A Darker Place by Laurie R. King Page A

resort.
    “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Anne,” he said carefully.
    “Is there anyone else?”
    “We have a couple of—”
    She interrupted. “Anyone as good?”
    He was silent. She turned back from the window then to look at him, and she was smiling.
    “If I don’t do it one more time, I’m going to live the rest of my life with the taste of failure in my mouth. My clumsiness in Utah killed seven people.”
    “Anne, your skill and your willingness to sacrifice yourself saved all the rest of them.”
    “From a situation I put them in.”
    “For Christ sake. Anne, not even you can stop an avalanche. Not even you could second-guess a man like Jeremiah Cotton.”
    “In my head, I know that, Glen. In my gut, I need to try one more time.”
    “And if it happens that this one goes bad?”
    “Well, I guess I’ll just shoot myself,” she said, still smiling.
    “Anne…”
    “I’m joking, Glen. Surely you must know that if I were going to commit suicide, I’d have done it a long time ago. And anyway, this one won’t go bad. We’re early enough with Cranmer, we can certainly defuse him and may even get enough evidence to put him away for a while. Very different from the last time. And a nice, tidy investigation might take your boss’s mind off Waco.”
    “I didn’t have anything to do with Waco,” he said quickly.
    “I didn’t think you had.” It was a simple statement, but Glen heard Anne’s faith in his abilities behind it. He looked down at the envelope.
    “Okay,” he said. “I’ll push a little harder.”
    He had pushed, and Anne had gone in, and in fact, they had been early enough: Cranmer was in prison now for a variety of offenses. However, the night before Anne had gone to Cranmer had not been an easy one. It had taken Glen two hours of concentrated effort to gain Anne’s full and undistracted attention, and he had felt distinctly triumphant when she had fallen asleep afterward. When she came back from Kansas, however, she looked immensely tired and had lost an alarming amount of weight. Besides, she was beginning to make him feel… uneasy. He went through the motions of preparing a new identity for her, but privately he vowed that he would not again pull her into one of his investigations.
    Over the course of his nearly forty years, Glen had been forced to break any number of vows, some of them serious, but never had he gone back on his private word with greater reluctance than with the case that had taken him into Anne Waverly’s lecture hall two weeks before that morning, and into her bed last night. In fact, it was something of a surprise that his reluctance had not manifested itself physically. Perhaps if Anne had not been so… uncontrolled, he might have had time to consider what he was doing and created difficulty for himself, but she had been. God, had she been.
    He only hoped he hadn’t hurt her. Whatever had taken possession of her last night had wanted to be hurt, and although Glen knew full well that wife-beaters and sadists the world around always used that rationalization, in this case he thought it might be true. He even had to wonder if somehow he had known it was going tobe that way. A month ago, when he was wrestling with the need to call Anne back into service, he had dreamed: He and Anne were lying together on the rug in front of the downstairs fire, just at that urgent stage between caresses and actual intercourse, when the smooth pink scars scattered across her body, remnants of glass shards and shotgun pellets, had awakened under his touch and begun to move, twitching independently of each other until they opened and became numerous tiny mouths, gaping against the palm of his hand and speaking to him in tiny, insistent voices. He instantly shot awake, revolted by the sick eroticism of the image but so turned on, he had stirred Lisa awake and crawled into her for relief.
    No, Anne had set the tone last night, as she always did in these encounters; he had only