Cutting Edge

ELEVEN

“This the street?”

“Sheffield’s place is just ahead of us.” DeMarco motioned to a dormered Old Quarter house on the right as he turned a corner in their Land Rover. “When I drove him over from the airport, the boss was in a pretty decent mood. Bushed, you know, but kidding with Wade and Ackerman in the backseat about it being a fancier Motel 6 than the one where he usually grabs a bed.” He shook his head. “I never would have thought I’d be here again tonight, bringing the kind of news we’ve got.”

Nimec glanced at him across the front seat.

“There’s no good time for bad news,” he said. “When things hit us over the head, we cope. Timing isn’t part of the bargain.”

DeMarco checked his mirrors and pulled to the curb. It was almost ten o’clock at night, twenty minutes having passed since he’d met Nimec’s chopper at the same field where Gordian had arrived some hours earlier.

The two men sat quietly in the vehicle’s dark interior.

“You think about how you’re going to break it to him?” DeMarco said.

Nimec’s smile was catacomb bleak.

“If I do that,” he said, “you can forget about me coping.”

He exited the Rover, strode into the building’s forecourt, and went up the steps to its entrance. The penguin who answered his ring reminded him of the waiters at the Rio de Gabao dinner reception. When did the black suits and ruffled white shirts come off?

A hurried introduction. Nimec said he needed to see Roger Gordian alone, was told Monsieur Gordian was in a meeting with his host and fellow house guests, explained he’d come about something very urgent, was then led into a side parlor, and invited to have a seat while he waited.

He stood instead with his back to the plush sofa.

Gordian was smiling as appeared through the parlor’s sliding walnut doors minutes later.

“Pete, hi,” he said. “I heard the doctors were checking you out and didn’t expect to see you until sometime tomor—”

He caught Nimec’s sober, uneasy expression and stopped in the middle of the room. The smile had faded.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

Nimec quickly went past Gordian to the doors, drew them shut, and then turned to face him.

“Boss,” he said. His hand went to Gordian’s arm. “It’s Julia.”

“That’s Rob over there on the tennis courts with the dogs,” Meredith Wagner said from the Jetta’s backseat. She motioned to the small community park on their left with her head. “He wanted to take them running while the rain gives us a letup.”

Pulled up by the park entrance, Ricci and Thibodeau looked out at the solitary figure of Rob Howell on the other side of a high chain-link fence surrounding the courts. His back to the plastic-coated mesh, hands deep in the pockets of his barn coat, Howell stood watching the dogs chase each other in repeated energetic circles around the wet artificial turf.

Thibodeau shifted around to face the woman.

“We won’t trouble him any more ’n we need,” he said. “I promise you.”

She nodded without turning from her window. Dressed in jeans and a light brown corduroy jacket that closely matched the color of her hair, Meredith Wagner was about thirty-five, plain, thin, soft spoken, and visibly worn. They had found her at the ranch-style house she shared with her husband, Nick; three-year-old daughter, Katie; and, since yesterday, her brother Rob and his five greyhounds in a quiet suburban development outside Sonoma.

“He’s so used to caring for those animals… I don’t think he could make it if not for them,” she said. “I don’t think he’d have anything left to keep him in one piece.”

Thibodeau did not comment. He wasn’t sure whether she had been addressing him or thinking aloud to herself. In either case, he could say nothing except what she would already know — that he wished things were otherwise, wished events hadn’t brought them to where they were right now.

He thought in silence a few moments. When you went fishing for information, you could never predict which facts would take a long cast of the reel to pull in, which ones would jump into your hands, and which would lead you toward a rich bounty of others. After Ricci had reminded him how he’d gotten Erickson to let out that Rob Howell was staying with relatives, Thibodeau had thought it might be a while before they could identify the particular family members and track them down. But that had proven to be as easy as stopping at a gas station to buy the Monday-morning edition of a regional newspaper called the Mountain Journal. Though they had originally picked it up to see what the police and emergency freq chasers might have found out about the crime from early dispatcher-respondent radio exchanges that would flurry over the air before law-enforcement put a stopper on open communications, it had been of far greater help than they’d bargained for. The paper’s freelance police stringer had picked up on the double homicide near the state park in time to get a jump on local television stations, learn where Howell had gone through his homespun contacts, and include the sister’s name and town of residence in his story. Once they read it, Ricci had only needed to call directory information for her phone number and street address.

And so they had found themselves here not two hours after leaving the rescue center. Thibodeau was convinced it was partly just luck that had delivered them to the Wagner family’s front door before a crush of media vans — if it wasn’t profane to use a word such as luck under these circumstances. The violence at the center had taken place on a Sunday morning, when the TV and radio crews were skimpiest, especially in the state’s more remote, unpopulated areas. What had given the Mountain Journal a chance to trump the competition also gave the police some time to go into clamp-down mode and keep the name of Roger Gordian’s daughter from surfacing as part of their investigation… for the time being. With the weekend over, things would start to percolate. The Journal people would want to spread its story around to make certain they got credit for breaking it first. Morgue beat reporters would get on the trail. Big-market newshounds with deeper and wider sources than some country red-bone with a police band radio in his Chevy would smell blood — literally smell blood, Thibodeau thought — and reports would be flying everywhere by the evening news cycle.

He and Ricci were ahead of the pack but Thibodeau believed it wouldn’t be long before the rest caught up. And while Ricci’s gut might fill with acid when he thought about the FBI joining the case, his own concern was having the press toss themselves into the mix. For reasons that didn’t exactly align, both men were very eager to talk to Rob Howell before others got wind of his whereabouts.

As a result, Thibodeau could sense the impatience with which Ricci glanced at their passenger’s pale, exhausted face in the rearview mirror.

“Okay,” Ricci said in his peculiar uninflected tone. “You want to go tell your brother why we’re here?”

Meredith Wagner nodded and reached for her door handle.

“I’ll let you know when he’s ready,” she said.

She went and talked with Howell for a couple of minutes. They saw him abruptly turn toward their parked car, saw him look back at his sister and talk to her some more. Then she waved them over, waited for them to approach, and sort of drifted off along the tennis court’s painted white foul line. Giving them room for privacy, Thibodeau supposed, but remaining close enough to cut short their conversation if Howell became too upset.

“Mister Howell—” Thibodeau began.

“Rob’s fine.” He shook their hands. “Meredith says you work for Julia’s dad. Private security, is it?”

Peripherally aware of the dogs in their circular sprint around the court, Thibodeau nodded, gave him their names, told him how sorry they were for his loss, and explained that what they wanted to ask wouldn’t take long.

“We know you been through everything with the police, ain’t about to put you on that go ’round again,” he said.

Howell cast his sunken eyes down at the ground a moment. Then he raised them to Thibodeau’s face and shrugged. “It’s all right. If it can help you find Julia, I don’t mind.”

Ricci looked at him. “Julia,” he said, “and the people who took what they did from you.”

Howell turned his way.

“My daughter was only six months old,” he said.

Ricci remained tunneled on his eyes, noticing their glazed appearance. Tranquilizers. A CNS depressant. Probably lorazepam.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I got a call from him this morning, you know. The detective in charge. He didn’t want me to talk to anybody about what happened, mentioned you two in particular. In case you showed up at Merry’s.”

“He say why?”

“I guess just what you’d expect,” Howell said. “Something about how they don’t want their investigation compromised by outside parties.”

“You’re allowed to talk to whomever you want. Nothing legal they can do to stop you.”

“I figured that,” Howell said. “And if he’s right and we’re wrong, I can always claim not to remember his words.”

Ricci nodded a little.

“The medication,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Besides,” Ricci said. “We aren’t at Merry’s.”

A faint, desolate smile touched Howell’s lips, revealing little white flecks of dried saliva at their corners. He checked on the dogs with a glance over his shoulder, thrust his hands back into his pockets, and quietly bowed his head toward the synthetic grass again, his thoughts slipping into their own nebulous, faraway space.

“We were at the center before,” Ricci said. “The cops gave us a look around. Probably decided to phone you because I got on their nerves asking questions they didn’t want to answer.”

Howell brought up his head, slowly, working against the heavy resistance of the tranqs.

“What sort of questions?”

“There was blood on the floor of the shop,” Ricci said. “Near the door. The detective was ready to tell me it wasn’t Julia’s, but he wasn’t so ready to tell me the blood came from a dog that’d been shot.”

Howell nodded.

“Vivian,” he said.

“That be one of the rescues?” Thibodeau said.

Another nod.

“Julia favors her. The first day she came to work for me, I remember lecturing her about how our policy’s not to become too attached.” Howell gestured toward the whirling dogs behind him with a slight roll of his shoulder. “Being firm’s how I wound up with five of my own.”

Ricci looked at him. “With all the things the police shared with us, we have to wonder how come they kept quiet about the dog. Vivian.”

Howell’s mouth worked.

“Evidence,” he said after several moments. “She’s just evidence to them. It’s why they won’t let me anywhere near her. They call it a safeguard.”

Ricci let his eyes rest on him. “It’s important for us to know what’s happened to her body.”

Howell’s expression was odd.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.

Ricci paused a beat.

“When a pet’s remains have to be examined during an investigation, the police bring them to a lab for tests,” he said. “Depends on the case, but they’ll usually give them back to the owner after they’re through—”

Howell was shaking his head.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

Ricci looked at him.

“Don’t understand what?”

“Viv’s alive,” Howell said.

Aware Gordian would want to see it with his own eyes, Pete Nimec had hardcopied the e-mail aboard the chopper, printing it out on a single sheet of paper he’d folded into his wallet. Behind the closed sliding doors of Sheffield’s visitor parlor now, he sat on the couch with him and heard that paper rattle in his trembling hand.

“There’s nothing else?” Gordian said. His face was chalky. “This message is it?”

“So far,” Nimec said. “Yeah.”

Gordian shook his head. “Ashley…”

“She doesn’t know yet. Meg’s been leaving messages for her to get in touch.”

“I’ll contact her myself.”

Nimec looked at him and nodded. He heard the paper rattle.

“You’re sure it’s the truth… about the tattoo?” Gordian said. “Because if Julia had gotten something like that put on her body, she’d tell me just to see my face turn red. You know her, Pete. How she is. She acts like it’s amusing when my dander’s up. She’d tell me—”

“She told Megan. Some kind of secret thing between them. I think she was going to make a presentation of it the next time you saw her.”

“My God,” Gordian said through a harsh exhalation. “If not for that poor woman… her baby… killed, shot dead… I’d think it was all some kind of hoax. That maybe someone who knows Julia found out she’d gone out of town, sent this poison over the Internet for a sick thrill…”

He let the sentence trail, recognizing the uselessness of trying to bind it in logic and reality. Nimec heard his agitated snatches of breath, the paper rattling again between his fingers in the silence of the room.

“Who’s on it?” Gordian said.

“Ricci and Thibodeau. If there are any leads, any paths they need to follow, every man, every resource, everything we’ve got is available in a heartbeat. You know that.”

Gordian nodded.

“I need to tie things up, get back home right away—”

“Boss,” Nimec interrupted. “You can’t leave Africa.”

Gordian looked at him. “No,” he said.

“Gord—”

“I know what you’re thinking. It doesn’t matter. Somebody has to be with Ashley.”

“Meg plans to stay with her, look after her for as long as she has to—”

“No, Pete. Forget it. I won’t let you decide this for me. That demand in the message… the announcement I’m supposed to make… we can’t jump to the conclusion it has anything remotely to do with the actual motive or motives for what’s happened. It could be a red herring. Meant to throw us off.”

“Or not,” Nimec said. “You really feel we’re in a position to take chances right now?”

Silence clapped down over them again. But now Gordian became very still, staring at the wall opposite him, the printout no longer rattling in his hand. The thick doors and walls of the room blocked out any sounds from elsewhere in the old French mansion.

After a long length of time, he turned to Nimec.

“The path you need to follow starts here,” he said, and put a hand to his chest. “Whatever the reason for what’s happened to Julia… those other innocents… they’ve fallen into the middle.”

Nimec said nothing for a while, and then nodded pensively.

“Find who’s at the other end,” Gordian said.

UpLink SanJo. Mid-afternoon. Their secure conference room’s sound-baffled, audio-secure walls once again enclosing them in an electronically fortified cocoon of silence. On one of those walls, a flat plasma screen jacked into a digital viewer showed an enlarged image of the e-mail Megan had received hours earlier. It struck the eye like the Mark of the Beast, a reminder that nothing in this technological age can make us impervious to its stain.

“We need to find out what evidence they’re pulling from that greyhound,” Ricci said. “We can’t wait.”

Megan looked at him. “You’re positive it’s that important.”

“I’m positive the cops think it is,” he said. “We cruised past that veterinary clinic a bunch of times. Saw a team of uniforms cooping outside in a patrol car. And I guarantee they weren’t going anywhere.”

“What makes it a sure thing is that they ain’t letting Howell in to see the dog,” Thibodeau said. “He tells us the vet be a good friend of his. Know him for years, care for every one of his hounds. Most’re more dead than alive when he bring them from the track. Some of ’em need surgery. Howell say you have to treat runners different from other breeds. They ain’t able to tolerate certain kinds of medicine or anaesthesia, need lower doses, you know.”

“One reason the cops brought the dog there is that Howell insisted on it when he found her alive,” Ricci said. “The clinic is only a few miles from his rescue center out in the boonies. Good break for him, trying to save that dog. Not too convenient for the badges.”

Megan was looking at him. “Why not?”

Ricci’s expression seemed to say the answer should have been obvious. “If they’re under orders to keep watch over it, they’d prefer bringing it someplace near an all-night diner, where they can tank up on free coffee and muffins the whole time. If it bleeds out on the way, so much the better. The dog becomes meat. They don’t have to worry about its carcass disappearing from a locked refrigerator drawer in a police lab, but a live animal in a country vet’s infirmary makes them insecure.” He paused a second. “Howell had some strong persuasion, though. The vet’s no bumpkin. Used to be with the San Francisco Zoo. Has a diploma in veterinary forensic pathology. The cops would have to call on somebody like him for the necropsy anyway… probably couldn’t find a better qualified man for the job.”

Megan was thoughtful. “And yet Howell doesn’t know why the police are so interested in the dog, am I right?”

“Right.”

“No idea despite his long-standing relationship with the veterinarian.”

“Right.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand that.”

There was a crackle of impatience in Ricci’s stillness.

“Once the vet becomes a fact finder in a criminal investigation it obliges him to clam up,” he said after a moment. “He leaks anything and it’s a violation of professional ethics.”

“I still think he’d be entitled to a general explanation,” Megan said. “Terrible as it sounds, we’re so focused on Julia, we risk losing sight of what Rob Howell’s suffered. He’s lost his entire family.”

Ricci turned toward her.

“You know how tight the cops can be with eyewitnesses in protective custody,” he said. “Maybe the dog had a clear look at the perps and they want her status kept secret till she’s well enough to make them in a lineup.”

Megan was silent. The sarcasm had caught her off guard.

“Wasn’t any call for that remark,” Thibodeau said from his opposite side. His large body shifted in his chair. “This ain’t no joke—”

“Stay out of this.” Ricci cut a hand in his direction, held his gaze on Megan. “You’re the one who might as well be joking. You don’t have the right to speak for me. You don’t know where I’m focused. You don’t know, or act like you don’t know, that the cops are putting an extra-heavy lid on things to keep us out. You sit here throwing words around a table when that e-mail on the wall says everything. We need to get busy.”

Megan remained quiet, staring back into his eyes. “What’s your recommendation?”

“We have to get Erickson to share that evidence from the dog. Whether he likes it or not.”

“I’m convinced,” she said. “But I also prefer we don’t alienate him. He has legal authority over the investigation and — as you’ve implied — can withhold anything he wants from us. We, on the other hand, have no license to meddle. If we plan to get somewhere we need his voluntary permission. Or maybe cooperation’s a better word. And I think the best way to obtain it would be to exert pressure on Erickson through behind-the-scenes channels.”

“Those channels have names attached to them?”

Megan nodded. She drew in a breath.

“Until now I’ve kept any knowledge about the e-mail within our organization to give us elbow room, but that changes tomorrow,” she said. “Since it’s safe to assume Erickson’s department would have put the FBI on alert for possible involvement, I can’t see a reason not to contact our old friend Bob Lang at Quantico in the meantime and ask him off the record to make a request of the local field office. That would be the San Francisco division. It won’t be long before the case winds up under its bailiwick anyway. And at that point they can share evidence with whomever they wish.”

Thibodeau was nodding as he mulled her words over.

“Sounds reasonable enough to me,” he said. “Beats going to war with Erickson.”

Ricci ignored him, continuing to look at Megan as if it were just the two of them in the room.

“Lang’s your old friend, not mine,” he said. “You want to visit wonderland with him, it’s your choice.”

A taut silence between them again. Megan’s eyes became narrow.

“What are you suggesting?” she said.

Ricci sat a moment, then slowly shrugged and rose from his chair.

“Nothing,” he said. “You’re the boss, you make the calls. I just want to get back to work.”

When the phone rang in Derek Glenn’s office, he was at his window admiring the new 120-foot-tall naval ship-yard cranes that soared prominently in his view of the waterfront. They had appeared there about a month earlier, and he hoped it was a permanent spot. Keeping a vigilant and appreciative eye on the cranes had come to occupy a large part of his day, and Glenn supposed that if he ever looked out to discover them farther up or down the harbor — or, worse, altogether gone — it might be a sign he’d have to find something else about the commercial harbor that might be of interest, which had been tough before their arrival. Or something other than standing by the window to keep him occupied. Either way, it would be a development worthy of consideration at UpLink’s San Diego overflow warehouse.

His lookout interrupted, Glenn went over and lifted the receiver.

“Yup, I’m here.”

“Glenn. It’s Tom Ricci.”

Glenn was surprised. Not a word from the guy for over a year. Then a phone call, a visit, and a second call in the space of a week.

“Lo and behold,” he said. “Knew I should have explained my picking up the tab the other night was a one-time deal—”

“I need help.”

Glenn’s face suddenly became serious.

“What is it?”

“Something you maybe don’t want to take on,” Ricci said. “Might not even want to know about, because just knowing puts you in it to where you have advance knowledge.”

“As in the sort of knowledge that might not be any good for my job status?”

“Could be,” Ricci said. “Could be that won’t be the worst of it. You say good-bye right now, it’s fine. You decide to take a pass, I’m okay with that, too.”

“How long do I have to think about this?”

“Till I hang up the phone,” Ricci said. “If you’re in with me, you have to be up here tonight. Early as possible.”

Glenn thought it over a few seconds, the receiver cradled against his shoulder, his eyes wandering toward the high, reliable cranes framed by his window.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Let me hear it.”

A country route near Portola State Park, half past eleven at night, a ground mist spreading over the roots of the oaks and madrones. Under a low roof of clouds the sky was moonless and starless.

The shingle outside the square, flat, single-story brick building read PARKVILLE VETERINARY CLINIC, KENNETH W. MOORE, D.V.M., PH.D., but there was scarcely enough light seeping from the windows on the clinic’s north side — and from the dashboard of the police cruiser parked out front — for someone even a yard or two away to see the sign with his unaided eye. Discerning the doctor’s name and credentials would be almost impossible.

In the thick woods that belted the clinic’s parking lot, Ricci would have known what the lettering said without having to use his portable night-vision binoculars — the vet’s name being one among many details he’d marked while driving past the clinic with Rollie Thibodeau almost twelve hours earlier, doing a canvass for reasons he’d kept to himself. Still, he found the definition with which it appeared in the high-mag, IR-boosted illuminator tubes exceptional. A clear, close, fully stereoscopic image. It was not so many years ago that night vision optics gave you green ghosts moving among ghost-objects and a poor sense of their spacial relationships. The ability to read a sign in pitch darkness at fifty yards and judge its distance was an asset he would have coveted as a SEAL, and later as a Beantown homicide cop. He did not take it for granted.

But now Ricci’s gaze held on the sign for only a moment before shifting elsewhere. A single prowl car did not automatically mean that two cops inside made up the entire watch. There could be others on foot patrol, though he’d have bet against it.

Beside him, Glenn’s thoughts were running to the contrary as he scanned the wide pool of shadows around the clinic through his own NV binocs. A hidden frown creased his brow under a black nylon balaclava.

“This just doesn’t wash,” he said in a hushed voice. He lowered the glasses and normal darkness poured into his eyes. “The police have a murder on their hands. The daughter of a famous businessman kidnapped. A war hero. And you tell me there might be important evidence in that animal hospital. But they’ve got one cruiser guarding it. No backup I can see.”

Ricci looked over at him.

“As of this minute, it isn’t an official kidnapping,” he whispered. “Tomorrow there’ll be feds all over the place.”

“Still…”

“Don’t think UpLink. Or U.S. Army,” Ricci said. “Think small-town police force. They haven’t got many resources. Don’t have a clue anybody besides Howell knows the dog’s alive, being kept here in the middle of nowhere.”

A grunt. Glenn raised his lenses again. Both cops were slouched against their headrests, relaxed, chatter from their police radio faintly reaching the trees. They had their windows open — the driver’s window lowered about a third of the way, his partner’s almost completely down on the other side.

Glenn wished it had been the latter facing him. He would need to make a perfect shot. If he missed by a couple of inches up or down, his.50-caliber plastic sabot — fired from an original VVRS, sound-suppressed barrel, his version of choice — would either strike the driver’s window or the rack lights atop the cruiser, jolt the patrolmen into alertness, and all hell would break loose. If his aim strayed a little to the right of his desired line of fire, he might hit one of the cops. Their heads were vulnerable. Their upper bodies, too. And even discharged at its lowest barrel speed a variable velocity round could inflict serious physical damage. It was why the military shied from the term nonlethal in preference of the less-than-lethal or reduced lethality designations. A weapon was a weapon was a weapon. Glenn knew cap guns could kill under freak circumstances, and the VVRS was no toy.

He turned his attention from the car windows to those on the near side of the clinic. All except the first of three or four running toward the back had their blinds raised. Glenn saw an overnight attendant in lab whites filling out paper forms at a desk behind the last window. Insofar as he could tell through his lenses, they were charts comparable to the sort nurses and doctors would hang from beds in hospitals that treated patients of the human variety. There was, he noticed, bluish light flickering from somewhere in the room… probably a television set. It wouldn’t hurt if the attendant had its sound up.

“Okay,” Ricci said. “You ready?”

Glenn nodded.

“Give me exactly two minutes.” Ricci tapped the face of his WristLink. “Remember… anything goes wrong, head straight for the car and take off.”

Glenn hesitated. This had been another point of disagreement between them, but Ricci had been relentless in his insistence on drawing the heat if there was a foul-up.

Ricci stared at him in the dark, waiting for his second nod. He gave it with slow reluctance.

“I thought it’d be ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ ”

“Bullshit,” Ricci said. Then he slipped away toward the left, bent low under the ponderous boughs of the hardwoods.

Hoping the cops would continue to lean back in their seats a bit longer, an eye on the tritium dial of his own watch — not quite as jazzed as Ricci’s, but accurate — Glenn knelt into position with the rifle.

Ninety seconds later he sighted through its night scope, counted down the final half minute to himself, and then pulled the trigger with a silent prayer.

The muted crack of the subsonic round leaving his weapon was no louder than the hammer click of a dry-fired revolver. It traveled straight through the cruiser’s open window, skimmed between the cops and the windshield, and struck the interior of the passenger door’s frame.

The startled cops jerked in their seats as the sabot burst open on impact to release its superconcentrated fill of dimethyl sulfoxide and zolpidem — a soporific aerosol formulated to be instantly absorbed into the bloodstream on contact with skin or mucous membranes. Glenn knew a microscopic amount of the agent would be enough to knock out someone the size of a pro-basketball center within moments, and neither of the cops was built like Shaquille O’Neal.

They dropped off into unconsciousness, spilling over each other in the front seat of the car. The two probably hadn’t had time to wonder what was happening to them. Their exposure to the chemical incapacitant would leave them with pounding heads, queasy stomachs, and a whole lot of confusion when they recovered. But they would be alive and well.

Glenn produced a long exhalation of relief, slung the rifle over his shoulder, and looked out past the treeline with his binocs.

Ricci had emerged from the woods and was hurriedly moving across the parking lot toward the patrol car.

Extending a gloved hand through its partially open window, Ricci unlocked the passenger door of the cruiser, pulled the senseless cop in the shotgun seat upright, and propped his weight against the backrest to ensure he’d remain in that position. Then he reached down between the seats for the prone driver’s dislodged cap, careful not to lean too far inside. Any residual trace of the DMSO/ zolpidem agent that hadn’t been biologically absorbed should have become inactive within seconds of its release into the air, but he did not want to take unnecessary chances.

He started toward the front of the clinic. At the entrance Ricci donned the uniform cap, knocked, and waited with his head bowed almost against the peephole. Moments later, he heard footsteps on the other side of the door.

“Back already?” The night attendant. Standing there behind the door. “Fella, the way that coffee passes through you, you’re gonna have to start drinking a weaker blend.”

“Or less of it,” Ricci said from the shadows, speaking quietly, his face still turned down so all the attendant would see through the peephole was the peak of the officer’s cap.

He heard the snap of the turning lock, braced himself. The door began to swing inward, light from the clinic’s vestibule filling the open space.

Then the night attendant spoke again as the space widened: “C’mon in before y—”

Ricci quickly shoved through the door and locked his arms around the attendant, a full body tackle that landed him on his back, the wind leaving his mouth with a grunt of mixed pain and surprise as he struck the floor. Down on top of him, Ricci grabbed hold of his arm, wrenched it hard, got him onto his side, twisted the arm some more to make him flip onto his stomach, then pressed a knee into his spine below the shoulder blades. Another pained grunt escaped the attendant. He tried to lift himself up, pushing his free hand against the floor. Ricci dug his knee in deeper to keep him still, got a spray canister of DMSO/ zolpidem out of his belt holster, held it to his face, and thumbed the nozzle.

The guy went limp. Pain gone; one, two, three.

Ricci rose to his feet, hustled across the vestibule and waiting area, and then passed through a swing door into the rear section of the building. There was a short hallway. Two examining rooms to his left, an operating room, a cubbyhole office beyond them, then a fourth room near the end of the hall to the right. All were doorless.

He hooked into the last room and immediately saw the cluttered desk where the attendant had been working on his charts. On a table beside it, the television that had cast a flickering glow through the window was tuned to a late-night talk show, its host mugging at his viewers. Otherwise the area was very sparse. There was a steel gurney in the middle of the floor. Some file cabinets stood against one wall. Another wall was lined with a dozen or so boarding kennels, the four largest on the floor, the rest above them on wide metal shelves.

Ricci scanned the kennels from just inside the entryway. Most were vacant. Each of the few containing animals was tagged with a case number and what was presumably the pet-owner’s surname. He saw a house cat watching him curiously from an eye-level shelf. Several kennels apart from it on the same shelf, a small furry dog was curled up into a sleeping ball.

In a big kennel on the floor, a greyhound lay on its side facing him, its bandaged flank rising and falling with its slow, heavy breaths, an IV tube running into it from a drip bag mounted above the kennel’s wire-mesh door. The dog’s eyes were open, staring, and blank. Ricci couldn’t be certain whether it was aware of his presence.

The tag below the door read: 03-756A-HOWELL CENTER.

Ricci’s gaze held on the dog a long moment, went to the file cabinets. No, he thought. Not there. Case is too fresh, too outstanding.

He turned toward the desk and noticed a rack holding several plastic clipboards, their neatly labeled tops facing outward. The board with the number and name matching those on the greyhound’s kennel jumped out at his eyes almost at once.

Ricci pulled it from the rack, hastily inspecting the notations on the attached sheets of paper.

His eyes widening, he heard his own sharp intake of breath.

Ricci needed under a minute to take digital snapshots of every handwritten page with his WristLink. After he was finished, he replaced the clipboard, went through the desk drawers, located the tray that held the sealed glass vials and transparent evidence bags referenced in the vet’s notes, and photoed them as well before returning them to the drawer in which they’d been found.

He had taken a half step toward the entryway when he paused, turned to look back at the wall of kennels, and went over to crouch in front of the wounded greyhound.

His fingers reached through the mesh and gently, gently touched its snout.

“Good girl,” he whispered. “You’re a good girl.”

Then Ricci was up on his feet again, racing from the clinic into the night.