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with Program knowledge,’ Drumm said. ‘After that, a hired gun.’
    Amanda gazed at the pine forest on either side of the highway. A paid informant, a hired gun. She felt the sun strike her face through the windshield. ‘I don’t want to go in this direction, Willie. It makes me queasy.’
    Drumm looked regretful. ‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I don’t know why I didn’t go straight to Flagstaff, and why the hell I took a detour to find you. I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.’
    â€˜You didn’t exactly press-gang me.’
    â€˜That’s not the point,’ Drumm said. ‘You don’t need good old Uncle Willie dumping the recent past on your doorstep. It was piss-poor judgement on my part.’
    Amanda dismissed Willie’s remarks with a motion of her hand. She looked from the window, saw that the Bronco had left the highway. ‘What’s your next move?’
    Drumm shrugged. ‘About all I can do at the moment is make out a report and send the paperwork down the line and it’ll eventually land on the desk of somebody in the Program. Trouble is, the Program works in deeply mysterious ways which makes it tough for your average joe homicide cop to get a foot in the door.’
    Deeply mysterious ways, she thought. Secrets that should have been impenetrable – except they weren’t.
    The cabin came in sight, located among dense trees. It had been constructed in the Seventies by Amanda’s father, Morgan Scholes, who’d bought 150 acres of pine forest and spent weekends building his sanctuary. He’d worked with the devout concentration he brought to all his activities, sunk a well and installed a generator. Two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, toilet and shower. A phone line had been brought in five years ago, a convenience Scholes had paid for handsomely. The number was unlisted. The cabin was a capsule that could be reached only by means of a narrow dirt track through the forest, an isolated retreat from the grind of the city and the red-hot freeways.
    Drumm parked near the cabin, but didn’t switch off the engine. ‘I don’t think I should come inside, Amanda. Two acts of trespass in one day, serious overkill.’
    She opened the passenger door and stared at the windows, looking for a sign of Rhees.
    â€˜I miss seeing you around,’ Drumm said.
    â€˜The same for me, Willie.’
    â€˜I hear they already gave your old job to Dominic Concannon.’
    â€˜He’s OK,’ she said. ‘He’s a decent lawyer, if that’s not an oxymoron.’
    â€˜But he’s not Amanda Scholes.’ Drumm placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Words of wisdom for you: put all this shit out of your mind.’
    She stepped out of the vehicle and stood staring up at Drumm. ‘All of it?’
    â€˜Every bit. Forget I ever came here. Just get on with your life.’
    She shut the door, rapped her knuckles against it and watched Drumm swing the Bronco round and head back down the track. When it had faded out of sight she turned and walked towards the cabin. She hesitated a moment before going inside.
    Rhees sat at the table, which was covered with his papers and poetry books. Last night he’d been preparing his lecture material for the Fall semester. His notes were written in a minuscule hand she couldn’t decipher.
    She had an affection for Rhees’s quiet world of poetry. He wrote some himself on occasions, such as her birthday, when she’d find a short poem sealed inside an envelope and attached to a gift. Glasses halfway down his nose, he laboured over his verse like a man with a scalpel. Sometimes he hummed old Welsh tunes quietly. There was a bardic streak in Rhees.
    Without raising his face from his books, Rhees said, ‘You just had to look, didn’t you?’
    She needed coffee. She spooned three scoops into the basket then plugged the percolator into the wall. She noticed