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days than not.
    His stops at Whispering Pines were one of the blocks with which the foundation of his simple life had been built. He looked forward to them as he looked forward to quitting-time and carving.
    He was not a stupid man, however, and not even merely smart. He knew that his life of seclusion might easily deteriorate into one of solitude.
    A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.
    Slipping the note from under the wiper, crumpling it in his fist, and tossing it aside unread would surely constitute the crossing of the first of those lines. And perhaps there would be no going back.
    He did not have much of what he wanted in life. But by nature he was prudent enough to recognize that if he threw away the note, he would also be throwing away everything that now sustained him. His life would be not merely different but worse.
    In his trance of decision, he had not heard the patrol car enter the lot. As he plucked the note off the windshield, he was surprised by Lanny Olsen’s sudden appearance at his side, in uniform.
    “Another one,” Lanny declared, as though he had been expecting the second note.
    His voice had a broken edge. His face was lined with dread. His eyes were windows to a haunted place.
    Billy’s fate was to live in a time that denied the existence of abominations, that gave the lesser name
horror
to every abomination, that redefined every horror as a crime, every crime as an offense, every offense as a mere annoyance. Nevertheless, abhorrence rose in him before he knew exactly what had brought Lanny Olsen here.
    “Billy. Dear sweet Jesus, Billy.”
    “What?”
    “I’m sweating. Look at me sweating.”
    “What? What is it?”
    “I can’t stop sweating. It’s not that hot.”
    Suddenly Billy felt greasy. He wiped one hand across his face and looked at the palm, expecting filth. To the eye, it appeared to be clean.
    “I need a beer,” Lanny said. “Two beers. I need to sit down. I need to think.”
    “Look at me.”
    Lanny wouldn’t meet his eyes. His attention was fixed on the note in Billy’s hand.
    That paper remained folded, but something unfolded in Billy’s gut, blossomed like a lubricious flower, oily and many-petaled. Nausea born of intuition.
    The right question wasn’t
what.
The right question was
who,
and Billy asked it.
    Lanny licked his lips. “Giselle Winslow.”
    “I don’t know her.”
    “Neither do I.”
    “Where?”
    “She taught English down in Napa.”
    “Blond?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And lovely,” Billy guessed.
    “She once was. Somebody beat her nearly to death. She was messed up really bad by someone who knew how to draw it out, how to make it last.”
    “
Nearly
to death.”
    “He finished by strangling her with a pair of her pantyhose.”
    Billy’s legs felt weak. He leaned against the Explorer. He could not speak.
    “Her sister found her just two hours ago.”
    Lanny’s gaze remained fixed on the folded sheet of paper in Billy’s hand.
    “The sheriff’s department doesn’t have jurisdiction down there,” Lanny continued. “So it’s in the lap of the Napa police. That’s something, anyway. That gives me breathing space.”
    Billy found his voice, but it was rough and not as he usually sounded to himself. “The note said he’d kill a schoolteacher if I didn’t go to the police, but I went to you.”
    “He said he’d kill her if you didn’t go to the police
and get them involved.
”
    “But I went to you, I tried. I mean, for God’s sake, I tried, didn’t I?”
    Lanny met his eyes at last. “You came to me informally. You didn’t actually go to the police. You went to a friend who happened to be a cop.”
    “But I
went
to you,” Billy protested, and cringed at the denial in his voice, at the self-justification.
    Nausea crawled the walls of his stomach, but he clenched his teeth and strove for control.
    “Nothing smelled real about it,” Lanny