Jane Whitefield is a Native American guide who leads solitary outcasts
through hostile territory to escape the vengeance of their enemies. But
the shaded forest paths her Seneca ancestors might have followed on such
missions have all been converted to superhighways, and now the safest
way stations are crowded urban buildings that offer the camouflage of
anonymity. Still, the supply of runaways - and the need for a woman who
will take risks to save them - have never been greater. Jane knows all
the tricks; in fact, she has invented several of them herself in the ten
years she has been teaching fugitives to live with new identities. Many
of her clients have been innocent people whom the institutions of
society have been too slow and cumbersome to protect, but an increasing
number have been like the gambler Harry Kemple: people who aren't
especially admirable, but who aren't bad enough to deserve to die
prematurely. Jane opens her door to find in her house an uninvited
visitor named John Felker, the latest to run to her for sanctuary. He
was sent, he says, by the long-vanished Harry: "He knew I was in
trouble. He told me that if I needed to disappear, there was a door out
of the world. He told me that this is where it was." Felker is not like
the others Jane has helped, and everything about him is disquieting. He
doesn't even know whom he is running from, only that whoever is framing
him as an embezzler has already circulated an open contract in the
prison system for his death. Maybe his problems began years ago, when he
was a policeman; a good cop makes an enemy with each arrest. But perhaps
he is still a policeman and has invented precisely the right story to
entrap Jane. Or perhaps heis something even worse. The unexpected guest
draws this exceptional woman into an adventure of mystery, love and
sacrifice, betrayal and vengeance, and propels her on a pursuit that
takes her from the night streets of Los Angeles and Vancouver to the
dark, unexplored regions of h
