3rd Degree

Chapter 87

THE LIGHTS WERE BLAZING in Molinari's office - the only lights on in the Hall at six A.M.

He was on the phone when I went in. His face brightened into what I took as a worn smile, pleased but exhausted. No one was getting any sleep these days.

“I was just trying to assure the chief of staff,” he said, signing off the phone and smiling, “that we weren't the secu-rity equal out here of, say, Chechnya - with larger bridges. Tell me you have something, anything.”

I pushed across the yellowed, folded article I had found in Jill's study.

Molinari picked up the article, PROSECUTOR NAMED IN BNA BOMBING CASE. He scanned it.

“What was it you called them, Joe? Radicals from the six-ties who you said are still out there, who never surfaced?”

“White rabbits?” he said.

“What if it wasn't political? What if there was something else motivating them? Or maybe it's partly political, but there's something else?”

“Motivating what, Lindsay?”

I pushed across the last article, the Sunday magazine sup-plement, folded to the part about Billy Danko's code name, circled in bright red: August Spies.

“To get back in the game. To commit these murders. Maybe to get some kind of revenge. I don't know everything yet. There's something here, though.”

For the next few minutes I briefed Molinari on everything that we had - right up to the prosecutor Robert Meyer, Jill's father.

Molinari blinked glassily. He looked at me as if I might be crazy. And it sounded crazy. Whatever I had was flying in the face of the investigation, the pronouncements of the killers, the wisdom of every law-enforcement agency in the country.

“Just where do you want to go with this, Lindsay?” Moli-nari finally asked.

“We've got to find out whatever we can about the people in that house. I'd start with Billy Danko. His family was from Sacramento. The FBI has files on what happened, right? Department of Justice, whatever it is. I need to know every-thing the Feds know.”

Molinari shook his head slowly back and forth. I realized I was asking for a lot. He closed his eyes for a second and leaned back in his chair. When he opened them I saw the faintest outline of a smile. “I knew there was a reason I missed you, Lindsay.”

I took that as a yes.

“What I didn't know” - he pushed back his chair - “was that it was due to the likely prospect we're both going to have some time on our hands after we're removed from our jobs.”

“I missed you, too,” I said.