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as the young man slid into a seat.
    Neither of the Thornton cops disagreed. They wanted to get on with it. Even so, Trainor felt a little anxious. As they drove further and further into the blackness of the night, he wondered just exactly where they were headed. All the stories of Trinidad being a haven for crime and the weirdoes that flock to such places took hold. It was so remote. It was so Nowheresville. It was the perfect place to bump off a couple of nosy out-of-town cops.
    Shoot us up on a hillside and say they never saw us…
    Glen Trainor chatted nervously about fishing and hunting prospects in the area as though he were really interested. The local deputy promised to take him up to the reservoir, if they had time, to show him the area’s best fishing spot.
    * * *
    The siren of the mountains, the purported sexpot of the Rockies, was puffy-eyed and weary when the detectives and their local law enforcement escort went inside her grand, custom-built home. For all the Thornton police detectives had heard about her, the woman’s appearance did not match her reputation. Perhaps it was the terrible circumstances of their visit? At 43, Sharon Harrelson was soft-spoken and devoid of makeup. She was no man magnet. She was tired and wan.
    The occupants of the house included two small children— identified as seven-year-old Misty and ten-year-old Danny Nelson—and a young woman named Rochelle and her husband, Bart Mason. None of them mattered, of course. At least initially, all eyes were on the woman who had lost her husband to a terrible fire.
    Rochelle scurried the little boy and girl into the living room, while Sharon led her somber parade of visitors to the kitchen.
    The flame of her lighter was a tiny torch held by fingers with candy-apple red nails. She put a cigarette to her full, sensuous lips and sucked hard. In a minute, as smoke streamed from her nose, Sharon started from the beginning.

BOOK I
    Preacher’s Wife
    “I was a perfect little minister's wife on the outside. I think probably most of our congregational members—except the ones I really let inside me—would have said I was a wonderful minister's wife.”
    —Sharon Fuller
    “So I thought, what kind of a woman is she? She’s coming down to Trinidad and she’s got two little kids and she’s married to a minister. Here she is shacking up with Perry at a motel.”
    —Barbara Ruscett

Chapter 1
    IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A FRESH START. GOD KNEW the preacher’s thirty-year-old wife needed one. So did her husband. Four years in Durham, North Carolina, had been besmirched by the unthinkable, the unspeakable. Nerves had been frayed. Blame had been heaped deeper and deeper. No man’s shoulders could bear the enormous weight of it all. Seventh-Day Adventist Pastor Mike Fuller knew he had a problem. A pretty one, too. Her name was Sharon.
    The family headed west to La Junta and Rocky Ford, Colorado, boiling over the circumstances forcing them from the eastern seaboard. It was the summer of 1976; platform shoes’ last stand, the year of the Bee Gees and Donna Summer. For the family in the convertible sliding across the mammoth asphalt belt of the interstate, it was not a happy time. The house they loved had been put up for sale; furniture loaded on a separate moving truck. Friends had been kissed good-bye. The couple’s two little girls, Rochelle, seven, and Denise, two, had been yanked from their playmates.
    And it was all her fault.
    Sharon Fuller had fallen in love with a man in her husband’s congregation. It was not the first time and, Sharon knew, it likely would not be the last. Within the embrace of the other man’s arms, Sharon told friends, she had found compassion, tenderness, love—emotions she derisively insisted her husband was incapable of offering.
    The scenario played in Sharon’s mind like a bodice-ripper romance novel without a happy ending. Tattered dreams. Lost opportunity. Star-crossed lovers. To her way of thinking, such a romantic