Yet faced with a pleasant, soft-spoken young woman from Right to Life of Minnesota, who concentrated on the health issues for women and the changing attitudes of a younger generation that could not remember the days before Roe v. Wade, Alison Beck had begun to feel that it was she, the campaigning doctor, who now sounded strident and intolerant, and that perhaps the tide was turning more than she realized. She admitted as much to friends in the days before she died.

But something else had given her cause to feel afraid. She had seen him again, the strange red-haired man, and she knew that he was closing in on her, that he intended to move against her and the others before they could complete their work.

But they can't know, Mercier had tried to reassure her. We've made no move against them yet.

I tell you, they know. I have seen him. And…

Yes?

I found something in my car this morning.

What? What did you find? A skin.

I found a spider skin. Spiders grow by shedding their old exoskeleton and replacing it with a larger, less constraining hide, a process known as ecdysis. The discarded skin, or exuvium, that Alison Beck had found on the passenger seat of her car belonged to a Sri Lankan ornamental tarantula, Poecilotheria fasciata, a beautifully colored but temperamental arachnid. The species had been specifically selected for its capacity to alarm: its body was about two and a half inches in length, marked with grays, blacks, and creams, and its legspan was almost four inches. Alison had been terrified, and that terror had only slightly abated when she realized that the shape beside her was not a living, breathing spider.

Mercier had gone silent then, before advising her to go away for a time, promising that he would warn their associates to be vigilant.

And so Alison Beck had, in that final week, decided to take her first vacation in almost two years. She intended to drive to Montana, stopping off along the way for the first week, before visiting an old college friend in Bozeman. From there they planned to travel north together to Glacier National Park if the roads were passable, for it was only April and the snows might not yet have completely melted.