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another hour down the road . He took a deep breath. Another. Whatever has happened, I must be prepared to deal with it—and in as rational a manner as humanly possible .
    A cool customer? It would seem so.
    But from that electric instant when Astrid’s scream had seared a wound in his soul, Andrew Turner had moved like one suspended in a horrific dream. He would awaken, of course, to live for a few hours in the sunshine—only to fall asleep when darkness came around—and dream again. And so would the cycle go. As this long nightmare rolled toward a veiled finale, the rational man would discover that logic and reason are applicable only to a certain limit…take one step beyond that invisible boundary, the unwary pilgrim falls into the Deep, twists and flows in dark currents—never to surface again.

Four
The Gathering Storm
    Most of the graveled road between the Columbine headquarters and the state highway was sufficiently well graded that a motor vehicle could roll along at a reasonable clip, but a two-mile stretch of tooth-rattling “washboard” spiked Scott Parris’s blood pressure, flushing his beefy face a ruddy hue. Because his countenance was illuminated by greenish dashboard lights, this crimson display went unappreciated by Charlie Moon, who was riding shotgun, so to speak, in the passenger seat. The moment the GCPD unit’s wheels got traction on the paved road, Parris switched on the emergency lights and siren, heavy-booted his almost-new black-and-white into a hair-raising sideways skid, straightened it, grinned while he watched the speedometer climb. Tranquil as a man of his temperament can ever be, his BP gradually drifted down toward normal, which in this instance was 138 over 93.
    As Charlie Moon checked his revolver, counted the shiny brass cartridges in the cylinder—he caught a definite whiff of gun smoke. Now where did that come from? The Ute was overwhelmed by a sudden suspicion that the cartridges were empty—that someone had fired all six shots from his gun and not reloaded. To make sure the ammo wasn’t spent, he removed the bullets for careful inspection. All was well.
    Up yonder, a moon glistening with reflected sunlight was about to be gobbled up by a hungry thundercloud. A great horned owl circled overhead, dragged a winged shadow across the highway. As the automobile roared past a clump of galleta grass, a startled cottontail bolted. In the wake of the black-and-white, hungry Ms. Bubo Virginianus blinked her bulbous eyes, made the practiced dive. Though he would not see another sunrise, Mr. Rabbit was, for the moment, intensely alive.
    But back to the chase.
    Along the stretched-out miles between the Columbine gate and the entrance to the Yellow Pines Ranch, the two-lane highway was mostly straight, except for a three-mile section where it snaked over a cluster of undulating ridges that, even at the posted speed limit, produced a stomach-floating roller-coaster effect in which children and well-adjusted grown-ups took childish delight. At a steady ninety-five miles per hour, the low-slung Chevrolet hugged the highway in the dips, went almost airborne on the peaks. After the road leveled, the speedometer ticked its way up to 110.
    Having checked his sidearm, Citizen Moon, the more intellectual of the pair, was pursuing the pleasant pastime of musing about this and that. By way of example: how responding to a trouble call was a small parable of life. Nine times out of ten, when the cop showed up at the other end, things would be okay. The prowler would be gone, the lost child found, the frightened lady unharmed. But then, there was always the possibility of—Number Ten.
    As they neared the turnoff, the chief of police shut down the high-pitched siren. When he could see the gate in the high beams, he switched off the emergency lights. If the assailant (assuming that there actually was an assailant) was still lurking on the property Astrid Spencer had inherited from her father, Scott Parris