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calm, ungodly calm, every thought and impulse under control. Shouldn't I at least hate them and start screaming?
    She left the hall, quietly, and eased down the stairway and back out the front door and stood for a few moments overlooking a lawn so green and smooth a golfer could have used it for putting practice. She disconnected a hundred-foot coil of garden hose from the lawn sprinkler, then reattached the regular nozzle head. Went back in the house, trailing the hose after her like some snake that just kept coming, sliding through the doorway and up the stairs.
    Neal and the mystery woman still didn't notice she was there, not until she unleashed the fury of the hose upon them. It was the most humiliating form of coitus interruptus she could devise on the spur of the moment, wetting them down not like husband and mistress, but rather a pair of mongrels rutting on the front lawn.
    After that day, she refused to see him without having first consulted a lawyer about it. And whenever, in the ensuing battle over communal property, she was prone to despair with frustration over Neal's own legal firepower, one recollection of him on his side, legs kicking impotently, screeching apologies and clutching his privates from the bruising force of the spray, was usually enough to bring a smile. And perspective…
    Still more of which came later when she realized that the whole of northern California had a taint, and might for years to come. Too lush, too hilly, too many secret enclaves in the land itself where she might run to contemplate the changes wrought in her life, only to find she was hiding from herself, as well.
    She wanted — needed — a simpler, less cluttered environment for a while. The austerity of the desert beckoned, clean and wind-scoured, like a cleared foundation on which to rebuild. Arizona would do nicely, and if she wasn't yet convinced she wanted to die here, she nevertheless owed this place debts she could never pay.
    Here was where she relearned that love need not stifle, nor grow complacent; that passion need not grow stale. That you really could link hands and hearts with another, whose life became a precious complement to your own. As long as there was love, there was life, and Arizona was just fine that way.
    Sarah was from here, after all, and that counted for much.
    The ancient Middle East wasn't the only place where saviors walked in the desert.

Three
     

    Even in her off-hours, of which there were many that weekend, Adrienne frequently found her thoughts turning to Clay Palmer, and the mysteries buried inside him: poisons in need of draining, psychological boils awaiting the lance.
    On Friday, Ferris Mendenhall had okayed the removal of Clay's restraints. Later that day he'd prescribed a regimen of lithium to get Clay stabilized and defuse any aggressive tendencies he might still harbor. He was already on pain medication for his hands, but Mendenhall preferred taking no chances; for someone who liked to use his fists, those casts were tantamount to giving him a pair of bludgeons.
    Shortly thereafter the tide of paperwork began.
    The name and other information Clay had given her had been verified and his records accessed from two Denver-area hospitals. All dated from the past four years, though along with these came records from Minneapolis, compiled over the several years prior to his relocation to Denver. On Sunday, Adrienne came in to her office an hour early to go through it all, uninterrupted.
    Eleven times over the past seven years he had made trips to emergency rooms; stitches in his shoulder, his thigh, his cheek; a few broken bones — ribs alone, three times — and once a dislocated elbow. In Minneapolis he had thrice been brought in for alcohol poisoning. Twice in Denver he had been involuntarily committed for a week of psychological evaluation, then released. Lithium had been prescribed once before, and Carbamazepine another time, in an attempt to combat poor impulse control, but there