Chapter 1

Thursday, June 17, 7:18 p.m.

He spotted her the moment he entered the huge discount store. She was tall -- only an inch or two under six feet -- and her legs, encased in loose-fitting cuffed shorts, were long and slender. This little city, he had observed, had more than its share of lovely young women, but this one, ah, God. This one was superb.

She was pushing a cart and, it appeared, moving aimlessly about the store. Her cart contained an unidentifiable item of crumpled fabric, toothpaste and cosmetics, a large box of 35 mm film, and a generous bag of birdseed. As he arrived, she was crossing in front of the women's clothing aisles, just behind the checkout counters, and was moving into the interior. From the contents of her cart, he could tell that she had earlier visited the same part of the large store where she now was headed.

Pushing an empty cart, he followed at a discreet distance.

"Look at me," he thought, bemused. "Walking about in Middle America's favorite discount store, trolling for women!"

It wasn't unfamiliar behavior for the patrician, 58-year-old investment banker. He had been engaged in similar conduct for more than four decades. Only the setting had changed. The upscale retail establishments of faraway Westchester County and Manhattan had been supplanted by this small-town chain store on the thinly populated North Carolina coastal plain. Instead of the backdrop of expensively dressed matrons carrying shopping bags from Saks or Nordstroms, he now observed overweight, potato-fed farm women in faded polyester shorts.

His avocation, during his long and successful career in New York, had now become his full-time occupation.

Christopher Louis Phelps was enjoying his new life to an inordinate degree. He was spending all of his considerable free time drinking in the experience of women. "Girl-watching," was the casual, juvenile-sounding term for it. "Birding," he'd heard it called, years ago. People often employed these lighthearted phrases, or supplanted them with more clinical or contemptuous ones: Voyeurism. Peeping. Many people, perhaps most, regarded immoderate interest in the bodies of women to be a perversion.

Phelps was aware of all the terms, all the attitudes. None of the terms, to his mind, was adequate to describe the activity. As to the prevailing public attitudes, he cared not at all, and he experienced no guilt. On the contrary, Christopher Louis Phelps was a remarkably complacent, altogether self-satisfied man. He was absorbed in his own pursuit of pleasure, and was not even occasionally self-critical. His firm belief was that anything he chose to do, or to be, was -- quite by definition -- desirable and entirely correct.

A wealthy man with no need to earn another penny to live comfortably for a lifetime, Christopher Louis Phelps recently had dropped out of society. He had left New York, virtually unannounced. His legal affairs, his fortune, were being managed by a small cadre of experts, only a handful of whom even knew where Phelps could be contacted. What few friends he had in New York or elsewhere had been told, vaguely, that he would be in Europe for an indefinite period.

Phelps was not in hiding. A good private detective

-- perhaps even a bad private detective -- could have located him within a week, had there been anyone disposed to track him down. But Christopher Phelps had systematically swept away all his routine contacts with the past. He was practicing something that he had dreamed of for years: abandonment of all social and professional contacts. Absolute freedom. The times, the people, the places that had made up his life all had, quite deliberately, been forsaken. His lawyer had instructions to hold his mail until notified where to send it; his accountant sent his generous pre-arranged living allowance to the lawyer on a monthly basis, for his holding or sending.

Outside intermediaries had arranged the purchase of his smallish but comfortable cabin cruiser, and Phelps had taken possession of it and sailed from Camden, N.J., several weeks earlier. The boat was carefully chosen for features that made it as convenient as possible for one individual to operate alone. It was comfortable, even luxurious, but not ostentatious: Christopher Phelps, after all, was not interested in calling attention to himself.

Currently, following a leisurely cruise down the intracoastal waterway, the boat was docked at the marina adjoining Twin Rivers, North Carolina's best riverfront hotel. The small, historic old city was an easy run upriver from the coast.

There were no children to wonder where he had gone; there were no close friends from his past to seek him out. Christopher Phelps was an upscale recluse; an unannounced new resident of Twin Rivers these past three weeks. No one except a real estate agent and the hotel clerk so much as knew his name.

He had purchased a large, somewhat run-down estate alongside the larger of the town's two rivers. The house, an imposing brick structure more than 70 years old, was buried deep in the trees on four acres of fenced ground. East of the little city, the house was far away from the old route to the ocean, a road long-since replaced by a modern four-lane highway that ran parallel and a half-mile to the southeast. It was a beautiful old house, but it was in great need of repair. Through intermediaries, Phelps had arranged for a leading local contractor to conduct an elaborate, carefully prescribed program of reconditioning.

In the meantime, he had the hotel, his boat, and complete freedom from responsibilities.

Phelps was a loner, but he didn't avoid public places; on the contrary, he regularly sought them out. He was a dedicated voyeur; he accepted the term. He knew also, however, that he was no pervert. He considered himself a man with a refined appreciation of the female sex. Because he always had derived enormous pleasure from this condition, Phelps could hardly regard it as a problem or a deviation. Quite deliberately, he had arranged his life in such a way as to provide himself maximum opportunity to indulge in this most favored of pastimes.

And Christopher Phelps was no "girl" watcher. Teen-age girls with their tight, perfect bodies might merit an appreciative glance -- no more. They were beautiful, to be sure, but they were, after all, only children. Phelps' eyes sought out mature women, whose bodies and whose character had been fully realized; women who had been around long enough to experience, perhaps, even a small degree of physical decline, but who had not begun to show it -- or women whose minimal physical decline manifested itself in interesting ways.

In truth, Christopher Phelps was a stalker, although he never thought of himself in that way. He knew that it was of critical importance to be circumspect. He was acutely aware that an active, aggressive voyeur, once detected, could be a target for ridicule, arrest, or worse. Phelps regarded himself as more than merely prudent; he was, he thought, the epitome of caution and care; a true master of his craft.

Frequently, Phelps had observed with amusement and disdain the clumsy voyeurism of other men. Many stared, goggle-eyed, at attractive women they passed in shopping malls and grocery stores. These men seemed to him barely able to contain their drooling tongues in their open mouths.

Phelps empathized with the women who were the objects of these mens' attention. But he was not one of these poor, unattractive creatures. No woman could know that he followed her, watched her, Phelps believed. Not unless he wanted her to know.