"It doesn't hurt anywhere," she replied. "It didn't happen today." Kincaid leaned over the cockpit rim, his thick fingers reaching down to her knees. He took the heavy handle of his brass-tipped flashlight and sharply tapped the patellar tendon just below her right kneecap. Nothing. Not a twitch. The quadriceps remained entirely soft and unresponsive. He struck the left knee with identical precision. The leg hung limp, completely dead to the stimulus. Beside him, Harlan watched her eyes. As an academic who had studied indigenous ceremonies and mental discipline, he knew that shock or trauma usually caused involuntary flinching, dilated pupils, or a tightening of the jaw. There was none of that. "She's telling the truth, Frank," Kincaid said quietly, looking back at the sheriff. "Zero motor response. No reflex arc at all. She's completely paralyzed from the waist down." "Look down there," Brawley interrupted, pointing his Winchester toward the base of the gravel slope twenty paces away near a clump of dry rabbitbrush. Sitting upright in the dirt was a wheelchair.