"Me? I am totally fantastic. What else?"

"Please," she said, but he walked away from her and did not look back.

Joe Deets finally devised an access code which pleased him. It fitted into the protocols of the cryptography which he had set up to protect the master data base from any outside invasion through the phone lines. He tested it by copying a small portion of the data base onto a hard disk on one of his personal computers, along with the program which not only protected the information but allowed for the orderly additions to the data base, and periodic file maintenance.

When the hard disk was ready, he added the trigger name and address he had devised, sending it to file just as if he were one of Jenny MacBeth's girls running her terminal, adding the new donors. And then he began printing out portions of the 2-34 information from the disk. On the first run it was slightly faulty. By the seventh retrieval, the list was garbage:

He tried to work backward through the changes to reconstruct the original data, but he had made the changes progressive, based on a random-number generation, and found the task impossible.

He erased the disk and shredded the lists. The poison was hidden inside the data base itself, unresponsive to any command to reveal itself. It was an elegant little program. Too bad there would never be anyone else to admire it. It would hide in there until the trigger came in, and then it would activate itself and begin the random substitutions, a machine-language corruption of the codes.

He switched a personal computer to Dow Jones Retrieval, and as he stared at the incoming data on the screen, once again his attention wandered and he found himself thinking about Annalee Purves. The daydream had a consistent pattern. He wondered what his life would have been like had they met and married in their early twenties. She had touched something within him he thought long dead. Though she was faded now, she was still a strong and vital woman, strong-bodied, intense, loyal, with a native shrewdness about life and relationships.

He knew he had given her a problem that might be beyond her capacity to handle. Or Patsy Knox had given her the problem.

When his thoughts drifted from Annalee back to her daughter, Doreen, he tasted a faint sour edge of self-loathing, an unfamiliar flavor, quickly suppressed, overwhelmed by his sensual images of her body and her soft cries, deliberately recalled as an antidote to the unfamiliar discomfort of an awareness of evil.

Is this the way it begins? he wondered. As she knelt and prayed, that startling image as of a curtain being opened to give a glimpse of wonders beyond, then quickly closed again, leaving me with the impression I am in darkness. Lost in a darkness. Is this the way the sinner comes upon a state of grace? To fall half in love with a woman who is not only a farm-woman, but is one of Brother Meadows' ignorant tithing 2-35 multitudes, compartmented away from life and reality, charged with thinking only those thoughts which reinforce her state of captivity. But she sees something out there, and for a moment I almost saw it. It comforts her. And she was once a sinner. In an indirect way she made that clear.

What if perhaps I stopped intellectualizing all this faith, and, like they say, took it on faith? Relaxed and believed. Prayed without the self-conscious feeling of being a superstitious damned fool. If it worked, what would I have left? The intricate pleasures of practicing my specialty. The constant itch and ache for the forbidden flesh of young women. And, maybe, a slim little promise of eternal life. Annalee, Annalee, I think I need you to come back here to me and help me pray. If we pray, maybe I can release your daughter and beg your forgiveness, and the Lord's.

The law offices of Winchester and Winchester occupied an entire floor of the Central Citizens Bank Building in Lakemore.

Charley had the largest office, a corner room paneled in fruit wood with four windows, a hidden refrigerator and bar, a desk big enough to serve as a conference table, a worn leather couch, two matching chairs and the customary shelves of law books.

Charley had been dictating to Mrs. Miller for over an hour, scores of short cheery personal letters to dear close friends.

Mrs. Miller, who had always looked close to death and who was as healthy as the Cowboy backfield, was so familiar with his style he had only to give the meat of the letter and then say, "Yattata yattata and so on," and it would all sound like him when the letter came in for signature.

At a couple of minutes before noon his brother Clyde came in and nodded and turned on the bookshelf television. The hilltop tower and the new cable brought in all three network stations in the city clear as any picture anywhere. It reminded Charley of John Tinker's phone call and so he dismissed Mrs. Miller, and on second thoughts told her she could stay and watch the young Reverend Meadows if she wished.

He was the third story on the noon news, right after the new after-shocks in California and some unusual and destructive tornadoes up in Pennsylvania. John Tinker looked very good on the tube. It had been cut to about three minutes, and it ended with him looking directly into the audience eye and spreading his hands and saying, "We of the Eternal Church of the Believer deplore all cruel and violent acts, physical, mental or spiritual. And we deplore the climate of indifference in our country that makes such acts not only possible but, to some warped minds, necessary."

When they began talking about a warehouse fire, Clyde turned it off and said, "The same mixture as before, hey, Charley?"

Mrs. Miller said, "He's wearing a little thin."

"Who asked you, Marian?"

"You'd be better off if you asked me about a lot more things, Clyde." She went out, setting her heels down hard, closing the door with an ounce more pressure than usual.

"She's right, Clyde," Charley said.

"I can see it. You can see it.

He's going through the motions. He told me the old man is worse. Walter Macy is all ruffled up about this Birdy that Finn and John Tinker think will be so good for the Church. The old man has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tried to drown his nurse."

"Jesus!" exclaimed Clyde.

"One of the Angels, great big old girl named Lilly Louise, boobs out to here, has got herself pregnant and won't say by whom. Nice nervous little woman named Glinda Lopez came sneaking to my house last night to see me by appointment and told me that some Jap has rigged up some kind of computer voice system where she can talk on the phone to people way behind in their donations, pretending she's old Matthew. She wanted to know if soliciting money using somebody else's voice was illegal."

"Good Lord, is it?"

"It never came up before. I told her I'd study on it. But it seems to me you get a personal letter supposed to be signed by Reagan asking you for funds for the Republican Party, that's kind of the same thing. But in another way, it isn't. She doesn't like doing it. She says it's very hard work, and she's not sleeping well because she dreams about it all the time."

"Wouldn't you think John Tinker would have checked it out with you before going ahead? Or Finn? Or somebody? There could be a big stink about something like that."

"Not as big as finding a missing lady down a well. Clyde, when things go bad, they go bad in bunches. Few years back all these things bunching up could have hurt the Church a lot. Not anymore. Too big. Too much momentum. Too much cash in the drawer. When you're big enough you can blame your troubles on your enemies and get believed. When you're little, all your troubles come from bad management. Where are you having lunch?"

"Murph's. With that zoning board consultant with the beard. I can't ever remember his name."

"Yates. Don't order the corned beef. It's been fat and stringy lately."

Lieutenant Coombs and Sergeant Slovik talked to Roy Owen in his motel room. He and Coombs sat in the chairs and Slovik sat on the bed. They waited while he read over the inventory list of her belongings.

"Look about right?" Coombs asked.

"I guess so. I mean, it would be the sort of things she'd have with her. What's this about a notebook, illegible?"

"Bad luck there, I guess. The suitcase popped open when it hit bottom, and the notebook slid out into the water and crud.

Or it lay there until the rainwater came in enough to wet it. The lab might be able to raise something off the pages, but it looked to me as if a lot of them had been torn out. Another thing.

Some of her stuff was neat, but a lot of it had just been crammed into the suitcases and train case as if she was in one hell of a hurry, or somebody did her packing for her."

Then somebody packed for her. Even in a great hurry, she was always a very neat and orderly person."

"Okay. Here's the jewelry. All we want you to do is identify it right now."

"The chain is hers. And the rings. I don't remember that watch."

"Okay, and here's the clothes she was wearing."

Roy looked at the list.

"One shoe?"

"We've got people searching the area looking for her shoe and her purse."

Roy started to hand the short list back and then said, "Wait a minute. You've got a bra on the list, but no underwear panties."

"She wasn't wearing any."

"I know... knew Lindy well. Really well. I knew more about her habits than I did about her attitudes. She would never, never, never put on a skirt without anything under it.

Believe me. Never!"

Coombs glanced over at Slovik and said, "That backs up our suspicion of sexual assault. And makes one more item to look for."