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Hannah?”
    “Appellate judge, Fourth Circuit, Richmond,” Mary explained. “I clerked for her in law school, when she sat on the Fourth District bench in Asheville. She’s an old family friend.” Mary thought how much more than an old friend Irene Hannah was. She had known her ever since she was eleven years old. It had been Irene who’d come roaring up in her brown Mercedes the afternoon her mother was murdered. She’d wrapped a blanket around Mary’s trembling shoulders and driven her back to Upsy Daisy farm, holding her tight in her arms while Mary had wept that long, hellish night away.
    Safer said, “If this rather loose pattern holds, some judge in the Fourth District should be killed sometime within the next eight days.”
    “And that judge will be injected with poison and have her head cut off?” Mary asked, her eyes on Safer’s.
    He nodded. “Possibly. Or her heart could simply stop, or she could have an automobile accident or someone could fake her suicide. All are lousy ways to die.”
    “But why?” asked Mary.
    Safer shrugged. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. The who and the why. Whether it’s just one psycho birdwatcher with a grudge, or a conspiracy of freaks who hate federal judges. Obviously, we need to keep our judiciary safe until we can nail down a suspect.”
    “So why don’t you just put guards on them?” Jim demanded. “Jesus, you guys are the FBI!”
    “We have, Mr. Falkner,” Safer replied, his tone sharpening for the first time. “We’ve alerted every federal judge in the country and put round-the-clock bodyguards on every Fourth District judge. All except Judge Hannah are extremely well taken care of.”
    “Then why the hell don’t you guard her?” Jim groused.
    Safer gave a bitter smile. “Because Judge Hannah refuses federal protection. She says that for a federal judge to require bodyguarding smacks of a regime rather than a republic, and she won’t have any part of it.”
    Mary fought an urge to leap from her chair and have Martel speed her immediately to Hartsville, North Carolina, lights and sirens blaring. In the years since that long-ago April afternoon, Irene had stepped in and filled a void in Mary’s life that no one else could fill. Irene knew her better than her grandmother Bennefield, in some ways better than even Alex McCrimmon. Though they now lived miles apart, Mary could not conceive of her life without Irene Hannah in it.
    Jim was frowning. “You still haven’t told me how you want my prosecutor to help you out, Agent Safer.”
    “If we can keep everything quiet for the next week, we’ll have broken the pattern. We’d like Ms. Crow to go to Irene Hannah in person, and talk her into accepting FBI protection.” Safer turned to Mary. “Since you’re a friend of hers and an assistant DA, we thought you might have better luck convincing the judge that she could be in serious danger.”
    “What makes you think she’ll listen to me?”
    “She may not. She probably won’t. All we can do is take you up there and hope you can talk her into it.”
    “Here.” Jim turned the phone on his desk around. “Call her, on my dime. Save yourself a lot of time and gas.”
    Safer shook his head. “Judge Hannah disconnected her phone last week. At the moment she’s incommunicado with the outside world.”
    “So where does she live?” asked Jim. “Timbuktu?”
    Five miles away from Jonathan, Mary thought, her heart both leaping and aching at the same time. “She’s got a thirty-acre farm near Hartsville. She raises Appalachian Single Foot horses.”
    Jim blinked. “The woman raises horses that only have one foot?”
    “It’s a special breed of mountain horse,” Safer explained. “They have the normal number of feet.” He turned to Mary. “Would you be willing to help us out?”
    Mary grabbed her purse. “If I leave now I can be up there by midnight.”
    “Whoa,” protested Jim. “Mary, you could be stepping into a real situation