Phoebe and Alan and Brig and Special Agent Toeller went to Alan’s townhouse for the time being, because the FBI wanted to search Phoebe’s place for any further evidence of Michael, as did the police.

Alan kept his front curtains open, so Phoebe could tell that outside was like a fire-ant hill someone had stirred with a stick. She saw men and women in uniforms, in suits, in lab coats swarming everywhere.

She felt bad for them. Tropical Storm Helene finally made landfall, and the weather, which had been weirdly bright and windy all day, turned to shit.

Inside, dry and secure, the four of them sat in comfortable chairs around Alan’s elegant coffee table, and Brig said, “First, let me tell you how sorry I am, Phoebe. I talked to Michael’s family about how you and Michael ended up getting married, and one of our guys found a detective’s report about Alan in a blue shoe box in your closet. It covered his credit, his income, his behavior and habits, his past including some details about his wife and daughter, and an estimate of his financial net worth.”

“I never had him investigated. I couldn’t afford to hire a detective.”

“We’re checking into the origin of the report right now.” Brig looked down and shook his head. “I know that good people sometimes make mistakes; I’m not used to dealing with good people, though. And the detective’s report combined with your current form of employment and your arrest record made me think I knew more than I did.”

Phoebe sat there staring at him. “Brig — I don’t have an arrest record.”

“Yeah, you do,” he said. “Up in Ohio when you were nineteen years old. You were charged with fraud, contributing to the delinquency of a minor—”

She interrupted him. “Those charges were dropped and the case was dismissed.”

“You were still arrested. And the charges were dropped only after you got yourself an expensive criminal defense attorney — whom you later married.”

Phoebe rested her face in her hands. “Good Lord.” She looked up. “If you’re here, I guess you’re at least open to hearing my side of this.”

“Yes.”

She folded her hands together and leaned forward in her chair. “I was in college at the time — had just finished my first year. I’d earned a full four-year scholarship to Muskingum College and was pursuing my bachelor’s degree in science. But while the scholarship covered room and board and tuition and books, it wasn’t enough to cover things like clothes. Or transportation. I had a Vega station wagon that I could barely keep running, and even though I kept my needs simple, I had to have gas, car insurance, and the occasional new pair of shoes or jeans.

“While I was home over the summer, my sister, who was seventeen at the time, reminded me of how we’d made our own spending money with lemonade stands and by selling homemade pot holders door-to-door in the various trailer parks where we’d lived. I told her I didn’t think I’d be able to cover the Vega’s expenses with homemade pot holders, and she told me she had a better idea. We could set up a little fortune-telling stand under this awful striped awning that my parents had tacked onto our trailer, and we could stick a classified ad in the local paper and charge a few bucks per reading. I read tarot, and she had a real knack with psychometry — holding things that belonged to other people and telling them about the owners of the objects.” Phoebe shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

She saw Brig and Alan exchanging glances. Agent Toeller sat quietly, looking at his hands, not saying anything.

So Phoebe continued. “We started slowly, but our prices were low — I think we were charging five dollars for a reading, and we were both pretty good. We got busy, and then we got very busy, and then one of the neighbors called the police and complained because our summer business customers were blocking her driveway. And the police came and discovered that we were running a business without a license, which neither of us had the faintest idea that we needed, and that we were engaged in a business that the State of Ohio at that time looked upon as criminal, or at least questionable. Nicki was underage, so she basically just got yelled at. I was nineteen, almost twenty. So I got booked and charged — and would have had a public defender, except that Michael Schaeffer happened to walk through and see me during the booking phase. He told me and my defender that he’d take my case pro bono.”

Her hands locked tightly together, she looked from one man to the next trying to see what they were thinking and getting... nothing. No expressions, no emotion. Nothing. They were hearing her out. But she couldn’t tell whether they believed her or not.

“Michael flirted with me. And took everything he could find out about me before the judge — my grades, my public service in high school and at college, and the story about how my sister and I were poor and just trying to earn enough money to further our educations, and how I was going to be a teacher and how she wanted to be a nurse. His details were all true, but he made the two of us sound like saints. And, worse, he’d put together this little photo presentation of our crappy trailer and how clean and bare the inside was, and how my sister and I shared a foldout couch in an eight-by-eight sunroom. The judge wasn’t thrilled about our interest in psychic readings, but he was very, very generous. He told me to research the law surrounding any further businesses I might pursue and to pass this suggestion on to my sister as well. He made us return the money to any of our customers who requested it and forbade us to do anything further along psychic lines. And then he dismissed the whole thing. And as soon as we were out of the courthouse, Michael asked me out. I turned him down, explaining that I didn’t intend to date until after I got my degree. And a job. I was determined to keep my grades up and my scholarship intact. I couldn’t afford distractions.” She turned to Brig. “I’m surprised that you found the case.”

“Your ex-in-laws told me about it,” Brig said. “And it was easy enough to confirm the broadest facts, and easy to fill in the missing ones with a lot of things that weren’t true.”

“The Schaeffers were not happy with Michael choosing me,” Phoebe said. “They had this rich blonde country-club debutante who’d graduated from Vassar picked out for Michael. I didn’t fit their plans. But the deb didn’t fit Michael’s. So he married me instead — lucky me. I was a sucker who thought he was a nice guy who’d had bad luck with women before and just needed more love.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Toeller said suddenly. “I’ve been going through Michael’s file. Schaeffer was trouble before you met him. He’d had a long history of serious behavior problems that his parents covered up with money. He’s one of the bad guys.”

Brig nodded.

Alan said, “You don’t have to worry anymore, Phoebe. Everyone who matters is on your side now. We’re all watching out for you. Michael isn’t going to get anywhere near you again.”

Phoebe leaned back in the chair, her leg propped on an ottoman, with thunder roaring outside and lightning crashing, with rain slamming into the windows, and she thought, It’s over. I can’t believe it, but it’s over, and I’m still alive.

She would have thought she’d feel better. She didn’t.

Alan was watching her. “What’s wrong?”

“He isn’t in jail yet, I guess,” she said. “I need to know that he’s locked up. That he isn’t going to ooze up through the floor or something and grab me.”

She smiled at Alan, and he said, “We’ll take care of you. We’ll keep you safe. I promise.”

A knock on the door. Brig went to answer it.

“Next door was our guy,” a woman in uniform said.

Brig pulled her in out of the rain.

“He has a huge setup in there. Has recording devices attached to the phone taps, a psychic-line prompt taped so that he could play it before speaking to her, TV monitors — one that must have been for the bug you found on the front window and three others that we located only by checking the angles. One was in her bedroom and one in the bathroom. And there was a third that covered the whole parking lot plus the street leading up to it.”

“The... bathroom?” Phoebe said.

“Yes, ma’am,” the officer told her.

“How did we miss them?” Brig wanted to know.

“These are micro-cameras. Each about the size of the head of a pin. He pushed them into the cottage-cheese ceilings and onto the light pole in the parking lot The things were about three millimeters across, total. He had to have paid a freaking fortune for them.”

“So that’s how he knew when she left, when she got home, when she was asleep. That’s how he stayed out of sight.”

The office nodded. “Sure looks like it.”

“We didn’t find lockpicks or a set of keys or anything like that but with all the lockpick technologies on the market, he didn’t exactly have to struggle to find a way in. His only risks were in getting caught, and his little listening post made sure that wasn’t going to happen.”

“We’re going to need to get the uniforms and the black-and-whites out of here,” Brig said. “Put plainclothes people down.”

Agent Toeller said, “Actually, the FBI has jurisdiction on this one. The two murders in the school shooting take precedence over the current lesser crimes. Have your people clear the roadblock and get them out of the area. We’ll have two agents in his listening post, two staying in the upstairs rooms in her place. We’ve also obtained clearance to use a snowbird’s townhouse across the green. I’ll be there with my partner. I want to keep the traffic down, let him think it’s clear, so we’ll have a couple of plainclothes guys outside.”

“As persistent as he was in coming after her,” Brig said, “I have to believe he isn’t going to just give up and go away. He didn’t spend the fortune that he’s already spent to not get what he wanted. Keep some of my people on it, Toeller. You may need the extra manpower.”

The churning in Phoebe’s stomach agreed with Brig.

But she was safe from Michael. The FBI had the case. They knew where Michael had been and where he was going to try to be. What he was driving. What he looked like. How he’d gotten to her the first times. They were watching over her.

She wanted to believe she was safe.

But she couldn’t.

Not until Michael was behind bars. He’d been planning this. He’d been preparing contingency plans. She knew he had. She knew him. Michael loved contingency plans. Which meant she had to be careful. She had to keep her eyes and ears open. And she had to do whatever she could to help put him behind bars.

“What do I need to do to help you?” she asked.

Brig started to say something, but Toeller held up a hand. “You can help us best by going back to your place. Do whatever you would be doing right now, act like this is a normal night. If Schaeffer put in four bugs, he may have a fifth that we haven’t found yet. He may have some sort of listening device. He may have a remote set on his phone taps that will let him connect from a distance. We don’t know, but we do know that if he thinks you’re alone and all the excitement is over, he may come back. He may make an attempt to come after you.”

“I don’t want her to do that,” Alan said. “I don’t want her to be the bait.”

“We have the area covered. We’re not going to miss him, Dr. MacKerrie, and we’re not going to let him slip by us.”

Alan said, “I’d feel better if I could stay with her.”

“I’d feel better, too,” Phoebe agreed.

Toeller shook his head. “He’s less likely to be lured into coming after her if you’re with her. And we want to get this man as quickly as possible, before he hurts someone else.”

Brig was frowning. “I’ll clear all my people out of the way,” he said. He looked at Toeller, and Phoebe saw some wariness in his eyes. “You’ve got it under control, right?”

“We’ve got it,” Toeller said.

Brig turned to the uniformed officer. “Tell them the FBI has claimed jurisdiction and we’re clearing off,” he said. The cop didn’t like it, and Phoebe could see that Brig didn’t like it. Brig turned back to her. “You’ll be all right. Just stay inside, do what they tell you to do, and stay safe until they give you the all clear.”

“I understand,” she said. She would go home. Lock her doors. Sit at the phone and read tarot for strangers for a few hours, and maybe a little longer than that. And Michael would come after her, and the FBI would arrest him, and he would finally be charged with the murders of her two students and for the murder of his first fiancée. He would be behind bars.

By morning it would probably all be over.