KANE THUMBED THE REMOTE CONTROL TO REWIND the tape. Slade walked over and set his hat on the breakfast bar, took two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, opened them, and walked back into the living room. He offered a bottle to Kane, who shook his head. Now was no time to start drinking. Slade sat down in one of the armchairs. The whir of the tape rewinding stopped, leaving only silence. The silence continued as Slade drank his beer slowly, pausing between swallows to stare into space.

Finally, Kane broke the silence.

“Shit,” he said. “Shitshitshitshitshit. And fuck.” He sighed. “What could Charlie have been thinking of? That girl was young enough to be his granddaughter. What could he have been thinking?”

Slade said nothing.

“And what about Faith?” Kane continued. “What would make a Christian girl, one living in a religious community, for Christ’s sake, take to whoring? It can’t have been the money.”

That’s the trouble with detecting, Kane thought. A lot of what you uncovered you didn’t want to know, and most of the time answers just led to more questions.

“Well,” he said, “we’re going to have to find out where that tape was made, where Faith was working. Although it’s pretty much got to be the roadhouse, doesn’t it?”

“I know where the tape was made,” Slade said in a small voice.

Kane went on as if he hadn’t heard the other man.

“God damn it, this news will kill her father. Who is going to tell him? I don’t want to do it. Maybe we’re better off just dropping the whole thing.”

“I said,” Slade said, “I know where the tape was made.”

Kane stopped talking and looked at Slade. The younger man had pain, and what might have been fear, in his eyes. As Kane opened his mouth to speak, he heard Harry and Sam coming up the stairs. He jumped to his feet, ejected the tape, and put it on top of the pile. The trooper investigators came into the room.

“A wasted day,” Sam said, tossing his coat on the floor. “You guys get anywhere on the girl?”

“Not really,” Kane said. He looked at his watch. “It’s early, but I think I’ll turn in anyway. Get an early start.”

Harry held up the tape of Charlie Simms and the girl.

“What you guys watching?” he asked.

“The Sopranos,” Kane said. “Charlie Simms taped them, and I’d never seen the show.”

“What did you think, huh?” Harry said. “That Tony Soprano’s as fucked up as a real bad guy, isn’t he?” He put the tape back on the stack. “I’ve been watching that show since it started. You should get cable.”

Kane put the tapes back into their boxes and picked them up.

“I’ll return these tomorrow,” he said. “I guess they’re still Charlie’s property.”

Harry and Sam looked at each other, then at Kane.

“The mine manager got a call just before we left,” Sam said. “Simms didn’t make it.”

“Aw,” Kane said, “that’s too bad. Did he say anything before he died?”

“Never came out of the coma,” Harry said.

Kane took the tapes and walked downstairs to the cell. He put the tape of Charlie, and the three he hadn’t watched yet, into his duffel. He set the others on the edge of Slade’s desk. Then he took a Clif bar from his bag and sat on the bed. He tried to think of nothing while he forced himself to eat. Each bite was like a mouthful of sand; it took a whole bottle of water to wash the bar down. His mind kept jumping to the images of Faith Wright and Charlie Simms, screwing their futures away. His life, in Charlie’s case. Maybe hers, in Faith’s.

Kane could feel depression clawing at him, and he set his jaw against it. He concentrated on trying to figure out what he’d just seen and heard.

He could understand Charlie being there, he supposed. Few old men would pass up a chance to get next to a young woman, especially a man like Charlie, who’d always followed his dick wherever it led him, even though that was mostly into trouble. Charlie had to know the risks to his job, his marriage, and his reputation, but the chance to get a good-looking young woman into the sack would drive everything else from his mind.

Out in the office, the fax machine started up.

Charlie is easy to figure, Kane thought, because he’s not all that different from me. But Faith’s motives are much harder for me to fathom. I’ve never been a teenage girl.

Kane was not naive. If he’d run across a teenage hooker on the streets of Anchorage, he wouldn’t have thought twice. The culture spat out rootless children in an unending stream—runaways, throwaways, druggies, adrenaline junkies—and some of them washed up in cities, even cities the size of Anchorage.

But he hadn’t expected this here, even though he knew that the trailers and cabins and slapped-together homes at the ends of the dirt roads of Alaska housed plenty of the cruelty and depravity that were epidemic in the world. Somehow, he’d been seduced by the idea of Faith Wright as the dutiful Christian girl, not entirely religious perhaps, but with the moral compass that a religious, small-town upbringing had given her. What was it the psalm said? He picked up his Bible and leafed through it until he found the passage he wanted: “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.”

Despite a life spent looking all too often into the abyss of human behavior, Kane had retained a belief in the saving grace of religion. Even though he couldn’t make himself take what theologians called the leap of faith, he admired those who had and stood safely on the other side. It wasn’t the aggressive and hostile religiosity of Moses Wright that he yearned for, or the superstition-ridden faith of his parents, but the quiet and constant right behavior he had projected onto Faith Wright. He wanted it so much for himself that he had imagined it in her.

Well, the videotape was the end of that. Probably the end of Charlie Simms’s reputation, too. And he wondered what it would do to Slade, who seemed to know more about it than he should have.

Footsteps came down the stairs, and Slade walked into the office. He picked up the fax, read it, and carried it into the jail cell. Kane straightened up and made room on the bed. Slade handed him the fax and sat, leaning his arms on his knees and folding his hands.

“Looks like Harry was wrong about how long the lab tests would take,” he said. “The fax says no gunshot residue on Simms’s clothing, so whatever he did he didn’t shoot Lester Logan.”

“Thank God for that,” Kane said. “Where are Sam and Harry?”

“Upstairs watching Fear Factor,” Slade said. “So they’re good for a while. I’ve got some things I need to tell you, but we have to keep them between us.”

Kane shook his head.

“I can try to keep you out of it,” he said, “but we both know if you’re involved in a serious crime, it’s got to come out.”

Slade was silent for a few moments.

“Yeah, I can see that,” he said, “but if there’s any way you can help me, I’d appreciate it.”

Kane sat and waited.

“I’d only been out here a couple of months,” Slade said. “I’d had the academy and the on-the-job training, but this was my first solo assignment. I guess I wasn’t really ready for it. They tell you all about procedures and precautions, but they never tell you what it’s like to be the only cop for hundreds of miles, to never really be off duty.”

Slade was quiet again, then shook his head.

“Listen to me, making excuses like some perp,” he said. “It was a Friday night and I was tired of my own cooking, so I went over to the roadhouse for dinner. I guess I wanted to look over the action, too, maybe get some of it. The waitress seemed friendly, and we got to talking. I ended up waiting for her in the bar. Maybe me being there put a damper on things, because the bar emptied out about eleven. The waitress showed up a few minutes later with another woman. We had a couple of drinks, and one thing led to another. I suggested we go back to my place, but the waitress said she had a key to one of the rooms. I thought, what the hell. The three of us spent a couple of very pleasant hours in that room, and that was that.”

Slade was silent again.

“Only, that wasn’t that,” Kane said to prime the pump.

Slade shook his head.

“No, it wasn’t. A couple of days later, this old guy with a beard and earring comes in here with a videotape under his arm. Says his name is John Wesley Harding and he wants to welcome me to the community. Says the videotape is a gift. ‘It’s only a copy,’ he says, ‘but I thought you’d want to see it. In fact, I think you should watch it right now.’

“By now, I’ve already got an idea what’s coming. So I bring the tape upstairs here and put it into the VCR, and there we are, the three of us, doing what comes naturally.

“The old guy has followed me upstairs, so I don’t have to go far to get my hands around his neck. ‘What are you showing this to me for?’ I ask him. ‘There’s no law against consenting adults doing what they want.’

“The old guy kind of cackles and says, ‘Consenting adults? That Tracy there, she’s a working girl. And the other one? She’s married. You don’t want your bosses to see this, especially when you think about the story that can be told around this tape.’

“So I let go of the old bastard and start thinking, and the more thinking I do, the worse it gets. ‘What do you want from me?’ I ask.

“ ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘except for you to remember that I’m providing a necessary service over at the roadhouse and it would be a shame to disrupt it.’ ”

Slade unfolded his hands and held them up, looking at them like he’d never seen them before.

“Of course, that wasn’t all,” Kane said.

“No, it wasn’t,” Slade said. “I figured the odds were good it wouldn’t be. So I didn’t intervene in the whorehouse part of the operation, but I kept a close eye on it.”

“Close enough that you knew Faith had joined it?” Kane asked.

The trooper nodded and dropped his hands.

“Yeah,” he said, “so I pulled her over one day on the highway and we had a little talk. She made it clear to me that she was older than sixteen, which is the age of consent in this state, and that she was a volunteer. Needed the money for college, she said. Told me there were no drugs involved or anything else. She just laid it all out, as calm and cool as could be.

“I couldn’t see any reason to intervene, especially with the original of that tape in the background.”

“What did you do with your copy?” Kane asked.

Slade gave him a startled look.

“Destroyed it, of course,” he said. “Why would I leave something like that lying around?”

Slade stopped again. Kane just waited. He’d tell the rest of it on his own.

“Then the girl disappeared,” the trooper said. “I heard her father and the others were looking for her, and her dad came to see me. After he left, I went looking for Big John. I found him in the roadhouse office with Little John and braced him about her.

“ ‘She was just fine when she left work Friday evening,’ he told me. ‘Maybe she just decided to take off and make a movie.’ Then he laughed and gave me a look. I got the point. I went through the motions of looking for her, but with no evidence of foul play I was happy to soft-pedal the whole thing.”

Slade stopped then and took a couple of deep breaths.

“If anything happened to her because I dragged my feet,” he said.

Kane stood up, walked over, and kicked the trooper’s desk. Then he started pacing.

“You should have locked the old bastard up right after he showed you the tape, then gotten on the telephone,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “Your bosses were young once, so if they thought you had any real cop in you they’d have helped you survive this. No matter what we tell the public, we’re not a band of God’s angels, and we all know it.”

He paced some more.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. You and I are going to question the boy and his brother and fill in the blanks about Faith as best we can. Then we’re going after Big John. When we find his stash of tapes, a couple of them are going to disappear. There’s no need Charlie Simms’s widow should have to see the one, and you’ll be rid of the other. With any luck, your bosses will never know.”

“What about the women?”

“I’ll find them and have a word, and the next time you are deciding whether to do something stupid, you’ll remember that I know all about this.”

He walked over and put his hand on Slade’s shoulder.

“There are several ways this won’t work out that well,” he said, “but we’ll take it one step at a time and hope. Now get upstairs and try to get some sleep. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”