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out there for us single women. It's that hope that keeps us shaving our legs, you know."
     
                                                
     
    The press had either lost her or given up on her for the afternoon. Deadlines beckoned them if Ellen North did not. He had no deadlines except the statute of limitations on his anonymity.
     
    He stood just outside a back door to Deer Lake 's City Center , freezing his ass and cursing Minnesota 's stringent antismoking laws. In the time it took to smoke a cigarette, he had already lost the feeling in his smaller toes.
     
    She came out of the building through a side door, muttering to herself, head bent as she pulled her keys out of her handbag. He tossed his cigarette butt at a snowbank.
     
    "Ms. North? May I have a word?"
     
    Ellen jerked her head up at the sound of the voice—a honey-and-smoke drawl from the Deep South. Damned reporters. Lurking everywhere but under the bushes—and they would have been there, too, if the bushes hadn't been buried under three feet of snow. This one came toward her with a long, purposeful stride, the collar of his black coat turned up high, hands jammed into his pockets.
     
    "No—that's your word," she snapped. "I said all I have to say at the press conference. If you didn't get your sound bite then, that's too bad."
     
    She kept walking, frowning as he stayed just in front of her, walking backward. "You're lucky I believe in handgun control," she said. "Don't you know any better than to sneak up on a woman in a dark parking lot?"
     
    He grinned at her, a wicked pirate's grin that flashed white in an angular face shadowed by a day's growth of beard. "Don't you know any better than to assume a stranger coming at you in a dark parking lot is a reporter?"
     
    The question cut through Ellen like a knife. What sun there had been earlier in the day was gone, swept away by a bank of clouds and the onset of evening. Though there was a police force inside the building she had just left, there wasn't another soul in the parking lot. She thought of Josh Kirkwood, his parents, everyone in Deer Lake who had made the assumption they were safe here. Even after everything that had happened in the last two weeks, she still felt personally immune. How stupid. How naive.
     
    An image of Megan flashed through her mind. Megan, her face a ^alette of bruises and stitches. Megan hadn't seen her attacker. "We fooled vou all along, he said . . .   We, always we . . ."
     
    Even in the faint wash of light from the streetlamps he had to see the color drain from her face. Her gaze darted toward her car, then back to he building, judging distances as her step slowed to a standstill.
     
    "I'm no rapist," he assured her with a certain amount of amusement.
     
    "I'd be a fool to take your word for that, wouldn't I?"
     
    "Yes, ma'am," he conceded with a tip of his head.
     
    "Ma'am," Ellen snarled under her breath, trying to muster up some anger to counteract the sudden burst or fear. She took a slow step back toward the building. "Now I do wish I had a gun."
     
    "If I were after you for nefarious purposes," he said as he advanced on her, "would I be so careless as to approach you here?"
     
    He pulled a gloved hand from his pocket and gestured gracefully to the parking lot, like a magician drawing attention to his stage.
     
    "If I wanted to harm you," he said, stepping closer, "I would be smart enough to follow you home, find a way to slip into your house or garage, catch you where there would be little chance of witnesses or interference." He let those images take firm root in her mind. "That's what I would do if I were the sort of rascal who preys on women." He smiled again. "Which I am not."
     
    "Who are you and what do you want?" Ellen demanded, unnerved by the fact that a part of her brain catalogued his manner as charming. No, not charming. Seductive. Disturbing.
     
    "Jay Butler Brooks. I'm a writer—true crime. I