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the street on the park’s other side. She got an eerie sensation down her spine again as it turned and looked directly at her. Then it vanished.
    Annja stood and watched for half a minute, her heart pounding in her chest far more than the brief exertion—even at a mile’s altitude—would account for. She didn’t see the animal again. Deciding she was not going to go tramping around through people’s yards hunting for what would almost certainly turn out to be somebody’s stray husky, she turned and walked back down toward where Watson had joined her daughter, kneeling beside Eowyn. Both stroked the animal and spoke soothingly to her.
    Why did I get so worked up about a dog? Annja asked herself. I shouldn’t let myself be so suggestible.
    It was fatigue, she decided. Physical and emotional. Had to be.
    The tall Plains woman stood. Eowyn had settled down. She wagged her tail and grinned at Annja, inviting her to admire her heroism. Annja bent down and petted her head and told her she was a good watchdog.
    “Was it just a dog, then?” Watson asked. Her tone sounded strained.
    Annja looked at her sharply. “Why? What else would it be?”
    Watson turned her eyes away from Annja’s. She seemed shaken.
    “Thank you for your willingness to protect my daughter,” she said. “We’d better go now.”

8
    “It’s a great honor to meet you, Dr. Michel,” Annja said in French, shaking hands with the psychiatrist.
    His face was pinched. “Please,” he said in thickly accented English. “Americans should not try to speak French. It is almost a form of cultural imperialism, to butcher the language so.”
    Annja tightened her lips. His tone as well as his words cut like a slap to the face. Especially since she was proud of her French. Justly so—she’d spoken it all her life, so far as she could remember, had minored in Romance languages in college and, most to the point, passed among the French themselves for a native speaker on more than one occasion.
    She forced herself to draw a deep breath to calm herself. I think I see what Dr. Watson meant about him being difficult, she thought.
    She wasn’t exactly unaccustomed to arrogance from the French, although they could also be a lovely, charming people. This man definitely pushed the envelope of rudeness, though.
    He was short, a head shorter than Annja, dressed in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, khaki pants, hiking boots. He had broad shoulders and a marathoner runner’s build. Despite the fact his close-cropped hair was steely, and his résumé, which Annja had looked up online the night before, said he was in his early fifties, his narrow features were quite youthful, relatively unmarked. Surprisingly so given a tan of apparent long-standing. He wasn’t what she would call a handsome man, but his appearance and manner suggested a kestrel; and that dark tan made his eyes, of a blue so pale as to be almost silver, look striking almost to the point of eeriness.
    At least I lucked out when it came to tracking him down, she reminded herself. He was currently working in Sandia Pueblo. It formed basically the northern boundary of Albuquerque, stretching from the river to the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, and north to within a few miles of the town of Bernalillo. For whatever reason, Dr. Michel had chosen to meet Annja late in the afternoon at a scenic lookout spot in the foothills, along the road past the exits that led to the pueblo’s immense and relatively recent casino and the Bien Mur Indian Center.
    The Sandias’ flat gray faces rose almost a mile above the river valley. They looked anything but watermelon-like, though that was what the name meant in Spanish. While various explanations for the name existed, Annja tended to believe that the Spaniards thought the north mountain looked like a big slice of watermelon. At sunset, at certain times of year, the westward-facing cliffs turned a startling red. Annja had seen that herself.
    When she arrived at