lesion in his heart that would never heal.

A Baptist preacher had asked Hackberry if he was angry at God for his loss.

“God didn’t invent death,” Hackberry answered.

“Then who did?”

“Cancer is a disease produced by the Industrial Age.”

“I think you’re an angry man, Hack. I think you need to let go of it. I think you need to celebrate your wife’s life and not mourn over what you cain’t change.”

I think you ought to keep your own counsel, Hackberry thought. But he did not say the words aloud.

Now, in the blue glow of early dawn and the fading of the stars in the sky, he tried to eat breakfast on his gallery and not think about the dreams he’d had just before waking. No, “dreams” wasn’t the right word. Dreams had sequence and movement and voices inside them. All Hackberry could remember before opening his eyes into the starkness of his bedroom was the severity of the wounds in the bodies of the nine women and girls he had found buried by a bulldozer behind the church. How many people were aware of what a .45-caliber round could do to human tissue and bone? How many had ever seen what a .45 machine-gun burst could do to a person’s face or brain cavity or breasts or rib cage?

There was a breeze out of the south, and even though his St. Augustine grass was dry and stiff, it had a pale greenish aura in the early dawn, and the flowers in his gardens were varied and bright with dew. He didn’t want to think about the victims buried behind the church. No, that wasn’t correct, either. He didn’t want to think about the terror and the helplessness they had experienced before they were lined up and murdered. He didn’t want to brood on these things because he had experienced them himself when he had been forced to stand with his fellow POWs on a snowy stretch of ground in zero-degree weather and wait for a Chinese prison guard to fire his burp gun point-blank into their chests and faces. But because of the mercurial nature of their executioner’s bloodlust, Hackberry was spared and made to watch while others died, and sometimes he wished he had been left among the dead rather than the quick.

He believed that looking into the eyes of one’s executioner in the last seconds of one’s life was perhaps the worst fate that could befall a human being. That parting glimpse into the face of evil destroyed not only hope but any degree of faith in our fellow man that we might possess. He did not want to contend with those good souls who chose to believe we all descend from the same nuclear family, our poor, naked, bumbling ancestors back in Eden who, through pride or curiosity, transgressed by eating forbidden fruit. But he had long ago concluded that certain kinds of experiences at the hands of our fellow man were proof enough that we did not all descend from the same tree.

Or at least these were the thoughts that Hackberry’s sleep often presented to him at first light, as foolish as they might seem.

He drank the coffee from his cup, covered his plate with a sheet of waxed paper, and set it inside his icebox. As he backed out of the driveway in his pickup truck and headed down the two-lane county road, he did not hear the telephone ringing inside his house.

He drove into town, parked behind the combination jail and office that served as his departmental headquarters, and entered the back door. His chief deputy, Pam Tibbs, was already at her desk, wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a short-sleeve khaki shirt and a gun belt, her face without expression. Her hair was thick and mahogany in color, curly at the tips, with a bit of gray that she didn’t dye. Her most enig matic quality lay in her eyes. They could brighten suddenly with goodwill or warmth or intense thought, but no one could be quite sure which. She had been a patrolwoman in Abilene and Galveston and had joined the department four years ago in order to be near her mother, who had been in a local hospice. Pam had a night-school degree from the University of Houston, but she spoke little of her background or her private life and gave others the sense they should not intrude upon it. Hackberry’s recent promotion of her to chief deputy had not necessarily been welcomed