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snarled as the pair strong-armed her into the van and slammed the door. Sean was trapped between them. The skycap jerked his wig off, leaned back over the seat, and snapped Sean's lap belt.
    “Who are you?” she asked. “Let me go!”
    “Any tails?” the woman asked the porter.
    “Didn't see any inside.” The tires screamed again as the vehicle sped away.
    “What's going on?” Sean demanded. “What in God's name are you people doing? Where's my husband?”
    “You'll find out soon enough,” the woman beside her said.
    “We're federal agents,” the porter said, as he stared over Sean's shoulder to study the traffic behind them. “We're all alone,” he told the driver.
    Sean Devlin didn't believe for a second that these people were cops.

4
  
Concord, North Carolina

    Winter Massey had visited the tombstone at his feet countless times in the past three years, most often at night. Tonight it was cold for October, and the wind whipped the black raincoat against his legs while icy rain stung his face. He wore a wool baseball cap and clenched a single long-stemmed rose in his gun hand. He had bought the rose, along with eleven others wrapped in tissue paper, from a young couple outside the airport for ten dollars. He suspected the pair were cult members because they wore identical, vacant smiles.
    Winter twisted the gold band on his finger. The vow said until death parted them, but he couldn't let her go even now. Maybe, he thought, that's because the time they had lived together, only fourteen years, was so terribly short . . . flying by like clouds in a fast-moving thunderstorm.
    He should have gone straight home, not driven five miles out of the way to the cemetery. He had spent two months tracking a fugitive, Jerry Tucker, the last two weeks never quitting the trail. After the capture, Winter had spent a full day processing Tucker—working to match the stolen property to descriptions of things known to have been taken from his victims—with homicide detectives from five jurisdictions and three FBI agents. He was tired, irritable, but he was also filled with a sense of accomplishment, knowing he had put a multiple killer on the long march toward the needle.
    The fact that a young female deputy marshal had invited him home with her earlier in the evening had spooked him. How could he? Maybe that's what had made visiting this place so important. Or perhaps he held out a faint hope that in coming to this desolate spot he might see his wife one more time, hold her tight against his chest and perhaps fill, if only for an instant, the aching void inside him.
    Winter remembered how hard he had prayed in those hours before she stopped breathing. Those prayers had done no more good than a wish tossed with a penny into a fountain. He knew that visiting her grave was tantamount to visiting a pair of her shoes, or a dress she could no longer wear. But he couldn't escape her memory. He would wander from it for a time, but a thought of her, triggered by a scent, a sensation, a sound, or a random feeling, would always slam him back to the past like a rifle shot.
    Winter Massey looked five years younger than his age of thirty-seven. He was five-feet-ten, weighed one-sixty-five, and could look forward to twenty more years of doing what he loved before he would have to retire at fifty-seven. He took good care of himself, ate as well as he could, ran, did push-ups, lifted weights, and swam. He had recently taken up boxing, sparring a few times a month.
    Before his wife's death, it had never occurred to him that he was powerless to keep harm away from his family. He had spent so many years hunting down the scum of the earth, trying to protect society from evil beings. He hadn't known he was the cobbler whose children go barefoot, the photographer with the empty family album.
    Feeling sorry for himself was not his style, and after three years he had no tears left to shed, just a sense of loss he had steeled himself to. He removed