“This one?”

Engleman leaned forward and Keller drew the loop of wire from his pocket and whipped it around the other man’s neck. The garrote was fast, silent, effective. Keller made sure Engleman’s body was where you couldn’t see it from the street, made sure to wipe his own prints off any surfaces he might have touched. He turned off the lights, closed the door behind him.

He had already checked out of the Douglas Inn, and now he drove straight to Portland, with the Ford’s cruise control set just below the speed limit. He drove half an hour in silence, then turned on the radio and tried to find a station he could stand. Nothing pleased him and he gave up and switched it off.

Somewhere north of Eugene he said, “Jesus, Ed, what else was I going to do?”

He drove straight through to Portland and got a room at the ExecuLodge near the airport. In the morning he turned in the Hertz car and dawdled over coffee until his flight was called.

He called White Plains as soon as he was on the ground at JFK. “It’s all taken care of,” he said. “I’ll come by sometime tomorrow. Right now I just want to get home, get some sleep.”

The following afternoon in White Plains, Dot asked him how he had liked Roseburg.

“Really nice,” he said. “Pretty town, nice people. I wanted to stay there.”

“Oh, Keller,” she said. “What did you do, look at houses?”

“Not exactly.”

“Every place you go,” she said, “you want to live there.”

“It’s nice,” he insisted. “And living’s cheap compared to here. They don’t even have a sales tax in the state, if you can believe that.”

“Is sales tax a big problem for you, Keller?”

“A person could have a decent life there,” he said.

“For a week,” she said. “Then you’d go nuts.”

“You really think so?”

“Comeon, ” she said. “ Roseburg, Oregon? Give me a break.”

“I guess you’re right,” he said. “I guess a week’s about as much as I could handle.”