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using a dialect from the Ukraine.”
    “The Russian Mafia?” Mary laughed, picturing Josef Stalin knocking back vodka on the
Robert E. Lee.
    “They are dangerous men,” Safer replied without smiling. He spat out some word in Russian. “Beasts, all of them.”
    “So did you help the FBI crack the case?”
    “I did. And by the time we’d nailed them, I was hooked. Gave the university my resignation and applied to the Bureau.”
    “Dr. Safer became Agent Safer. What did your family think?”
    “They thought and still think I’m crazy.” He chuckled. “How about you? What does your family think of your being a prosecutor?”
    She remembered her grandmother’s funeral, three months ago. “Actually, I don’t have enough family left to think much of anything.”
    They rode on, passing through green pastureland grown gold, letting the Dodge’s heater warm the sudden coldness that filled the truck. After a time, Safer spoke again.
    “So did you give any thought to these judges last night?”
    Mary tried to sort through her jumbled memories of the day before. Everything seemed chaotic—first she’d been dancing to the Strutters, then she’d raced downtown in a police car, then she’d seen the picture of that poor woman with no head. When she’d finally gotten home, she’d pulled off her silky green gown and fixed her special martini—three fingers of frozen Sapphire gin, not shaken, not stirred, not altered at all except for being sloshed in a glass. After that she remembered packing, then dozing, then waking from a terrifying dream where Irene Hannah was being loaded into a cattle truck and driven away.
    “Some,” she lied, quickly starting her prosecutorial wheels turning. “I wondered if there was any commonality between the victims.”
    Safer raised one eyebrow. “Opinion-wise, they were all middle-of-the-road jurists. Five had been appointed by Democratic presidents, six by Republicans. Most had supported fourth amendment rights and ruled against hate crimes. Klinefelter had just signed an opinion involving interstate banking.”
    “That’s not exactly a hot-button issue.” Mary frowned. “How about personal? Anybody divorced? Gay? Minority?”
    “The Alabama judge was African-American. The guy in Wyoming was Latino. The rest were white. All were married to people of the opposite sex. Six were Protestant, two were Roman Catholic, the other three had no religious affiliation.”
    “No religious axe-grinding there,” Mary said.
    “How about Irene Hannah?” asked Safer.
    “She’s a white Democrat, sixty-two, and widowed,” replied Mary. “I don’t know her judicial record chapter and verse, but politically she’s pro-choice, anti–hate crime, and thinks DUI ought to be a capital offense.”
    “I read that she spent a lot of time in Japan,” said Safer.
    Mary nodded. “After the war. Her father was in the diplomatic corps. She’s fluent in Japanese, speaks good Cherokee, and doesn’t suffer fools lightly.”
    “Well.” Safer gave an ironic smile as he zoomed past a Greyhound bus. “Then I’m doubly glad you’re here.”
    *  *  *
    They drove on, considering the possible connections between the eleven dead judges. As the highway began to twist through the old familiar territory of the mountains, Mary started sketching again. In the winter, the fiery red and orange leaves of autumn were gone, replaced by skeletal maple and oak branches that waved thin fingers at a stark gray sky. The mountains themselves stood like sheep after a shearing. The great humps of iron-brown earth looked strangely humbled, shrouded with fog at the lower elevations, dusted with snow at their peaks.
How different it is this time,
she thought, abruptly remembering Jonathan’s hands and mouth and eyes so fiercely that the breath seemed to catch in her throat.
How very different from before.
    She looked up from her sketch pad.
    “Would you turn there?” She pointed at a road that veered off into the