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“Elizabeth Palmer.”
    The taste of the words in his mouth was sweet and subtle and forbidden. He liked it.
    He was driving down Oracle Road , the highway that descended from the outskirts of the Catalina foothills into Tucson ’s downtown. Traffic had worsened in the city throughout the past decade, and tonight, at nearly   eleven o’clock , his SUV was part of an endless flow of cars and pickup trucks, while the northbound lanes to his left were a thick mass of headlights.
    Ordinarily he disliked city traffic. It made him grateful to live far from town, thirty miles to the east, where the roads at night were dark and quiet under the undimmed stars.
    But tonight the congested streets were helpful to him. He would have found it difficult to follow Elizabeth Palmer on an empty road. She might have seen his headlights, as he’d seen the glint of her chrome.
    She would never notice him now. He could follow her as far along Oracle as he pleased, keeping her red hatchback just within sight.
    No doubt she was heading home—wherever home might be. He was curious about that. He would be able to tell a good deal about her simply from her residence. And once he had subdued her, he could search the place, comb through any file cabinets or desk drawers, learn who she was and what she was after.
    His desire to see where she lived was one reason he had chosen not to attack her at the resort. The other was simple prudence. Though he might have surprised her on the fitness trail and rendered her unconscious, he would have had difficulty removing her from the hotel grounds without being seen.
    And to kill her at the hotel and leave her there would be too great a risk. Someone might remember that she had left the bar soon after he had, that she had walked in the same direction he had taken.
    No, it was better to abduct her from her home, interrogate her in solitude, and when the night’s sport was done, leave her body in the desert for the turkey vultures to find.
    After losing her on the fitness trail, he had quickly doubled back to the parking lot. Since obviously she had followed him, it seemed safe to surmise that her car was parked near his own.
    He’d moved his Lexus to another part of the complex, and from a hill he had watched the lot until the woman returned, hatless now, and wary. She must have spent two hours looking for him. Good. He wanted her tired, frustrated, not thinking clearly.
    She got into a Chevrolet   Chevette , the oldest and most unprepossessing vehicle in the parking area. Irrationally he was disappointed. He’d expected her to drive something better.
    Before she left, he trained a pair of collapsible binoculars on the car, and in the light of a sodium-vapor lamp, he read her license plate. An   Arizona   plate, battered and soiled like the car itself.
    He departed from the resort when she did, and followed her at a safe distance, listening to a handheld radio he kept in his glove compartment. The cheap speaker crackled with police codes.
    Cray had purchased the radio from a black-market dealer who advertised on the Internet. Commercially available scanners only received police frequencies, but this radio was a transceiver; it transmitted on police bands. Cray could talk to the police.
    As the hatchback pulled onto Oracle, Cray had heard a Tucson PD traffic unit call in a ten-seven. The officer was going on a break. Cray had waited a minute or two, to be sure the cop was out of his car and safely preoccupied. Then he pushed the transmit button.
    “Traffic five-six,” he said in a neutral voice. “Can you, uh, ten-twenty-eight a stoplight?”
    “Go ahead, five-six,” the dispatcher said.
    Cray recited the hatchback’s license number. There was silence as the request was processed.
    He was sure the dispatcher suspected nothing. His only worry was that the traffic cop might still be monitoring the frequency. If so, he would have heard his unit number, Traffic 5-6, and would alert Dispatch to the