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suppositions about why Sam and Krista were killed had begun fouling the air before their bodies were even found. Burglary had been dismissed as a motive within minutes. The killer didn’t take enough stuff. Besides, a simple burglary gone wrong didn’t set the imagination aflame. Most of the students leaned toward a botched drug deal. Many of them used drugs themselves and harbored a healthy fear of the people their habits forced them to deal with. And those who maintained a more chemical-free lifestyle were attracted to any theory that blamed the victims for their misfortune and fostered their illusion of safety.
    Faye, who couldn’t have afforded drugs even if she’d been attracted to them, had no illusion of safety. However Sam and Krista died, whoever did it, the fact remained that someone had committed murder. No matter the reason for the crime, no one was safe in the vicinity of someone who had once violated that taboo.
    “The vans are here,” the sheriff announced. “There’s room for everybody. We’ll bring you back here to your cars as soon as we’ve taken your statements.”
    As Faye allowed herself to be herded once again, she scanned the faces of the people she passed. They all looked so ordinary. If she had to guess which of them was capable of murder, it would be the black-eyed man in the corner. He was just standing there, waiting for the cashier to ring up a loaf of bread and a can of potted meat, but he stood out among Wally’s rubber-necking patrons because he refused to rubber-neck. His casual stance was studied and he did not gawk at the grim-faced procession walking single-file and silent in the sheriff’s wake. There was a stillness to his face that did not speak well of him.

    Nguyen did not like the way the dark-skinned girl looked at him as she passed, as if she could hear what he was thinking and was appalled by it. He wished the cashier would quit ogling the sheriff’s parade of witnesses and take his money. He needed to get back out to Water Island and dismantle his worksite before somebody stumbled onto it. Even though he was working miles away from Seagreen Island, the Marine Patrol and the Sheriff’s Department would have cops crawling all over the Last Isles and he didn’t want to abandon his equipment or his finds. If he got out there quickly, the search wouldn’t yet have fanned out wide enough to catch him in its net.
    He watched the cashier amble over to the redheaded hag working at the grill, probably planning to share a bit of gossip about the double murder. Nguyen had no time to watch a couple of rednecks jaw at each other. He walked out, leaving his potted meat and bread on the counter.

    Stuart Sheffield was aware that his neighbors hated him. They hated his rusty singlewide. They hated the ramshackle roofover that covered the trailer’s leaking shingles and sheltered two porches, front and back, where he stored broken stuff that he didn’t feel like hauling to the dump. They especially hated every scrap of trash that could be seen from the road (including Stuart himself, who sat drinking beer on the front porch with daily regularity), because they felt the condition of his home lowered their property values and made them look like rednecks by association. And they were right.
    Nevertheless, Stuart liked his environment precisely the way it was. He lifted a beer can in tribute to every car that drove past his private paradise, listening all the while for the sound of real estate prices tumbling. He particularly enjoyed the fact that his choice of careers gave him plenty of idle time to annoy his neighbors, because a man in his line of work could afford to work very rarely indeed.
    He would be working this week for a change and the anticipation vibrated in his chest, just as his cell phone had vibrated in his pocket not an hour before. It still tickled him to mate the tiny phone with his teeny palmtop computer, bringing the World Wide Web to his very own porch. E-mail