The Program

chapter

one

ALMOST FAT TUESDAY

1

"Remember this. Every precious thing I lose,

you will lose two."

The man was a good target.

Tall, six-five. Wavy blond hair that shined almost red in the filtered February sunlight. Ivory skin that refused to tan. Green eyes that danced to the beat of every melody that radiated from every tavern on every street corner in the always-tawdry Quarter. Even during a crowded lunch hour in the most congested part of New Orleans, you could spot him a block away, his head bobbing above the masses. On the eve of Fat Tuesday the Quarter was flush with tourists, and each of them was flush with anticipation of the debauched revelry that would only accelerate as the Monday before stretched into the Tuesday of, as almost-here became Mardi Gras.

The other man, the one with the gun, knew that in a crowd like this one he would have made a rotten target. He was five-eight with his sneakers on. What hair remained on his head was on the dark side of brown. His creeping baldness didn’t matter much to him, though, because the Saints cap he was wearing shielded his scalp from the sun as effectively as the distinctive steel-rimmed Ray-Bans shaded his eyes. The khakis and navy-striped sweater he was wearing had been chosen because they comprised the de facto uniform-of-the-day among the male revelers wandering to join the crowds on Bourbon Street.

The late morning had turned mild, and the man’s windbreaker was draped over his right hand and arm, totally disguising the barrel of his Ruger Mark II as well as the additional length of the stubby suppressor. His left hand was shoved deep in the pocket of his khakis. He had been briefed on the tall man’s destination in advance and kept his distance as he followed him. At the intersection where Bienville crossed Royal the man with the silenced .22 would begin to close the gap on the man without one. That would give the assassin a little over a block to get close enough to do his job.

The tall, blond man had come from his office near City Hall. His wife had wanted to meet him downtown and accompany him to the restaurant. But he’d declined her offer. He’d made prior arrangements to stop on his way to their lunch date at an antique store on Royal to pick up a nineteenth-century cameo he knew his wife had been coveting. The cameo was a surprise for their anniversary.

The errand on Royal hadn’t taken the man long, though, and he was turning the corner from Bienville onto Bourbon ten minutes before he was scheduled to rendezvous with his wife. With an athlete’s grace and a large man’s strides, he dodged slothful tourists with their to-go cup hurricanes and quickly covered the territory to the entrance of Galatoire’s. Briefly he scanned the sidewalk and the teeming street in front of the restaurant. His wife wasn’t there. He didn’t even consider looking for her inside: Kirsten had a thing about sitting alone in restaurants. He hoped she wouldn’t be too late; the line for lunch at one of New Orleans legendary eateries was already growing.

They had been in New Orleans for six years and this would mark the sixth time that they had celebrated their anniversary at Galatoire’s. He was the one who insisted on returning year after year. She would have preferred going to a restaurant that actually took reservations. But he prevailed. He was the keeper of the traditions in the family. He was the romantic.

The man with the windbreaker on his arm window-shopped two doors down from Galatoire’s, using the storefront glass to reflect the position of his prey. He didn’t worry about being spotted. There was no reason that anyone would focus on him. He was a middle-aged guy loitering on Bourbon Street just before lunch hour on the eve of Mardi Gras. One, literally, of thousands. Finally, the beeper in his pocket vibrated. With his fingertip he stilled it and began to scan the street for Kirsten’s arrival. His partner up the street had paged him from a cell phone. The page was his signal that she was approaching.

She, too, would have been a good target. Like her husband, Kirsten was tall. And she flaunted it. Two-inch heels took her above six feet, and the skirt of her suit was cut narrowly to accentuate her height. The jacket was tailored to pinch her waist and highlight her hips. Her hair was every bit as blond as her husband’s although the sunlight reflected no red. Kirsten was golden, from head to toe.

She carried a small gift box, elaborately wrapped. In it was a key to a suite at the nearby Windsor Court Hotel and a scroll with a wonderfully detailed list that spelled out all the erotic things she planned to do to her husband’s lean body between check-in that evening and dawn the next day. She’d had the list drawn on parchment by a friend who was a calligrapher.

The man with the windbreaker spotted Kirsten down the block. As he had been told to expect, she was approaching down Bourbon from Canal. A moment later her husband spotted her, too, but he was reluctant to leave his place in line at Galatoire’s. He waved. She waved back. Her smile was electric.

The man with the windbreaker on his arm moved closer to the tall blond man, simultaneously lifting his left hand from his pocket and placing it below the jacket. His right hand was now free. He stuffed it into the pocket of his trousers at the same moment he spotted his partner moving into position behind the woman.

Timing was everything. That’s what he’d been told. This wasn’t just about the hit; it was also about the timing. Timing was everything.

Kirsten Lord was fifty feet away when the man with the windbreaker stepped into position no more than two yards to the left of her husband, Robert. The position the man took was slightly back from Robert’s left shoulder. Kirsten dodged tourists and closed the distance between herself and her husband to twenty feet. Impossibly, her smile seemed to grow brighter.

The man raised his left arm, the one shielded by the windbreaker, so that it extended across his chest. Below the jacket, the barrel of the sound suppressor was now pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle toward his right shoulder.

Kirsten’s eyes left her husband’s for only an instant, just barely long enough for her to notice the small man with his oddly held windbreaker. She met the man’s eyes as they danced from her to Robert and back. She noticed the awkward way he was holding his arm, perceived the evil in his grin, and in a flash, she processed the peril that the man presented. The bright smile she was wearing for her husband left her face as though she’d been slapped. The gaily decorated box flew from her hand. Instinctively, her tongue found the roof of her mouth and the beginnings of a horrified No left her lips just as the man in the Saints cap pivoted his hand and wrist at the elbow so that his silenced weapon emerged from below his jacket.

Out toward Robert Lord’s head.

With the voices from the throngs on the street mixing with the music coming from the myriad clubs mixing with the rest of Kirsten Lord’s plaintive NOOOOO, the hushed shots from the silenced pistol were barely discernible, even to Kirsten. She thought they sounded more like arrows than bullets. Another witness later described them as two drumbeats.

Both shots found their marks. The first slug entered Robert’s head just below his ear, the second higher, in his cranium. The load in the Ruger was .22 caliber. The slugs possessed neither the mass nor the velocity to find their way back out of Robert Lord’s head after they pierced his skull. No grisly hunks of cranial bone cascaded against the plate glass of Galatoire’s front window. No bloody gray matter fouled the clothes of the locals and tourists standing in line for lunch. Instead, the two slugs banged around inside Robert Lord’s head, mixing the contents of his skull the way a ball bearing blends the contents of a can of spray paint.

The hit was supposed to be clean. And it was.

The timing was supposed to be perfect. And it was.

KIRSTEN FELL TO her knees at Robert’s side just as his legs were collapsing below him. One of the two shell casings was still dancing on the concrete, finally coming to rest near the crook of Robert’s neck. Kirsten seemed oblivious to any danger she might be in. No one around her seemed to be aware that her husband had just been shot. She no longer recalls what she said to the strangers who stared down at her with shock and pity on their faces.

When she looked up to identify the shooter, to confront the shooter, to accept the next bullet, he was gone. There was no way she would have known it, but by then his Saints cap was off his head, his pager was down a sewer, his sunglasses were off his eyes and he was around the corner, walking placidly down Bienville toward Dauphine. That’s where the third member of the team was waiting with a car.

The band in the bar on the corner was playing some better-than-average Zydeco, and he decided that the longer he was in New Orleans the more he liked it.

His instructions had been to make sure that the lady saw the hit. He knew he’d done well.

She’d seen the hit. No doubt about it.

2

Remember this, he’d said, pointing at me over the defense

table. Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.

Less than a month after they slid my husband Robert’s body into the only empty slot left in his family’s tomb in the Garden District’s Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans, I packed up my daughter and moved what remained of our life north to a little town called Slaughter, which was bisected by Highway 19 about halfway between Baton Rouge and the Mississippi state line.

We made the move in the middle of the night. In homage to my paranoia I’d driven all the way to Picayune, Mississippi, before I backtracked into Louisiana and charged north to Slaughter. My old boss in New Orleans, the district attorney, had arranged for a Louisiana State Trooper to tail my car all the way to Picayune and then all the way back as far as Baton Rouge. I bought the trooper a cup of coffee at a truck stop outside Baton Rouge, and he finished two pieces of pie, one apple, one lemon meringue, before I allowed myself to be convinced that we had not been followed.

Somewhere between the outskirts of Baton Rouge and the town limits of Slaughter, I stopped calling myself Kirsten Lord and started calling myself Katherine Shaw. I chose the name at my husband’s funeral. The inspiration? The name was written in pencil inside the prayer book that was in front of me in the pew at the church. Katherine Shaw it read. The name was written in a child’s hand, neatly, in pencil, and I prayed that the Katherine Shaw who’d sat in that pew and sung the hymns in that church and who had spoken the prayers wouldn’t mind that we now shared her name as we had shared that holy book.

Trying to make the urgent move to a new town a game to my ever-cool daughter, I’d allowed her to choose her own new name, too. Her class in school had been studying the Olympic Games in Sydney, so my daughter was now Matilda. I wasn’t fond of the name but consoled myself with my glee that her class hadn’t been studying the Nagano Games or Salt Lake City.

Together, Matilda and I danced off to Slaughter. "… You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me…."

WHEN I AGREED to go into what I told myself was temporary hiding under the protection of the State of Louisiana, one of the reasons I’d chosen to move to Slaughter for our new home was because it was the kind of town where strangers were noticed. Where unfamiliar cars earned a second glance. Despite my still raw grief over Robert’s death I did everything I could to befriend our neighbors and I quickly became known as the mother who watched her daughter enter school each morning and who was waiting outside the door ten minutes before the end of classes each afternoon. The routine I followed didn’t vary despite the fact that the upstairs window of the house that I was renting had a pretty good view of the front door of the school. For my state of mind those days, a pretty good view wasn’t good enough. A half-block away was a half-block too far.

SCHOOL ENDED FOR Matilda on a much-too-sultry-for-early-June day. But the kids didn’t notice the heat. They were energized and intoxicated by the prospect of their upcoming summer of freedom.

Matilda was planning to go home from school with a friend, the first social invitation she’d received since becoming the new kid in class so late in the school year. Upon learning of her plans, I invited the new friend’s mother over for coffee and sprinkled the conversation with a manufactured concern that my estranged husband might try to abduct Matilda. A custody dispute, I implied. The new friend’s mother said not-to-worry, she’d keep a close eye on the kids. She pressed for some dirt about my estranged husband and as I struggled to invent details to satiate her I wished I’d come up with a different story.

Eight, almost nine-year-old Matilda sensed my apprehension about her visit to her new friend’s house and informed me that she could walk all the way there without a chaperone.

Really, I said, feigning surprise, though I’d expected to hear words a lot like those from my much-too-independent daughter.

You won’t wait for me outside school?

I raised a hand in honor and stated, I promise.

"Mom, you promise?" There was a time in the not-too-distant-past that she stomped a foot every time she used that tone of voice.

I asked, Will you call me when you two get to your friend’s house?

Do I have to?

Yes, you do.

Then I will.

Matilda, you promise?

Mom.

THE PHONE RANG at eighteen minutes past three on that last day of school. Hi, Mom, said Matilda. We’re having lemonade and those little cookies just like the ones that Grandma used to make. With the jam in the middle? Grandma was my mother. She’d died the previous April. My unfinished grief over her death had already been trampled over by the brutal pain I felt trying to absorb the responsibility and loss I felt over Robert’s murder.

So. Matilda was enjoying an after-school snack in a house that was three and a half blocks from our rented home, yet I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and rest until I’d heard my daughter’s voice on the phone. Once I did hear the sweet melody of her call, I lowered myself to the Adirondack chair on the front porch and resumed my daily afternoon vigil. What was it, my vigil? I sat on the porch and watched for strange cars driven by small men wearing chinos and carrying windbreakers.

Or I watched for anything else that might feel out of the ordinary. I told myself that my task was like that Supreme Court justice’s assessment of obscenity—I couldn’t quite define what I was looking for, but I was positive that I’d know it when I saw it.

As I sipped my tall glass of sweet tea and the ice jiggled in the glass, the sound I actually heard was the tinkling of the spent .22 shells as they danced on the concrete near my husband Robert’s head.

That, by the way, is a killer whale.

I FELT THE distance to my daughter deep in my chest as though it could be measured in light years and not small-town blocks and imagined what my life would be like with just one more loss and I couldn’t imagine that it could still be called living.

I caressed the cameo that hung around my neck—Robert had given it to me for our last anniversary—and I thought about justice. The concept was distant and imaginary, as full of promise as the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny, and just as elusive.

That’s what I was doing when the portable phone rang on the table beside the chair.

I said, Hello, my attention momentarily diverted from my emptiness and my vigil on the street.

Matilda’s friend’s mother said, Is this Katherine? Katherine, this is Libby Larsen. Now tell me once again, what does your ex-husband look like, exactly? I think there’s a—

"There’s a what?"

It’s one of those big SUVs, she said, drawing out the last letter, the V, as though its agent had succeeded in negotiating top billing. It’s a black one. Big and shiny.

Where?

Under the magnolia in front of Mrs. Marter’s house. It’s—

Are the girls okay, Libby? I was trying hard not to let my fear ignite panic in my voice.

They’re right here on the living room floor playing with—

I’ll be right there, I said and threw down the phone. Once inside the house I wasted ten steps running to get my keys from the hook in the kitchen before deciding it would be faster to walk—no!—run, then thinking twice and backtracking for my keys after all because I might need the car to chase that SUV.

I was fumbling to get the key into the ignition when I remembered to run back inside and get my gun. Arriving at the locked case in which I kept it, I realized I’d left my keys in the car’s ignition and had to retrace my steps all over again. I was losing minutes when I didn’t even have seconds to spare.

Remember this, he’d said, pointing at me over the

defense table. Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.

The man’s words had chilled me for a minute that day in court but I’d shrugged off his threat. It certainly wasn’t the first threat I’d ever heard from a desperate con that I was prosecuting.

I figured that it wouldn’t be the last.

But then the man in court had sent the man in the chinos to New Orleans and he’d killed Robert right in front of my eyes on the sidewalk in front of Galatoire’s.

And now there was a big black SUV parked under Mrs. Marter’s magnolia tree and I was sure it was driven by a small man wearing chinos but I kept thinking it’s way too warm for him to be wearing a windbreaker.

The entire three-block drive I wondered what he would be draping over his arm instead.

HERE’S A BELUGA:

Before we were lovers, or even friends, even before I knew I wanted him to be my lover, Robert and I shared our first long weekend away at a mutual friend’s cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. Robert and I arrived separately, and we were two of ten people sharing the spacious vacation home. The second night of our holiday, after an evening of revelry that included a sojourn in a steaming hot tub on the edge of the adjacent woods, Robert pulled me away from the group and with the softest amber eyes in the world told me that I had the most lovely back he had ever seen.

That’s right. He was talking about my back. His first heartfelt compliment to me was about my back.

If the man had been paying attention that night, and I assumed that he was, he’d had the fleeting opportunity to see my breasts, to gaze at the full length of my legs, and to study the then still-youthful contours of my ass, yet the man I would soon choose to marry wanted to reflect on the beauty of my back.

These are the types of things I remember now. Even at moments when I’m careening around corners and speeding three blocks to save my daughter from assassination.

I don’t understand.

It’s just a beluga.

THE NATURAL ROUTE to Matilda’s friend’s house caused me to approach the big SUV—it was one of those obscenely immense Ford things—from the front. I screeched my Audi to a stop halfway between the stubborn-looking snout of the monstrosity and the front door of the house that held my daughter, and I parked on the wrong side of the road, something that just isn’t done in Slaughter.

Two men sat in the front seat of the huge vehicle. One wore a ball cap, and both shaded their eyes with sunglasses. Beyond that, I couldn’t tell how tall they were or what clothes they were wearing.

Libby Larsen stood on the edge of the large, tidy lawn in front of her house, shading her eyes with the hand that wasn’t supporting the toddler perched on her outstretched hip. I turned to face her and watched her mouth. Is that him? she was asking.

I shrugged my shoulders as I walked toward her. She tried not to move her lips as she said, Don’t look, but they’re getting out of the car, now.

I barely understood her words but knew what to do next. Why don’t you go back inside with the girls, Libby? Do you have a cellar? Pretend there’s a tornado drill or something, will you do that? Take them down to your cellar. You hear anything out of the ordinary, you don’t hesitate to call 911.

She didn’t know me well enough to know my determination about things, but she attended to my words as though I were a preacher who knew the path to eternal bliss, and she skipped away to find the girls and squirrel them into the cellar.

The two men who got out of the SUV weren’t anywhere nearly as tall as it was. They both walked my way. There was no hurry in their steps. Neither of them was carrying a jacket or anything that could be used to shield a silenced handgun, though the one who was wearing the ball cap seemed to have his left hand tucked back behind his buttocks.

I watched that one, the one with the ball cap, as I fingered the trigger of my pistol, which weighed heavily inside the front pouch of my sleeveless sweatshirt. The sweatshirt had been Robert’s. I’d cut the sleeves off for him. On the front it was embroidered LSU, his alma mater.

The man I was watching closely raised his free hand, the right one, and tipped the ball cap my way, saying, Ma’am.

I nodded, trying not to be distracted from the hand that was still hidden behind his back.

He said, We’d be looking for Missus Marter, while tilting his head back in the direction of the magnolia tree.

Yes, I said.

The other man, the one without the cap, said, We tried but she’s not answering her bell.

I replied without allowing my attention to waver from the man with the ball cap. Then I imagine she must not be home. Is she expecting you?

Indeed. Our appointment was a while ago. He tapped his watch.

Appointment for?

Air-conditioning. She wants a bid to install air-conditioning.

I’ll tell her you came by. Do you have a card?

The man with the ball cap moved, his hidden hand thrust forward with a suddenness that caused me to jerk my hand and tangle the pistol in the fabric of the pouch of my sweatshirt. I couldn’t extricate the darn gun. It took too many seconds for my eyes to recognize that the hidden hand, now extended my way, held nothing more than a business card.

Leaving the pistol tangled in the pouch of my sweatshirt, I reached out and took the card from him and read it. You’re with Buster’s? I asked. Buster’s Sheet Metal and Air-Conditioning. I thought I remembered seeing a sign on a ramshackle building over by the supermarket.

Yes.

Missus Marter will be sorry she missed you, especially on a day as wicked as this one. The summer will be a long one, don’t you think?

Fierce, he agreed.

You betcha.

3

Matilda’s new friend in Slaughter was named Jennifer. The two of them became buddies the way only little girls can. That end-of-the-school-year visit at Jennifer’s house led to another at ours, which led to a sleepover at Jennifer’s—Mom, don’t call her Jenny—and to the required reciprocation. Soon, there were long nightly phone calls between the two girls and loud protests of eternal devotion that I couldn’t help from overhearing.

Believe me, I tried.

By the time June was ending they’d been best friends for a fortnight and had already endured at least two spats that, in much of the animal kingdom, would have left one of their carcasses rotting in the sun.

As far as I could tell, my little girl never faltered in her quest to reinvent herself and become this child named Matilda. She fell into her ever-evolving encyclopedia of lies with an affinity that frightened me. The child could piece together the strands of her fictitious life with the facility of a master weaver. Not once did I hear her lose her place as she recounted details of her new story to her new friend. Often, I worried what bruises her fantasies were screening from my view, or of greater concern, from her own.

I was terrified that I didn’t know how to measure her pain.

My own? I felt that my own bruises were invisible to others but that they were potentially crippling to me. In my mind they were like subdural hematomas. But in my heart I knew that it wasn’t my brain that the swollen clots were pressuring.

It was my soul.

•    •    •

AT BEDTIME EACH night Matilda listened with feigned patience to my litany of concerns and my admonitions about how important it was that she understand how to react around strangers. Before long she was able to recite the rules to me the same way she had learned to recite the lines of Goodnight Moon as I turned each page for her when she was two years old. When she was small, no matter which book we read first, or second, or third each night, she always insisted that the last book we read was Goodnight Moon.

That meant that the final words before dark, the last words before I love you, were always, Good night noises everywhere.

After we resettled in Slaughter, we talked most nights at bedtime about Robert, her daddy, and at least once or twice a week she asked questions about the bad man who had killed him. Did he do something to make him mad? she’d want to know, and I told her that her daddy was the sweetest man on the planet, she knew that. What does he look like? she’d ask, but I wouldn’t tell her about the chinos because I didn’t want her to grow phobic about khakis. Is he big? she would wonder, but I never told her that by the time she was twelve I was sure she would be taller than the bad man who had killed her daddy.

Right from the start, though, she seemed to understand that the bad man who was responsible hadn’t been caught and that we were going to hide in Slaughter until he was behind prison bars. But her grief over Robert’s death was as immature as she was, and I remained worried that she hadn’t shed as many tears over her dead father as I felt were required.

•    •    •

ALMOST A FULL month passed without another sighting of the two men in the big SUV from Buster’s Sheet Metal and Air-Conditioning. I had checked them out, of course. The business was legitimate. Buster’s was. And the two men worked there. I’d watched them show up for work the very next morning after I’d met them outside Mrs. Marter’s house. And a simple phone call confirmed that Mrs. Marter was indeed considering air-conditioning her home, but the prices had taken her breath away as surely as had the previous July’s humidity.

Slowly, as the days passed, I began to feel some renewed safety and insulation in the security provided by the routines of Slaughter, Louisiana. The call that finally shook me from that false security and stiffened my spine came from an old colleague in the district attorney’s office in New Orleans.

THE MAN WHO’D threatened me that day in court, the man I was sure had arranged to assassinate my husband, the man whom I’d sent to prison for more years than even a Galápagos tortoise could hope to survive—that man—had just suffered a major personal tragedy.

The man’s name was Ernesto Castro. He had been a big shot in the cocaine trade, a local boss for the Colombian drug cartels, running an operation that delivered major quantities of cocaine from Miami all the way up to D.C. and Baltimore.

When I met him, he was residing in the Mississippi River town of Welcome, halfway between Louisiana and Baton Rouge. He’d been arrested for suspicion of committing a brutal rape on a wheelchair-bound forty-six-year-old woman in the elevator of the office building where she worked as a legal secretary. The New Orleans police quickly concluded that Ernesto was responsible for at least two additional recent rapes, equally depraved, equally vicious.

Fortunately for the legal justice system, Ernesto was much more brutal than he was clever. I was assigned to prosecute him, and I had no trouble winning convictions on each and every count. I felt confident that Castro would never again see the light of the Louisiana sun as a free man.

It was the day of his sentencing that he threatened me in open court.

A day in court that began like a hundred others.

As I approached the bench at the judge’s request, Castro unexpectedly stood up behind me at the defense table and raised his shackled hands. He lifted the fat index finger of his left hand, and he pointed it right at me. You! Bitch! Hey! he called.

I turned my head. Not even my whole body. Just my head. I wasn’t even certain that I was the bitch he was talking to.

The judge pounded her gavel. I could tell that she didn’t know if she was the bitch he was talking to, either. The bailiffs awoke from their reverie and moved toward the convict.

Remember this, Ernesto Castro said before the burly bailiffs could restrain him. Thees. Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two. Doo.

I don’t even recall the look on his face as he spoke those words to me. Despite the melodrama of the moment, the threat felt relatively inconsequential, as though it were just one of too many interactions during which I’d felt soiled by the vermin I prosecuted. In my journal, on those rare days when I had the time and emotional awareness to reflect on some way I’d been treated particularly badly in court, I would note that I had been slimed that day.

That was my word for it. Slimed.

Do you remember Ghostbusters? No? It’s not important. Trust me, I was slimed that day.

So what was Mr. Castro’s more recent tragedy, the one my friend in the DA’s office was telling me about as I hid out in Slaughter? Castro’s mother had been on her way to visit him in prison when her car was hit head-on by a bread truck full of snack cakes. The driver of the bakery truck had fallen asleep at the wheel and crossed the highway median. Mrs. Castro had died in a veritable sea of Twinkies.

"Every precious thing I lose," were the words he’d spoken to me. His mother was a precious thing, right? To him? Certainly.

He could hold me responsible, right? Of course he could.

From the moment I heard the news of Castro’s mother’s death, I lost more sleep wondering if Señora Castro’s death meant that I now owed Ernesto Castro one more loss of my own, or three more losses of my own?

My Robert, did he really only count for one?

Matilda, dear God, she would count for dozens.

If Castro got to Matilda, I knew I’d go all by myself to the prison where he lived and I would cut out his organs, one by one, until he died. I’d flay him open and first remove the organs that wouldn’t kill him quickly, his appendix and his gall bladder and his spleen, and I’d stuff them in his mouth and I’d force them down his throat until he began to choke on his own evil.

Images like that never became part of my pod of whales. No, they never dived, they never ran deep. They became my daydreams, the thoughts that filled my head while I sipped sweet tea on the porch in the heat of the afternoon and watched the road for small men in chinos.

SHE WAS A soccer player, my Matilda. And so was her new friend, Jennifer. The Larsens had a front yard that was large enough to kick a ball around in, and we didn’t. The girls spent hours that summer working on their game, which meant that they were at the Larsens’ house more often than they were at ours. Mr. Larsen had constructed a makeshift goal out of PVC pipe and fishing net that he set up between some flowering bushes on the north side of the big lawn.

If Robert had been alive, he would have offered to help Mr. Larsen with the net, and he probably would have managed to totally screw up the project. Robert wasn’t exactly what you would call handy. But, then, if Robert had been alive, Matilda and I wouldn’t have been in Slaughter.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but—even though I’m the one who got him killed—I occasionally cursed Robert for dying.

BY THE WEEKEND before the Fourth of July, I was complacent enough about Matilda’s visits to Jennifer’s house that I was able to sit and read or clean the house during her absences. But I wasn’t so complacent that I would run an errand away from the house and maybe risk missing the phone call from Libby Larsen informing me that the short man with the ball cap and the chinos was back in my life.

THE PHONE CALL, when it did come, was brief, even cryptic. Libby said, Katherine? I think you should come over. Right away.

Is she okay? I said. Is Matilda okay?

The police are on the way, Libby said, her voice admonishing, not reassuring. "She isn’t Matilda. And it wasn’t your ex-husband."

I threw down the damn phone, grabbed my purse—which I knew already contained my keys and my gun—and drove the three blocks to the Larsens’ like the mad woman I was.

A policewoman from the Slaughter force met me at the curb and was almost strong enough to restrain me from my sprint to the front porch of the Larsen home. Almost. Once I was past her, though, she was nowhere nearly fast enough to keep up with me. I paid no heed to her verbal protests that I stop, and I didn’t knock at the front door but instead just threw open the screen and called, Baby! Matilda! Matilda!

Libby Larsen walked into the toy-strewn entryway of her home wiping her hands on a kitchen towel that was decorated with blue pineapples. Matilda? she scoffed. How could you? she demanded. She tossed the towel over her shoulder and moved her clean hands to her ample hips in the international sign of housewifely indignation. "How could you lie to me? To us? How could you even think about putting all the other children in danger like that?"

Her outrage deflected off of me like X rays off of lead. No penetration whatsoever. She didn’t even know what danger was. I had a daughter to protect.

Matilda! I yelled.

I don’t believe that I was always so callous. Perhaps I was. Maybe it was the work I did. Or having my husband murdered. I just don’t know.

Libby said, She’s in the kitchen with the police. She pronounced it poe-lease. "I’ll tell you, ma’am, but you have some explaining to do. To them. And when they’re done with