Mitch knew beyond doubt that his old man was not a rock.

Daniel was a fleeting shadow on that river, riding the surface, neither agitating nor smoothing the currents.

If Mitch had nurtured resentment toward such an ephemeral man, he would have made himself crazier than Captain Ahab in perpetual pursuit of the white whale.

Throughout their childhood, Anson had counseled Mitch and his sisters against anger, urging patience, teaching the value of humor as defense against their father's unconscious inhumanity. And now Daniel inspired in Mitch nothing but indifference and impatience.

The day Mitch had left home to share an apartment with Jason Osteen, Anson had told him that having put anger behind himself, he would eventually come to pity their old man. He had not believed it, and thus far he had advanced no further than grudging forbearance.

"Yes," he said, "I have an engagement. I should be going."

Regarding his son with the keen interest that twenty years ago would have intimidated Mitch, Daniel said, "What was this all about?"

Whatever Holly's kidnappers intended for Mitch, his chances of surviving it might not be high. The thought had crossed his mind that this might be the last chance he had to see his parents.

Unable to reveal his plight, he said, "I came to see Kathy. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow."

"Came to see her about what?"

A child can love a mother who has no capacity to love him in return, but in time, he realizes that he is pouring his affection not on fertile ground but on rock, where nothing can be grown. A child might then spend a life defined by settled anger or by self-pity.

If the mother is not a monster, if she is instead emotionally disconnected and self-absorbed, and if she is not an active tormentor but a passive observer in the home, her child has a third option. He can choose to grant her mercy without pardon, and find compassion for her in recognition that her stunted emotional development denies her the fullest enjoyment of life.

For all her academic achievements, Kathy was clueless about the needs of children and the bonds of motherhood. She believed in the cause-and-effect principle of human interaction, the need to reward desired behavior, but the rewards were always materialistic.

She believed in the perfectibility of humanity. She felt that children should be raised according to a system from which one did not deviate and with which one could ensure they would be civilized.

She did not specialize in that area of psychology. Consequently, she might not have become a mother if she hadn't met a man with firm theories of child development and with a system to apply them.

Because Mitch would not have life without his mother and because her cluelessness did not encompass malice, she inspired a tenderness that was not love or even affection. It was instead a sad regard for her congenital incapacity for sentiment. This tenderness had nearly ripened into the pity that he withheld from his father.

"It's nothing important," Mitch said. "It'll keep."

"I can give her a message," Daniel said, following Mitch across the living room.

"No message. I was nearby, so I just dropped in to say hello."

Because such a breach of family etiquette had never happened previously, Daniel remained unconvinced. "Something's on your mind."

Mitch wanted to say Maybe a week of sensory deprivation in the learning room will squeeze it out of me.

Instead he smiled and said, "I'm fine. Everything's fine."

Although he had little insight into the human heart, Daniel had a bloodhound's nose for threats of a financial nature. "If it's money problems, you know our position on that."

"I didn't come for a loan," Mitch assured him.

"In every species of animal, the primary obligation of parents is to teach self-sufficiency to their offspring. The prey must learn evasion, and the predator must learn to hunt."

Opening the door, Mitch said, "I'm a self-sufficient predator, Daniel."

"Good. I'm glad to hear that."

He favored Mitch with a smile in which his small super-naturally white teeth appeared to have been sharpened since last he revealed them.

Even to deflect his father's suspicions, Mitch could not summon a smile this time.

"Parasitism," Daniel said, "isn't natural to Homo sapiens or to any species of mammal."

Beaver Cleaver would never have heard that line from his dad.

Stepping out of the house, Mitch said, "Tell Kathy I said hi."

"She'll be late. They're always late when the Robinson woman joins the pack."

"Mathematicians," Mitch said scornfully.

"Especially this one."

Mitch pulled the door shut. Several steps from the house, he stopped, turned, and studied the place perhaps for the last time.

He had not only lived here but had also been home-schooled here from first grade through twelfth. More hours of his life had been spent in this house than out of it.

As always, his gaze drifted to that certain second-story window, boarded over on the inside. The learning room.

With no children at home any longer, what did they use that high chamber for?

Because the front walk curved away from the house instead of leading straight to the street, when Mitch lowered his attention from the second floor, he faced not the door but the sidelight. Through those French panes, he saw his father.

Daniel stood at one of the big steel-framed foyer mirrors, apparently considering his appearance. He smoothed his white hair with one hand. He wiped at the corners of his mouth.

Although he felt like a Peeping Tom, Mitch could not look away.

As a child, he had believed there were secrets about his parents that would free him if he were able to learn them. Daniel and Kathy were a guarded pair, however, as discreet as silverfish.

In the foyer now, Daniel pinched his left cheek between thumb and forefinger, and then his right, as if to tweak some color into them.

Mitch suspected that his visit had already more than half faded from his father's mind, now that the threat of a loan request had been lifted.

In the foyer, Daniel turned sideways to the mirror, as though taking pride in the depth of his chest, the slimness of his waist.

How easy to imagine that between the facing mirrors, his father did not cast an infinity of echo reflections, as Mitch had done, and that the single likeness of him possessed so little substance that, to any eye but his own, it would appear as transparent as the image of a spook.

Chapter 18

At 5:50, only fifteen minutes after he had arrived at Daniel . and Kathy's house, Mitch drove away. He turned the corner and traveled a quick block and a half.

Perhaps two hours of daylight remained. He could easily have detected a tail if one had pursued him.

He pulled the Honda into the empty parking lot at a church.

A forbidding brick facade, fractured eyes of multicolored glass somber with no current inner light, rose to a steeple that gouged the sky and cast a hard shadow across the blacktop.

His father's fear had been unfounded. Mitch had not intended to ask for money.

His parents had done well financially. They could no doubt contribute a hundred thousand to the cause without being in the least pinched. Even if they would give him twice that sum, and considering his own meager resources, he would still have in hand only a little more than ten percent of the ransom.

Besides, he would not have asked because he knew they would have declined, ostensibly on the basis of their theories of parenting.

Furthermore, he had come to suspect that the kidnappers were seeking more than money. He had no idea what they desired in addition to cash, but snatching the wife of a gardener who earned a five-figure income made no sense unless they wanted something else that only he could provide.

He had been all but certain that they intended to commit a major robbery by proxy, using him as if he were a remote-controlled robot. He could not rule out that scenario, but it no longer convinced him.

From under the driver's seat, he retrieved the snub-nosed revolver and the ankle holster.

He examined the weapon with caution. As far as he could tell, it did not have a safety.

When he broke out the cylinder, he discovered that it held five rounds. This surprised him, as he had expected six.

All he knew about guns was what he had learned from books and movies.

In spite of Daniel's talk about inspiring children to be self-sufficient, he had not prepared Mitch for the likes of John Knox.

The prey must learn evasion, and the predator must learn to hunt.

His parents had raised him to be prey. With Holly in the hands of murderers, however, Mitch had nowhere to run. He would rather die than hide and leave her to their mercy.

The Velcro closure on the holster allowed him to strap it far enough above his ankle to avoid exposing it if his pants hiked when he sat down. He didn't favor peg-legged jeans, and this pair accommodated the compact handgun.

He shrugged into the sports coat. Before he got out of the car, he would tuck the pistol under his belt, in the small of his back, where the coat would conceal it.

He examined that weapon. Again he failed to locate a safety.

With some fumbling, he ejected the magazine. It contained eight cartridges. When he pulled the slide back, he saw a ninth gleaming in the breach.

After reinserting the magazine and making sure that it clicked securely into place, he put the pistol on the passenger's seat.

His cell phone rang. The car clock read 5:59.

The kidnapper said, "Did you enjoy your visit with Mom and Dad?"

He had not been followed to his parents' house or away from it, and yet they knew where he had been.

He said at once, "I didn't tell them anything."

"What were you after—milk and cookies?"

"If you're thinking I could get the money from them, you're wrong. They're not that rich."

"We know, Mitch. We know."

"Let me talk to Holly."

"Not this time."

Let me talk to her," he insisted.

"Relax. She's doing fine. I'll put her on the next call. Is that the church you and your parents attended?"

His was the only car in the parking lot, and none were passing at the moment. Across the street from the church, the only vehicles were those in driveways, none at the curb.

"Is that where you went to church?" the kidnapper asked again.

"No."

Although he was closed in the car with the doors locked, he felt as exposed as a mouse in an open field with the vibrato of hawk wings suddenly above.

"Were you an altar boy, Mitch?"

"No."

"Can that be true?"

"You seem to know everything. If you know it's true."

"For a man who was never an altar boy, Mitch, you are so like an altar boy."

When he didn't at first respond, thinking the statement a non sequitur, and when the kidnapper waited in silence, Mitch at last said, "I don't know what that means."

"Well, I don't mean you're pious, that's for sure. And I don't mean you're reliably truthful. With Detective Taggart, you've proved to be a cunning liar."

In their two previous conversations, the man on the phone had been professional, chillingly so. This petty jeering seemed out of sync with his past performance.

He had, however, called himself a handler. He had bluntly said that Mitch was an instrument to be manipulated, finessed.

These taunts must have a purpose, though it eluded Mitch. The kidnapper wanted to get inside his head and mess with him, for some subtle purpose, to achieve a particular result.

"Mitch, no offense, because it's actually kind of sweet—but you're as naive as an altar boy."

"If you say so."

"I do. I say so."

This might be an attempt to anger him, anger being an inhibition to clear thinking, or perhaps the purpose was to instill in him such doubt about his competence that he would remain cowed and obedient.

He had already acknowledged to himself the absolute degree of his helplessness in this matter. They could not strop his humility to a sharper edge than now existed.

"Your eyes are wide open, Mitch, but you don't see."

This statement unnerved him more than anything else that the kidnapper had said. Not an hour ago, in the loft of his garage, that very thought, couched in similar words, had occurred to him.

Having packed John Knox in the trunk of the car, he had returned to the loft to puzzle out how the accident had occurred. Having seen the neck of the lug wrench snared in the loop of the knot, he had settled the mystery.

But just then he had felt deceived, watched, mocked. He had been overcome by an instinctive sense that a greater truth waited in that loft to be discovered, that it hid from him in plain sight.

He had been shaken by the thought that he saw and yet was blind, that he heard and yet was deaf.

Now the mocking man on the telephone: Your eyes are wide open, Mitch, but you don't see.

Uncanny seemed not to be too strong a word. He felt that the kidnappers could not only watch him and listen to him anywhere, at any time, but also that they could pore through his thoughts.

He reached for the pistol on the passenger's seat. No immediate threat loomed, but he felt safer holding the gun.

"Are you with me, Mitch?"

"I'm listening."

"I'll call you again at seven-thirty—"

"More waiting? Why?" Impatience gnawed at him, and he could not cage it, though he knew the danger of the infection proceeding to a state of foaming recklessness. "Let's get on with this."

"Easy, Mitch. I was about to tell you what to do next when you interrupted."

"Then, damn it, tell me."

"A good altar boy knows the ritual, the litanies. A good altar boy responds, but he doesn't interrupt. If you interrupt again, I'll make you wait until eight-thirty."

Mitch got a leash on his impatience. He took a deep breath, let it slowly out, and said, "I understand."

"Good. So when I hang up, you'll drive to Newport Beach, to your brother's house."

Surprised, he said, "To Anson's place?"

"You'll wait with him for the seven-thirty call."

"Why does my brother have to be involved in this?"

""You can't do alone what has to be done," said the kidnapper.

"But what has to be done? You haven't told me."

"We will. Soon."

"If it takes two men, the other doesn't have to be him. I don't want Anson dragged into this."

"Think about it, Mitch. Who better than your brother? He loves you, right? He won't want your wife to be cut to pieces like a pig in a slaughterhouse."