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firmly shut, but there came to him the hint of a smell: mascara, makeup, something Emma had used on her face. Behind him, he heard a whisper. Burnished light seemed to fall on the narrow space between the window and the drape. A shadow moved, a whisper like wind through a field of grass. Was it his daughter's voice?
    A tiny thrill shot up his spine. "Emma?" he said under his breath. "Are you here? Where are you?"
    Nothing. The smell had vanished. He stood for a moment, lost in time, feeling like an idiot.
Why can't you face it?
he told himself.
She's gone.
But he knew why. During the six months while Sharon was popping pills behind his back, while she and Jeff were finding shadowed corners to couple in, while his marriage was falling apart, he'd spent every minute of his spare time trying to piece together the hours before Emma's death. The truth was, he hardly slept, using the nighttime hours to prowl, run down leads, talk to snitches. Emma's cell phone, crushed in the accident, was no help, but he got a friend at the phone company to pull her records. He worked the list of numbers, buildingcharts of her friends and acquaintances, but always the nodes and connectors circled back on themselves, like a snake eating its tail. He laboriously read the transcripts of her text messages for the previous two weeks, the longest the phone company kept such things. He scoured the hard drive of her laptop, looking for suspicious e-mails, links to Internet chat rooms, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous Web sites. It was like the dark side of the moon in there, the hard disk was clean of such ubiquitous detritus. If this had been a spy novel, he'd suspect it had been purged, but Emma was no spy and this wasn't a novel. He spent hours with Alli Carson, braced the faculty and staff at the school. He interviewed every neighbor of the school's in an ever-widening circle until even he understood he'd exhausted all possibilities. He'd run down all Emma's girlfriends until the father of one had taken out a restraining order on him. He'd followed every possible lead, even ones that appeared improbable. For his tireless and often frenzied efforts, he'd come up with nothing. After six months, he was no closer to finding out what had frightened his daughter so thoroughly. She'd always been something of a fearless creature. Not reckless, so far as he knew—though he'd finally had to admit to himself that he'd known Emma not at all. The bitter truth, as Sharon had said, was that their daughter had a secret life from which, even in death, they were excluded.
    "Emma, I want to listen," he whispered into the space between the curtain and the window. "Honest I do."
    Moments later, amid an eerie silence, he returned to his escort and was taken away, down the paneled corridor hung with photo portraits of the college's more illustrious alumnae, who had achieved fame and fortune in their chosen fields. Before he reached the end, the door to the headmistress's office opened and a woman came out. Jack's escort stopped, and so did he.
    Closing the door firmly behind her, the woman strode toward him with her hand outstretched. When he took it, she said, "Jack McClure,my name is Nina Miller." Her clear blue eyes regarded him steadily. "I'm a special operative of the Secret Service and the Department of the Treasury," she said with exquisite formality. "I'm assisting Homeland Security First Deputy Hugh Garner. The president has appointed him to spearhead this joint operations task force."
    Nina Miller was tall, slim, proper. She wore a charcoal gray man-tailored worsted suit, sensible shoes with low heels, a pale blue oxford shirt buttoned to the collar. All that was missing, Jack observed, was a rep tie. This one was trying too hard to fit into an old-boys network that obviously wanted no part of her. She had the narrow face of a spinster, with a rather long, aggressive nose and a pale, delicate complexion that seemed as translucent as a bowl of light.
    She gestured.