinning, and disappeared into a room on the right.

The woman's voice said, "Chris, Amanda, no, no, no."

Despite everything I'd ever been warned about highrisk entries, I stepped inside.

The place smelled of longago meals-fried chicken, oranges, grilled cheese sandwiches. A wall unit AC was humming and whining somewhere in back, but it made no difference. The house was hotter than the summer night outside.

To the left was a den, illuminated only by a television. Half a dozen schoolaged children reclined on sofas, eating Cheetos and watching The Magic School Bus.

To the right, where Chris and Amanda had run, a woman dominated a blue couch in the living room. A portrait of Jesus hung on the wall above her. At her feet, two toddlers sat Vlegged on the carpet amidst a Gettysburg of Legos and blocks. The last child-not counting however many might be packed into the closets-was an Anglo boy of about ten. He stood next to the woman, fanning her face with a piece of cardboard.

The woman smiled pleasantly at me. "I'm Mrs. Hayes. Are you Dwight's friend?"

She looked in her late fifties, paleskinned, not merely fat but big in every respect, from wrists to ankles to fingers. She wore a pink tentdress and gaudy makeup that struggled to create contours on her otherwise shapeless face. Her hair was the colour of diet cola, and looked like it had been cut and combed by a barber who usually did men.

I introduced myself, told her I'd given Dwight a ride after he'd had a minor accident at Scholz Garten.