Housed in an old stone building built in the 1920s, the office was small, crowded by two desks, the walls lined with metal shelving and stuffed with books. Sprawled over the cluttered desktop, Oscar looked as homey and leggy as a spider in his web. Long limbs poked out the fabric of his trousers at knee and hip. His arms, seeming to bend in several places along their bony length, were stacked like sticks on his thighs. Come Halloween it would take only a little white paint to pass him off as a respectable skeleton. A mummy of the sere and unwrapped variety would be even easier. The man looked made of leather, hide tanned by the desert, hair coarse and straw-colored from the sun. Anna guessed he was close to her age, maybe forty-five or -six.

"Got some bizarre news," he said, banging his heel softly against the metal of the desk.

For whom the bell tolls, Anna's mind translated the hollow ringing.

"Now that the relatives have been notified we can release the name of the injured woman. Frieda Dierkz. And she's asking for one Anna Pigeon."

Shit, Anna thought. It tolls for me.

"Frieda?" she echoed stupidly.

Iverson shot her a startled look. "Don't you know her? From the intensity of the summons, I got the idea you two were best buds."

"Buds." Anna's mind was paralyzed, not so much by shock as by incongruity. Hearing Frieda's name in reference to the victim of the rescue was akin to running into one's old grammar school teacher in an opium den.

"She's the dispatcher at Mesa Verde," Anna managed. "We're… friends." They were friends, fairly close friends, and Anna wondered why she'd sounded so halfhearted.