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There was a muffled cry and the scrape of furniture legs across a hardwood floor following my knock. Then there was just silence.

I stood on the McNallys' front porch watching a cardinal perched on a bird feeder in a nearby oak tree. He bobbed and pecked relentlessly, red and vivid and sleek in this afternoon of graceful white butterflies and cute quick squirrels bouncing across the side lawn. It was springtime, and I wanted to be up on the Iowa River, standing in my waders and casting my line.

I knocked again.

Half a minute later, Eve McNally came to the door. Her forehead and left cheek showed red from where something had slammed hard against her—a fist, most likely. She wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a pair of red shorts. Her legs were shaped nicely, but she was already having problems with varicose veins.

"I didn't invite you here," she said. "Go away."

"I want to talk to your husband."

"He's not here."

"He's inside, Eve, and I know it."

"He don't want to talk to you."

"You haven't got your daughter back yet, have you?"

She glanced over her shoulder. If I hadn't known for sure that her husband was home, I knew now.

He appeared in the doorway, a big beefy man with hair so black it looked dyed, a blue panther tattoo running down the meaty biceps of his right arm. He wore a white sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of dungarees that hung precariously on the slope of his considerable belly. The panther looked angry, on the prowl. Presumably that's how his master looked most of the time, too.

"What do you want?"

"I want to help you get your daughter back."

"You get off my property," he said. I thought of angry Sam throwing me off his property a little earlier today. This wasn't my day for making friends.

"Tell him I'm trying to help you," I said to Eve.

"He don't listen to me."

"Out," he said. And suddenly he was out the door and pushing me backward off his porch.

"Don't hurt him," Eve said. "He's tryin' to help us."

I grabbed the railing to keep from falling down the four steps. I had just managed to get a grip on it when he hit me with a hard roundhouse right.

I suppose tough guys don't mind much getting hit but personally I've never cared for it a whole lot. For one thing, it almost invariably hurts. For another, it oftentimes inhibits your vision. And, for a final thing, it makes you feel like a helpless child.

Unless, of course, you hit back.

He was still p'd, meaning he wanted to hit me some more despite his wife's screams.

I stumbled down the final three stairs, losing my grip on the railing. But by then I knew just what I wanted to do.

And I did it.

When he was on the bottom step, I kicked him directly in the crotch. He made a lot of frightening noise, but then he did what I'd hoped he would do: sort of crumpled into himself, holding his crotch as he did so.

I hit him three times in the side of the head, hard. I wanted to hit him a fourth time, but my knuckles were starting to hurt.

I grabbed him by his nice black hair and half-dragged him back up the stairs and inside. He took a swing at me once, but missed. I returned the favor by slamming home an especially vicious kidney shot. I didn't miss.

In the living room, I pushed him on to the couch and stood over him. I had my Ruger out and was pointing it in his face.

"Oh, God, mister, don't shoot him."

"I just want to talk to him without him trying to hit me."

"You sonofabitch, I won't just hit you, I'll kill you."

"You were out at the Brindle farm this afternoon. Why?"

He looked surprised, fear and curiosity blooming in his beady little gaze. He composed himself before speaking, sitting up straighter on the couch, tugging his T-shirt down over his little middle-aged male titties.

A grandfather clock tocked peacefully, measuring out the centuries in the sudden peaceful silence, and in the kitchen the refrigerator motor thrummed on. It was a nice modest home, this, a home where husband and wife should live happily ever after and children should be raised in safety and love and not get kidnapped—no, never get kidnapped at all. Nor should two grown men, both with blood on their mouths, be in the living room sweaty and enraged and wanting to kill each other.

"You dumb bastard, even if you don't believe me or your wife, I am trying to help you find your daughter."

But he was scared. His eyes kept blinking, and he kept licking his lips. He daubed blood from his lower lip with the back of his hand. "What's my daughter to you?"

"Well, for one thing, believe it or not, I really don't like to see little kids get kidnapped. And for another thing, I think she figures into a case I'm working on. By helping you, I'm probably going to help myself."

"I don't know who took her."

"I think you do. And I think you know why. And I think that's why you went to the Brindle farm this afternoon."

He sat up even straighter, daubed at his split lip some more.

"Tell me about the farm, McNally. Who did you meet there?"

His gaze shifted subtly to the right. I instinctively understood the significance of that—he was watching somebody, namely his wife, do something behind my back—but by then there wasn't much I could do. I guess because she'd sort of taken my part with her husband, I'd figured she wouldn't help him hurt me in anyway. But you never know about husbands and wives. You just never know.

I started to turn to the right, and that's when she hit me on the crown of the head.

I had no idea what her weapon of choice happened to be, but whatever it was, it was damned effective.

I felt my head start to split open, felt a dark cold rush up my nostrils and start to spread through my respiratory system, and felt my knees go. And that was it; then I didn't feel anything at all.

"Let me help you up."

"I'd appreciate that."

"Maybe I hit you a little too hard."

"I think you did."

"Here. Just sit down here right on the couch. I'll get you a couple of aspirin. I mean, I'll bet your head hurts."

"I suppose your husband's gone?"

"He's afraid—I've never seen him like this. Somebody's trying to kill him, I think."

"Who?"

She just shook her head.

"I want you to tell me who was out at the Brindle farm with your husband this afternoon."

"I don't know."

She put her hand out as if to touch me, then stopped herself. "I'll get you those aspirin."

The dog lapped my face all the time Eve McNally was gone, big slurpy dog kisses and hard killer dog breath. When Eve returned, she handed me a glass of water, then dropped two aspirin tablets into my palm and then shooed Sara away.

"I'm sorry, mister," she said, "I really don't know who he met at the Brindle farm this afternoon, and I really am sorry I hit you so hard."

And just what was I supposed to say to that?

I took another break and looked over more of Peary's notes for the second or third time.

"Killings abruptly stopped," he noted in pencil. "I doubt this was because the killer lost his passion for the hunt. More likely, he found a better way of disposing of bodies."

I found a pay phone and called one of my friends at Quantico, asking him to run a search through the FBI computers. I wanted to know if there were a precedence for a case where a killer abruptly changed the way he was disposing of his victims. The computer would search through tens of thousands of cases, checking patterns to see if this abrupt change had been noted before.

I told him that this was real urgent. He told me to try back in a couple of hours.

Dearest Reece,