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pathways between rows of brutally pruned roses. As chance would have it, she was at the farthest point in her circuit when McCarthy’s cellular phone chirped in his pocket, and she did not hear it. She saw it in his hand, however, the moment she turned, and broke into a trot in her eagerness to get back to him.
    It was a very brief conversation; McCarthy was folding the telephone before she reached the bench. He stood, putting the phone back in his pocket.
    “Was that her?” It was.
    “Christ. About time.”
    McCarthy glanced at her sharply, but he did not speak until they were in the car and on the freeway out of town.
    “Anne doesn’t have to do this, you know. She’s under no obligation; she doesn’t even take a salary beyond expenses.”
    “So why does she?” Farmer demanded, still impatient. Three days was far too long, and her department had begun pressing for her return after the second.
    “Eighteen years ago, Anne Waverly’s seven-year-olddaughter and thirty-one-year-old husband died in a mass suicide in northern Texas. The child drank a glass of cyanide-laced fruit juice, probably given to her by her father. You may have heard about it—they called it Ezekiel’s Farm—but it was only in the news for a couple of days because there was a plane crash and then some enormous political scandal just after they were found that knocked them off the front pages. A lot of comparisons were made to the People’s Temple suicide in Guyana two years before, and I suppose their reasons were much the same although there were only forty-seven people instead of nine-hundred-and-some. The bodies were not found for nearly a week. In early summer. You can imagine what they looked like.”
    Gillian grimaced; she had been a cop long enough to know.
    “Anne herself was a member of the group, but she had begun to question the methods and beliefs of the community. Her doubts were serious enough for her to take a leave of absence, as it were, to go away and think about things for a few days. She left the child, Abby, with her husband. Three days later the leader Ezekiel had a final revelation, and broke out the cyanide.”
    “Christ.”
    He added in an unemotional voice, “Anne believes that her departure triggered the suicides. It is quite possible that she is right.”
    They drove in silence for a long time, until Gillian stirred and asked, “So this is, what, some kind of penance? Or revenge?”
    “Neither, as far as I can tell. I believe it’s her own form of suicide.”
    “You mean she goes into these situations with a death wish? Jesus, McCarthy, how could you possibly allow—”
    “Not a death wish, no. She’s sensible and cautious, and she does her part very, very well. She goes in, shelooks around, she comes out and tells us what the community looks like and gives us her opinion concerning its internal stability. It’s just that on a very deep level, she’s made her peace with death, and she doesn’t really care if she comes home or not. A lot of people who do long-term undercover work have it to some degree, and with Anne it’s never interfered with getting the job done. Up to now, that is.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Probably nothing. It’s just that her reaction to me this time was different. She was angry.”
    “Pretty normal reaction, I’d say.”
    “That’s exactly it. She seems to have gotten used to the idea of living again.”
    Their rental car had problems with the first section of Anne Waverly’s road, but at the end of it—up the rutted gravel track, through the gate, and around a mile or more of narrow twists and turns—she was waiting for them. She watched them get out of the car, saw the woman, Farmer, look around her with a sudden delight in the dappled sun and the clean silence that followed the laboring engine sounds of the last ten minutes, and waited with neither movement nor expression while her guests metaphorically brushed off the dust of their journey and came toward