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ferocity. She gave herself to him that way too, devoted herself to him, attached herself to his life and submitted herself to his authority so completely that it simply baffled him. He did not have such a high opinion of himself that he could ever imagine he deserved such devotion, so what the hell was she thinking exactly? Day to day, he was never really sure.
    But never mind. He loved his wife. This was no mere matter of emotion to him. It was a profound fact of his existence. He might feel any which way about her at any particular moment, sure. But as long as creation endured and ever after, Grace’s good was his good, her suffering his. Even his love for his children was somehow an extension of his love for her. Even his love of his own life. When the psycho kidnapper of Emily Watson had fired that 500 at him in the farmhouse, his primary emotion—aside from the adrenaline rush—had been righteous indignation on his wife’s behalf. How evil could Ray Mima be that he would risk causing Grace to grieve? That was how much he thought of her.
    At that first lunch with Margo Heatherton—this was maybe eight months ago—Margo had interviewed him as “research” for her “novel.” She had been flattering him, he realized now, but it was subtle and at the time he hadn’t noticed it. She had simply let him do the talking and occasionally admired his expertise. Then, after a while, she had told him about the troubles of her young life—her desire to go her own way rather than succumb to pressure from her father. Which allowed him to dispense a bit of easy wisdom to her, which also flattered him. Which, again, he didn’t realize until much later.
    After that—for the next month or two—she did little more than e-mail him from time to time. She’d ask him some new interview question or send him an article she thought might interest him. Every e-mail had her photograph attached. That was just a feature of her e-mail program. But he found himself searching for other pictures of her online. He found two. One in particular showed her at a fancy New York debutante ball, wearing a gown that made her look like a princess. It fascinated him.
    Once, after about six weeks, she arranged to bump into him on the street outside the NYPD’s 16th precinct, where Extraordinary Crimes was housed. He bought her a cup of coffee at a nearby diner. She somehow ended up telling him about her problems with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a medical student. He felt jealous, though he didn’t quite recognize that that’s what it was. She invited him to a party later that night. “Bring your wife!” she said. “I’d love to meet her.” But he knew Grace wouldn’t be able to get away, and wouldn’t like it much if she did. He refused Margo’s invitation to go on his own. He liked the look of disappointment in her eyes. All of this, he had now come to believe, had been calculated on her part, a well-planned campaign to draw him in.
    It worked, too. She got into his mind. He began to think about her. There were things that she said and ways that she looked when she said them that kept coming back to him during the day. By this time, Grace had started to rebound from her mild depression. She still missed Houston, but she’d found a church she liked in Queens and the kids were pretty well settled in their red-brick home. She was almost back to her cheerful and generous self. As for him, his work on the Task Force was still slow and frustrating, but traces of the BLK were starting to emerge—they were making progress.
    None of this mattered. The only thing that mattered was that she, Margo, was in his mind. Otherwise, he would not have been so vulnerable to the final phase of her seduction.
    She invited him up to Westchester, where she lived. To a café where she said she was going to give a reading of some of her novel. He did not go there to have