The gun was pointed at Monica Shepard's back when she heard the wrench strike the storm drain. It made one bright metallic sound against the grate, then a smaller sound somewhere below the street, and then it was gone.
Sergeant Brad Copeland stood behind her with his pistol extended, ordering her onto her knees as though she were a stranger caught breaking into a car.
The white electric sedan was hers, the driveway was hers, and the house with the green front door thirty feet away was hers, but none of those facts appeared to interest him. Two days later he would sit in a federal briefing room waiting to meet his new commanding officer, unaware that he had already put that woman in handcuffs.
On the morning it happened, Larkspur Bend looked almost offensively peaceful. The little residential street in Silver Pines, Colorado, curved around a stand of aspens whose leaves had turned the color of old brass in the first week of October.
Sprinklers clicked across lawns, someone burned toast behind an open kitchen window, and sunlight moved over rows of beige and cream houses built so similarly that visitors sometimes mistook one driveway for another.
Monica had been awake since before six, had run six miles along the creek trail, and was still enjoying the pleasant exhaustion in her legs. She intended to spend the rest of her Saturday repairing a charging module and perhaps, if the repair went well, eating lunch somewhere with a view of the mountains.
She was thirty-two, strong from years of running and tactical training, and accustomed to doing practical work herself. Her bright green work shirt had a faint stain near the collar from an earlier project, and she had tied a gray mechanic's apron over dark work trousers before lifting the sedan's hood. She had moved to Silver Pines only two weeks earlier, and most of her neighbors knew her simply as the woman who had bought the little house across from Ralph Denning. They had seen boxes delivered and a new white car parked outside, but they had no particular reason to wonder what she did for a living. Monica preferred it that way because she had come to Colorado hoping that home would be one place where her job did not arrive before she did.
Inside her right hand rested a chrome wrench whose edges had been polished by decades of use. Five characters were engraved into its handle, RS1979, so lightly now that a person had to angle the metal toward the sun to read them. Her father had given it to her when she was twelve, though he had owned it long before she was born, and she still remembered the smell of his repair shop in Omaha. Warm rubber, cutting oil, coffee that had sat too long on a burner, and a faint trace of the peppermint he chewed whenever a customer