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In the distance he could see New York. Lights were coming on and people were coming out to play. In the west, the sun was nothing more than a streaking white memory behind the clouds. Walker cursed as a light rain began falling.
    There was a scrubby group of trees at the very bottom of the hill, about thirty yards from the damp earth where the little girl was buried. Walker reached it as the last trace of daylight snuffed itself out. The dark shadows engulfed him as he sank back against a gnarled tree trunk. He waited.

Three
    S HE CAME BUT IT was hours later. Though Walker hadn’t brought a watch, he thought midnight must have come and gone before he saw the first movement in the trees above the hill. She came quickly, surely, as though she knew the way well. She reached the rim and started down the hill, walking down the dirt road toward him without once breaking stride. She stopped near the bottom, her first moment of confusion. A tiny penlight came out of the cloth bag she carried, and she played it first along the ground and then at a copy of that day’s Tribune. It took her perhaps five minutes, feeling her way along with the tiny light, to find the place where the little girl lay. In the dark the grave was almost indistinguishable from the earth around it. The dirt had sunk in slightly and was softer there, wet. The woman dropped to her knees in the mud and Walker heard a long sigh, breaking up at the end into a moan of raw grief. She began to sob, then cried violently over the grave for perhaps five minutes. Walker, watching from the trees, felt sad and a little sick. He was an interloper in a drama intended to remain very private. Something he would now make very public, because that’s what he did for a living and it was that kind of story. Real front-page stuff, wherever features were valued as much as hard news, and it didn’t matter much what the woman’s reasons were.
    It had the same taste as the Diana Yoder thing, only with this one there was no question of the public’s right to know. It was a police case, an unsolved coroner’s case, and possibly a court case as well. And if this sobbing woman was in fact the little girl’s mother, it was the best possible angle for his story. A hell of a reader. But suddenly, for no good reason other than the woman’s tears, he didn’t want to do the goddamned thing. He was getting soft in his old age. He pushed away from the tree and was about to confront her, when she opened her bag and took out a small but unmistakable gun. She put the gun in her jacket pocket, took out what looked like wire cutters, then reached deeper in the bag and found what she wanted. A cluster of flowers. This she put on the grave, in the center of the pool of water, since she had no way of knowing the head from the foot. She put the wire cutters back in the bag, then the gun, drawing the strings tight and holding it against her legs. For perhaps five minutes she sat like that, soundless, absolutely still. Then, again, she broke down and cried.
    Walker didn’t move. He hardly breathed. The gun added a new element. The possibility that the woman was deranged now loomed large and real. Suddenly she stood and came toward him, swinging the cloth bag at her side. He heard her sniff as she came close. He couldn’t see much about her in the moonless sky, other than the fact that she was slim and of medium height. She turned away and started up the long hill. He waited until she was almost to the top before he moved. At the top, he hurried along under cover of trees, leaving the road and cutting through the main graveyard, moving carefully between the tombstones toward the street.
    She was just a shadow ahead of him as she neared the caretaker’s cottage and the locked main gate, where she left the road. She skirted the fence until she reached a far corner. There she disappeared for a moment, and Walker had to hurry to avoid losing her. He did lose her, for more than a minute, but then she