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Show 125 her breasts? Or the one strangling his wife?" ". . . Rex?" Hunt tried out. Names exhausted quickly in his mind; what he held were images. "Is that his name? Schoefield? To the south? Rex?" "Oh! The Queen!" Leah announced, though there was a tense craziness in her attempted humor. "The Queen - Rex!" "Leah . . . Don't make things worse than they ..." "Impossible!" Leah interrupted. The phone rang again. This time the voice sounded drunken, barking. Through one of their many panes of glass, Hunt could see the return of Lane Pierson's Monte Carlo. He slipped a hand over the angry earpiece, and when the vibrations stopped against his palm, he hung up. "The arsonist!" Leah made a fact out of her question. "I had no mind to be malicious," Hunt announced. "No," Leah said. "No. I know. You never do." She turned her back to him. and beyond, over her shoulder, Hunt could see his sons, both in swimsuits listening to music and playing backgammon in the light. He felt a brief shiver, a shiver with more truth than anything he had been attempting, but then the clarity of whatever vision he was having blurred, and he was back, held in tension in the room again. He heard Leah. She was trying, through slow precise words, to say something to him. "Hunt . . . you are the only person . . . I have ever met ... who .. . can make goodness . . . who can make ingenuousness, make innocence . . . into something absolutely demonic. It must be a talent, but ..." She didn't finish her sentence. It hurt. There was no denying. It penetrated, got to blood and nerve. |