Flight

30

Wednesday, July 12, 5:15 P.M.

The Dane Mansion

“A child, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

Myles kept his face impassive, but his knowledge of Mr. Dane made him proceed cautiously. Mr. Dane was not following his usual routine this evening. Departure from routine did not often bode well for his staff. Mr. Dane had refused to hear Myles’s report on Lefebvre’s funeral until a few moments ago. He sometimes did this — put off what he would consider a treat.

A report on the funeral for Lefebvre was, Mr. Dane decided, a real treat.

“The Las Piernas Police Department may not remember all he did for them,” Dane had said when told of the arrangements, “but I certainly do!” He considered and rejected the idea of gracing the services with his own presence, but he could not resist causing a stir.

His instructions to Myles had been explicit. “I want you to hover there, Myles. Don’t get close enough to kiss the casket — in fact, stay well out of reach, but make sure your appearance is noted. They’ll go positively wild. And it will give us an idea where things stand. You must tell me who is in attendance.”

Not long after Myles returned from the cemetery, he reported that he had been seen and videotaped by members of the LPPD. Dane had held up one pale hand and shouted, “Don’t! Not another word. You will tell me more this evening.”

For the past few hours, Dane had been amusing himself by observing the police surveillance efforts, their virtual occupation of other houses in the neighborhood. “Oh, look! They’ve convinced the old busybody next door to quarter their troops!” he said gleefully.

He had fed the swans a little earlier than usual, making a show of it, his gestures sweeping. He began conversing with the birds in a lunatic fashion. He had been delighted to think of his little play with the swans being immortalized by the video cameras of the LPPD. “They’ll believe I’ve gone gaga!”

But when Dane finally heard Myles’s report, his mood changed.

“Elena Rosario — you’re sure?”

“No, sir. Not positive.”

“But you heard her voice! It must have been chilling! I swear to you, I horripilate at the very idea — Detective Elena Rosario’s voice after all these years!”

Myles now knew without a doubt that he was on dangerous ground. He said nothing.

“Did her fellow law enforcement officers embrace her? Did they welcome — ah! — her resurrection?”

“No, sir. Detectives Collins and Baird were intrigued by the veiled woman, but I believe they left the task of identifying her to Detective Harriman. Or perhaps they believed she was in some way connected to Mr. Arden. She stayed next to him throughout the time I saw her.”

“Ah, yes, Arden.” Dane brooded for a time, then said, “Tell me more.”

Myles described the altercation between Tory Randolph and the veiled woman, which had taken place just as he was leaving. He kept hoping Mr. Dane would find some amusement in it. He did not. Suddenly, Myles remembered another detail he had planned to report.

“Before anyone else arrived at the cemetery, I looked at the flowers brought there from the funeral home. They included an elaborate arrangement of white flowers. All white. No card.”

Dane sat up straighter. “Really? Now you interest me…”

Myles waited.

“Yes, that is interesting. Did you discover where they came from?”

“Not yet, sir, but we are working on it.”

“It is very important to me, Myles.”

“Yes, sir. I expect an answer by early this evening.”

Dane tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. After a moment, he asked, “Detective Harriman was delayed in his return to his office?”

“Yes, sir. By several hours.”

“Curious…” Dane grew introspective. “He does not seem as interested in me as his friends are. Which can only mean that he is not as convinced as they that I killed their precious Trent Randolph. Why?” He looked up at Myles. “What does he know that they don’t?”

This aspect of matters had escaped Myles’s notice. He was ashamed that he had not assigned someone to follow Detective Harriman from the cemetery. He had someone watching inside the department, of course, but that was not helpful to Mr. Dane now.

“You and I were due to discuss him today, weren’t we?” Dane asked.

“The report is ready whenever you’d like to go over it, sir.”

“Excellent,” Dane said. “After dinner, you and I shall spend time together in the study, discussing Detective Harriman.”

“Yes, sir. Will that be all?”

Dane nodded absently. Myles was almost to the door when Dane called him back.

“The boy, Myles. Tell me everything you can remember about the boy.”

31

Wednesday, July 12, 5:30 P.M.

The Kelly-Harriman Home

Elena checked on Seth, who was still sound asleep. He had stayed up late the last few nights, visiting with Yvette and Matt — added to all the stress and excitement of the day, he was exhausted.

The dogs had gone out when she opened the door to the room. She had almost lost her balance, because she had been using one foot to block the entrance of the big gray cat — Cody? Yes, that was what Frank had called him. She shut the door behind the whole menagerie — on all but Seth’s guinea pig, who was sleeping in his new cage, undoubtedly dreaming of huge tomcats.

She looked around the room and tried hard to summon some sense of anger, of righteous indignation toward Frank Harriman. She couldn’t do it. She had seen him talking to Baird, could see there was some sort of friction between them. And although Pete had helped them out, she knew he was one of the ones who thought Phil was guilty.

There, the anger was back.

It lasted until she saw a photo of Frank with two boys who were near Seth’s age. The kids were climbing all over him; he was laughing. They weren’t his kids, though. She had overheard that much of Seth’s interrogation of him before Yvette had dragged her farther into the kitchen. No kids. But there were games for kids to play with here. Frank had shown her the closet that held toys. She couldn’t picture him playing with them himself — it was an aunt and uncle’s house, then.

She smelled smoke on her hair and decided to take a shower. Carrying the plastic bag that held the basic toiletries she had purchased at the drugstore, she gathered up a towel and a washcloth from the stack of linens Frank had left for them and went into the bathroom.

It was there, for the first time, that she became acutely aware of the fact that Frank’s wife lived in this house. Not that she had expected that Irene Kelly lived somewhere else, but Elena had been feeling too numb to really study her surroundings. In the moments when the numbness briefly faded, she was caught up in thoughts about the funeral and the fire, in worries about the future, in questions about whom she should trust.

Now, on the counter, small items became a visual alarm, declaring her an interloper on another woman’s ground. No, a couple’s ground. Two toothbrushes, a man’s comb, a woman’s hairbrush. A small bottle of scent, almost full. She opened the mirror door on the cabinet over the sink and saw the his-and-hers mix of deodorants, makeup (very little, she noted), mouthwash, razors, shaving cream, aftershave, hand lotion, cotton balls, aspirin, a box of bandages.

She felt a fierce stab of jealousy toward Irene Kelly. This was not because she had long considered Irene a potential rival or even because she had, at some point during the afternoon, decided that she liked the color of Frank Harriman’s eyes. It was because Irene Kelly had this male presence in her life.

Would she think of Elena as a poacher?

Elena began shrugging out of her clothes. Irene had nothing to worry over, she decided. Frank was attractive, but Elena never went after married men. Hell, she really didn’t spend a lot of time with men, period — although she had always liked the company of men more than of women. She didn’t have women friends. Her friendship with Yvette had been a first, and that one probably wouldn’t have been formed without Seth.

She shook her head. No, that wasn’t it. She liked directness, and most women weren’t as direct as Yvette.

As for men friends, most of the single men she met didn’t seem to be able to give up using the pointers between their legs as the compasses for their lives. Telling a man she was a single mom was usually enough to send his compass needle due south.

She’d met a few men she liked, and she had dated, but nobody ever got more than a good-night kiss from her. For a while, she had wondered if she was actually as frigid as the jerks at the LPPD had said she was. But she knew that was not the problem. The problem was, no one ever measured up to her memories of Phil Lefebvre.

She knew it wasn’t healthy to cling to memories this way, but it was no use trying to let go. She need only look at her son and the memories of Phil were there, inescapable. In a number of ways, she was more faithful to him than many women were to their living mates. She had said this once to Yvette, who had scoffed and said, “A dead husband is very easy to get along with. He doesn’t even snore.”

Maybe Yvette was right. Maybe they would have come to despise each other. Maybe they would have already been divorced, and she would have become a single mom anyway, and moreover, had to watch him date other women.

That was too hard to think about. Maybe, after all, they would have been happy, the way Harriman seemed to be with his wife. She had seen the way they supported each other at the funeral. She had envied Irene Kelly for that, too.

What would it be like, she asked herself, to have someone like Frank Harriman as your husband? There was a faint scent of aftershave, of maleness, in the room. She touched a towel hanging over the shower door. It was slightly damp. She brought it closer to her face and inhaled the combined scents of the soap and shampoo he used. She suffered a small shock, a sudden reacquaintance with the distantly familiar, and opened the shower door to see that Frank used the same brands of soap and shampoo that Phil had used.

She felt a chill. It was almost enough to make her close the shower door again, to let her hair stay smoky, to tell the Harrimans that she’d rent a hotel room somewhere.

She laughed at herself. A hotel? She didn’t make enough money to set herself up like that, not even in a rathole of a hotel. The afternoon shopping spree had almost maxed out her one credit card. “And this is just day one,” she said aloud, turning on the shower and stepping in.

Once the warm water began to sluice over her, she reached for Frank’s shampoo, leaving her own in the plastic bag, leaving the one she knew must be Irene’s on the tile shelf above her. She washed her hair with it, and as its scent rinsed across her face, the knot that had been tied so tightly somewhere in the middle of her chest loosened and the tears began to flow. She couldn’t remember ever crying so much in a single day, and she despised herself for it, even as she let long-denied grief take her where it would go.

So she let herself think of Phil and of what might have been. She fantasized, as she had so often, of Phil at the hospital on the night she gave birth to his son, holding Seth as an infant, how proud he would have been.

She thought of being held by him, of sharing warmth with him.

And as she had done so many, many times, she wondered if he had suffered before he died, if he had been scared, or cold, or lonely. If, from within the wreckage, the very marrow of his bones had tried to call out, asking to be found, only to be utterly abandoned.

“Stop it!” she said aloud, but the scolding only made her cry harder.

Irene had been sent into downtown L.A. on a story that the greenest reporter in the newsroom could have covered, on orders from Wrigley, her boss’s boss. She had watched while Judge Lewis Kerr was handed a plaque from the Southern California Women in Law, thanking him for organizing a series of Tomorrow’s Women in Law days in six counties. Tomorrow’s Women in Law days allowed girls to learn about the legal system by touring courtrooms, meeting with judges and attorneys, and generally being scared out of their wits by the inmates in the women’s jails.

Irene liked the program, and liked Kerr, but she was a veteran reporter, and the assignment had been a bit of petty office warfare. She had, not for the first time, considered finding other work. She loved her job, especially on the days when she was allowed to do it. Today wasn’t one of those days.

Although the press conference was over at two-thirty, Kerr had been flattered that the Express had sent her out on the story, had singled her out afterward, and had extracted a promise from her to attend the upcoming dedication ceremonies for a new wing of the Las Piernas County Courthouse. The fifteen minutes of sunshine he showered down on her ensured that she was going to be totally screwed trying to get back from L.A. through traffic.

The traffic was only beginning. Knowing she was never going to make it back in time to file the story, she called it in — on one of the newspaper’s cell phones. She had left her own phone at home when she heard that she would be covering this event. Wrigley would have to foot the bill for this one. She knew the cost of the call would irk the stingy bastard. Keeping that in mind, she described today’s event in minute detail. She had never loaded a story up with so many adjectives in her life.

As it turned out, she also paid for her moments of revenge — the battery on the cell phone went dead just before she reached the last bloated paragraph of the story, abruptly ending the call and denying her the chance to check her messages. Cussing out Wrigley for not investing in phones with a longer battery life, she inched her way home, smelling exhaust fumes, watching brake lights, and wondering if the paper in Modoc County was hiring.

At last, after spending nearly three hours covering a distance of about thirty miles, home was in sight. She pulled into the driveway, anxious to get out of the car. She hurried into the house, was snubbed by a preoccupied Cody, greeted the dogs, and went back into the bedroom to change.

She was surprised to hear the shower running; she hadn’t seen Frank’s car. But he might have parked in the garage or on the street. His clothes were in a pile and smelled heavily of smoke. She wrinkled her nose in distaste. She was putting them in the bag for dry cleaning, wondering why her normally neat husband had just tossed them on the floor, then thought of the shower. Probably washing the smoke smell out of his hair. She imagined him in the shower, smiled, and quickly stripped. She was on her way out of the bedroom when she saw the blue kimono. She smiled again and put it on.

She stepped into the bathroom, heard a woman say, “Honey, are you awake now?”

Honey?

Through a haze of red, she pulled the shower door open and yanked the temperature control so that the water went to one hundred percent cold.

Seth woke up, hearing two women’s voices shouting words that would have put him on restriction for weeks.

32

Wednesday, July 12, 5:45 P.M.

Garrity’s Flowers

He parked in the alley behind the florist shop, checked his pocket to make sure he had the photos, and got out of the car. The two vans parked at the back of the store were older than the one he had seen. They were white Chevy vans, but they didn’t look like the one at the cemetery. Emblazoned in red and green on the side panels and the back door of each was Garrity’s Flowers and the florist’s phone number (2-4-BLOOM). One of the vans had something in common with the van he had seen — its plate number. Even before he walked around to the front end, he knew the other plate would be missing.

He walked through a narrow breezeway between buildings to get to the front of the shop. A bell rang as he stepped in, but apparently it wasn’t heard over Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, which was playing over a speaker. He allowed himself a moment to enjoy both the music and the earthy scents of potted plants, the sweet and spicy mix of fragrances of roses and other flowers, the bright colors of summer blooms.

There was no one at the front counter at the moment. A set of glass climate-controlled cases filled with orchids and other exotic-looking plants stood behind the counter, and through them he could see an elderly woman working in the back of the shop. He heard her humming to herself as she created an elaborate arrangement.

Frank didn’t rush her. An avid gardener, he was quickly distracted by the colorful displays around him. Florists could order from greenhouses, of course, and while his own roses and zinnias and dahlias were doing fine, he couldn’t match the variety here. He walked slowly past bins of tulips, lilies, irises, snapdragons, carnations, daisies, and chrysanthemums. He made his way toward another set of climate-controlled cases at the back — these were filled with roses. Wending his way to it, he studied their various shades and shapes, wondering if he should surprise Irene by bringing her a dozen of them, a token of thanks for accepting two houseguests without notice — and a peace offering. It would surprise her — he didn’t stop at florists very often; not only because there were plenty of flowers right outside their back door, but also because he preferred to see flowers growing.

The aisles of the shop were narrow, crowded with blossoms, indoor plants, boxes of chocolates, and a limited assortment of other gifts — ceramic mugs with “World’s Greatest Granddad” and similar phrases imprinted on them; stuffed animals, mostly overdressed bears; hand-painted T-shirts, seemingly designed with cat lovers in mind. He negotiated his way between a display of Mylar balloons and a large potted palm and was bending to take a closer look at a bromeliad when the bell on the door rang again.

A young man entered the shop. He was tall. Not quite as tall as Frank — six two, maybe. His build was solid and muscular — so muscular that Frank thought his neat blue suit must have been custom-tailored. He had close-cropped blond hair, blue eyes, and a small tattoo on his thick neck just behind his right ear. A wasp.

He walked directly to the counter, apparently not noticing Frank’s presence. His posture was ramrod straight, his manner assured.

For reasons Frank could not name, the man made him feel uneasy. He stayed still, watching from his crouched position, hidden behind the palm.

The wasp man used his large hands to beat sharply on the countertop. “Hello!” he called, more in impatience than by way of greeting.

The florist came out, smiling. “Sorry to keep you waiting. What can I do for you?”

The wasp man smiled back. “Excuse me, ma’am. I sounded a little impatient, didn’t I? I apologize. I guess I’m a little frustrated, is all. You see, I’ve been to almost every florist in town, so I hope you can help me out.”

Her smile grew at this engaging politeness. Frank felt more wary. He unbuttoned his jacket, to give himself freer access to his weapon. He prayed he was being paranoid.

“I certainly hope so,” she said. “You’re not wanting something completely out of season, are you?”

“No, ma’am,” the wasp man said, laughing a little. “Oh, it feels good to laugh. I haven’t laughed much today.” He suddenly grew solemn. “You see, we had a funeral today — my uncle’s.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

He shrugged his big shoulders. “I really wasn’t close to him at all. But my mom loved him, and now she’s really upset — not just because of the funeral, but because of a little something that happened at it. You see, someone sent a big, beautiful spray of white flowers — gladiolus, mostly, or so my mom says — but the card must have fallen off of them, because we couldn’t find it after the service. The funeral home said they didn’t bring them to the cemetery, so they must have come directly from a florist. We checked with the cemetery, and they can’t tell us who brought them to his grave. Did you happen to make a delivery of white flowers to Good Shepherd Cemetery today?”

Even from the back of the shop, Frank could tell that the woman was nervous. He swore silently to himself, then, staying low, slowly crept forward. He tried to stay beneath the level of the counter, so that his reflection would not appear in the glass of the cases behind it.

“Good Shepherd?” she repeated.

He’s not a cop, Frank thought, edging closer. Not the one who killed Lefebvre. He’s too young. Which left the only other person who’d be interested in white flowers. One of Dane’s men. This likelihood did not make him feel any better.

The wasp man said, “Yes. Lefebvre. My uncle’s name was Lefebvre.”

“I — I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

The wasp man sighed, then walked toward the door. Frank couldn’t believe he was giving up so easily — there was something else going on. Did the wasp man have a confederate outside? He hurriedly repositioned himself so that he was better concealed, but not aligned with the woman behind the counter. If he had to fire his weapon at the wasp man, he did not want her to be in the line of fire. He could not see as much of the man’s movements, but he still had a good view of the woman and the street outside. There was a Camaro parked at the curb. No one was waiting in it.

He hoped the wasp man was going to leave, that he had learned whatever he wanted to know. But he didn’t believe for a minute that it was going to happen that way. He thought of all the names on the police memorial that belonged to guys who had bought the farm just like this, on a night when some walk-in asshole’s random or not-so-random act of assholishness turned a trip to a florist or a store or a restaurant into a situation, forcing an off-duty cop to act without the usual protections he’d have on the job — no backup, no radio, no Kevlar vest. Shit.

Instead of going out the door, the wasp man locked it. As he bent to do this, Frank saw the outline of a weapon beneath his coat. Shit.

“Why did you do that?” the florist said. “Can’t you read the sign? ‘This door to remain unlocked during — ’”

“I said, I need your help.”

Frank unholstered his own weapon. With his other hand, he pulled out his cell phone, which was set on silent mode, and dialed Pete’s pager number. Keeping an eye on the wasp man, who was moving closer to the florist, he entered 77, the last digits of his badge number, which would immediately tell Pete who was calling. Separating each code with asterisks, he followed this with 1199, the radio code for “officer needs assistance,” then 211, “armed robbery,” then 2-4-BLOOM — driven nearly mad by having to translate the store’s phone number into digits before hitting the pound key. He put the phone away.

The wasp man was back at the counter now. “Come on, tell me.”

“I told you,” the woman said. “I can’t help you.”

He moved closer to her. “Can’t you?”

“No. I mean — yes, we did make that delivery, but the customer didn’t leave his name. He paid in cash.”

“Describe him.”

“You aren’t upset about him being illegitimate, are you?”

The wasp man momentarily lost his air of menace. “What?”

“He said that he was Mr. Lefebvre’s illegitimate brother. That’s why he didn’t want his name attached. He wanted to pay his respects but not to upset the family. I thought he was being overly sensitive, but—”

The wasp man reached across the counter, grabbed hold of her blouse, and dragged her halfway over it as he pulled his gun out.

Frank moved forward.

“I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you!” the woman said. “Please don’t shoot me! Please don’t! I don’t want any trouble!”

“Neither do I,” he said, releasing her. “Now tell me — who ordered the white flowers?”

“Please don’t shoot me!” she said again, cowering down behind the counter.

“Hold still!” the wasp man shouted at her. “Get your hands up where I can see them!”

She whimpered, putting her arms over her head, as if to shield herself from him.

The wasp man laughed. “Are your arms bulletproof?”

“Ohhh, God! Oh, God!”

“Christ, lady, did you just wet yourself?”

She began sobbing.

The phone rang.

“Don’t answer that!”

She sobbed louder.

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up! I just want a little information, for God’s sake.”

She obeyed, making little hiccuping noises. “He didn’t give me his name! I swear to you, he didn’t! I told you, he paid cash.”

“Describe him to me.”

“He was older, in his fifties, I’d say. Oh…”

“God damn it! Lady! Wake up! Oh, Christ — do not have a fucking heart attack on me, lady!” He shoved the weapon into the holster at his back and began to move around the counter.

Frank wasn’t going to wait for another chance.

“Police — freeze!” he shouted, his own heart hammering as the man turned toward him. His voice had come out at about half its usual volume — he had forgotten the effects of the smoke. “Freeze!” he said again.

To Frank’s surprise, the wasp man complied. He could see in the wasp man’s eyes that he didn’t necessarily want to do so — but he responded in the manner of someone experienced with being arrested.

“Hands high! On top of your head! Keep them there. Lock your fingers together.”

The wasp man complied.

“You will slowly take two steps away from that counter! Now!”

He moved, Frank’s weapon trained on him the entire time.

“Face the door!” Frank moved so that he was behind him but not within reach. “On your knees!”

With only the slightest hesitation, he obeyed.

Frank thought of waiting for backup before removing the weapon — always a tricky moment, one when it was easy to end up losing your own. But not knowing whether Pete had received the message, he wasn’t going to give this wasp knucklehead the time to change his mind about being cooperative.

“On the floor, facedown. Cross your ankles.”

Carefully, he relieved the wasp man of his weapon. It was not until he had taken the clip out of it that he noticed that the Brandenburg Concerto was still playing. For some minutes — could it have been only minutes? — he had been concentrating on the wasp man to the exclusion of all else. He cuffed him just as the old woman called out, “Is it okay now?”

“You were faking?” the wasp man said, incredulous.

“Shut up!” Frank told him, glad that she was all right but worried that she might be more difficult to control than the handcuffed man on the floor.

This concern seemed warranted when the woman stood and started to walk out from behind the counter.

“Stay back,” Frank warned. “Don’t come any closer. Just stay right there.”

“For God’s sake,” she said to Frank, sounding more calm than he did. “Took you long enough. What was I going to have to do next? Strip naked to scare him out of here?”

“You knew I was in here?”

“Oh, yes, I saw you back by the roses a little earlier. Do you have a cold, dear?”

“No. You couldn’t know that I wasn’t with him,” he said, indicating the wasp man. Although the man stayed perfectly still and did not seem inclined to cause trouble, Frank never took his eyes off him.

“Well, yes, I did know. I expected you.”

“Expected me?”

“Yes, you personally. The man he’s been asking about gave me your picture.”

“What?”

“You’re Mr. Lefebvre’s other illegitimate brother, the policeman, right? Your brother — the living brother — told me you might see those flowers and use your police know-how to find out where they came from. And he said to tell you that there was no need to feel obligated to him or to me and that he’d already paid me in full. Which he did. Now, I must ask you — do you have a picture of your father? He must have been some man!”

Mercifully, the SWAT team arrived, sparing him from having to answer her.

33

Wednesday, July 12, 8:30 P.M.

The Kelly-Harriman Home

He was tired, he was hungry, and it occurred to him that after talking to Mrs. Garrity and dealing with all that had followed, he hadn’t remembered to buy flowers. The arrest had kept him at the station longer than it did the wasp man, whose lawyers — Dane’s lawyers — had him out of jail almost before he was booked, saying that he had done nothing more than try to help an elderly woman whom he believed was suffering a heart attack.

Mrs. Garrity had readily identified the spray of flowers in Frank’s photo, but hadn’t been able to provide many clues to the identity of the man who bought them.

“He was wearing a disguise, of course,” she said.

“You knew this at the time?” Frank asked. “And weren’t suspicious?”

“Yes, but after all, a person doesn’t want everyone on earth to know he was born out of wedlock. So I understood perfectly. He was wearing sunglasses, and a hat, and a wig — not a very good one. No mustache.”

“Well, that’s something to go on!” Pete said.

“Sarcasm does not become you,” she said.

“How tall was he?” Frank asked.

“Not as tall as you, not as diminutive as Detective Sass here. Did he pass the height requirements for the department?”

“I used to,” Pete answered, “but witnesses like you have worn me down.”

She had not studied the man too closely, having been distracted by stories of legions of bastards roaming Las Piernas and by envisioning the all-white arrangement of flowers. She had complimented Frank on his photography and asked if he would send a copy of the photo to her.

“I’m quite proud of that arrangement!” she said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I need to go home and change my clothes.”

As he came in the door, the dogs greeted him. Seth was not far behind, jumping up and down and shouting, “He’s home! He’s home!” as if a fanfare ought to be playing, a red carpet rolled out.

“Hello, Seth,” he said, not feeling so tired after all.

“We’ve been watching about you on TV! Tell me about the bad guy in the flower shop.”

He groaned. There must have been a TV news team among the helicopters.

Irene came hurrying toward him, face full of worry, and hugged him tightly. “Are you okay?”

“Fine, I’m fine.”

“Your voice—”

“The smoke got it,” Seth explained. “My mom broke our window, so we got air. But he was in the smoke.”

Irene looked more worried than ever.

“Safe and sound,” Frank said. “Both then and this evening. Sorry you even had to think about it — it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Did you shoot him?” Seth asked.

“No. Nobody shot anybody.”

“Seth!” Elena’s voice called. “Let Frank have a chance to come in the door.”

Frank bent closer to Irene’s ear and said softly, “I didn’t mean to spring them on you like this…”

She laughed, but he didn’t think there was a lot of humor in it.

“You missed it!” Seth said with relish.

“Seth!” Elena’s voice warned.

He walked in to find Elena sitting on the couch. She was petting Cody, who had taken up residence on her lap. He still had an arm around Irene and felt the tension in her shoulders.

“Everything okay?” he asked warily.

“Fine,” Irene said.

“They were going to kill each other!” Seth said.

“A misunderstanding,” Irene said, blushing.

Elena looked embarrassed, too.

Frank felt a nearly overwhelming urge to go back to the office.

“It’s okay now,” Seth said. “I made them be friends. But they were fighting! And saying the S-word! And the B-word. And even…”

“Seth…” Elena warned.

“…the F-word!”

“Seth Lefebvre!”

“And,” he added in a lowered voice, “they fought naked!”

“I had a robe on!” Irene protested.

“Naked fighting…”

“And I had grabbed a towel by the time you came in, Mr. Tattletale,” Elena said.

“…swearing ladies!”

“Seth!” the women shouted in unison.

Seth gave Frank a look that asked Who are you going to believe?

“Well,” said Frank, doing his damnedest not to laugh, “I’m glad you were able to make them be friends.” He looked between the women and saw that he wasn’t going to get any immediate answers. Certainly not about naked fighting swearing ladies. Not only was he not going to get answers, their faces said, he shouldn’t dare to ask any questions. He was still tempted to try, but decided he’d had enough heroic action for one day, and accordingly changed the subject. “Have you eaten yet?” he asked Seth.

“I wanted to wait…” Seth began.

“He did,” Irene said. “But I was hungry after all that swearing and nude boxing, so I went ahead and ordered pizza. Is that okay?”

“That’s great,” he said. “I get home late a lot, Seth — so you should eat when you’re hungry.”

“I want to eat with you.”

The pizza arrived, and over dinner the mood seemed more relaxed, although Elena was quiet. Seth talked about going for a walk on the beach with Irene and the dogs. When Frank asked if Elena had joined them, he learned that she had stayed at home.

“I was admiring your garden,” she said quickly. “One of the things I miss — we can’t have a garden at the condo.”

“I grew a potato in a jar,” Seth reminded her.

“Yes, I’d forgotten that.”

“Irene flew with my dad in his plane,” Seth said to Frank.

Frank happened to be looking at Elena when Seth said it and saw her wince.

Seth was rambling on, talking a mile a minute about the dogs, the beach, his new pal Irene.

“So, Elena,” Frank said when Seth paused for breath, “I haven’t even asked you about where you work.”

“I’m a PI now,” she said. “I got my license not long after I left the department.”

“Pete’s wife is a PI. You should meet her. You’d get along great. Are you on your own or with a company?”

“On my own. I do a little insurance work, mostly workers’ comp investigation, some heir hunting.”

“So that gives you time to home-school Seth?”

“You told him about that, huh?” she asked Seth.

“Yes. My mom’s a good teacher,” he said to Irene, then frowned. “Mom, am I going to flunk now?”

“No, why should you?”

“I can’t study. You know — the fire.”

“We’ll be able to get our things out soon. What we can’t get out, the insurance company will help us replace.”

“Gordie Howe?”

“He might be just fine. We don’t know yet. What’s important is you’re safe, and I’m safe, and My Dog’s safe.”

“And Frank.”

“Yes, and Frank.”

“And I have my treasures.”

“Yes, but if we’re ever in a fire again—”

“I know.”

“You scared me to death, Seth Lefebvre.”

“I’m sorry.” He turned away from her and back to Irene. “Stay here — I have something to show you.” He stood up, seemed to remember something, turned back to Elena and said, “May I please be excused?”

“Yes, you may.”

He hurried to the guest room, taking care to prevent Cody from following him in.

“He’s great,” Irene said. “You must be so proud of him.”

“I am,” Elena said. “I am.”

Frank thought of the videotape Polly Logan had given him. “Elena — has he ever seen a videotape of Phil?”

“What? You have a tape of Phil?”

“Yes.” He explained where he got it. “I brought it home.”

Seth had overheard the last of this and said, “I have a tape of him too! Wanna hear?”

“Sure,” Irene said, then glanced at Elena, who was pressing her fingertips to her lips. “But maybe we should save it for another time.”

“No,” Elena said. “No, it’s fine.”

He ran over to the stereo, treasure box in hand. “Hey, Frank! Can you show me how to work this thing?”

Frank obliged. They gathered in the living room. Frank noticed that Elena was focusing on the cat, not meeting anyone’s eyes. What the hell was going to be on Seth’s tape?

As soon as Irene came in, Seth said, “Ready?”

“Yes.”

He opened the lid of his treasure box a narrow crack, slipped his hand in, and pulled out a cassette. Frank put it in the machine and pressed the play button. Seth reached into the box again and pulled out a black-and-white photo. A photo of Lefebvre as a young man, in a U.S. Air Force uniform, standing next to a plane. “That’s him,” he whispered to Frank as the tape went past the leader. Through the speakers, they heard a male voice say, “You’ve reached 429-5555. You know what to do.” There was an electronic beep, the soft hiss of tape, then silence.

“Wow, that’s so awesome!” Seth said. “I’ve never heard it on a big speaker before. Play it again!”

Elena’s head was down, her hair hiding her face.

Frank rewound the tape and played it again. This time Seth said the words along with his father.

“It was on his answering machine,” Seth explained to the silent adults. “We made a bunch of copies of it, because it was inside the machine and we were afraid the machine would break, right, Mom?”

“Right, Seth,” she said softly. “A digital recording.”

“The only one you have of him?” Frank asked.

“Mom has the other copies of it,” Seth said. “But this is my own. That’s why it’s in my treasure box.”

“Seth, I’m so glad you and your mom came to visit us,” Frank said, “because I have something I think you are going to love.”

For the next two hours, they watched Phil Lefebvre. At first, Irene and Elena fought back tears, but Seth was so totally captivated — and thrilled — his enthusiasm became contagious. “That’s him! Mom, look! He was on TV! My dad was famous!” he kept saying. “Frank, those people at the church were right!”

He would listen carefully any time Lefebvre spoke. Frank turned up the volume and Seth thanked him.

In one interview, Polly Logan asked Lefebvre about being a pilot. For once, Lefebvre smiled when he answered.

“God, how he loved flying,” Elena said. “He spoke about it in just that way to me on — when he took me out for dinner one night.”

“He took Mom to the Prop Room,” Seth said. “Tante Marie waited on them. Now she owns it.” He studied Elena, then moved over to sit beside her. “Are you sad, Mom?”

“A little, but only because I miss him,” she said.

Frank looked toward Irene, silently sending her another apology. She smiled, but he wasn’t sure that meant the apology was accepted.

Frank noticed that Lefebvre typically minimized his own role in solving cases, always mentioning anyone in the department who had given him help. In one of the last short segments before the final press conference, the tail end of one of Polly Logan’s questions could be heard: “…brilliant rescue of the boy?”

“There was nothing brilliant about it — I was at the marina by the purest chance and had the help of Detectives Elena Rosario and Robert Hitchcock,” Lefebvre said, quite obviously trying to get away from Logan. “You should talk to Detective Rosario — she hasn’t received the credit she deserves.”

“But you must have suspected something to be at the marina at that time,” Logan persisted.

“No. An anonymous tip on another case brought us there — a false lead. So you see, we were just lucky.”

Frank was thinking about this set of coincidences when the segment with the final press conference began. It was rough footage, not edited as the others were — Frank noticed there was much more background noise in this one than in the others. As the camera roved over the small crowd in the hospital room, Frank was struck by the fact that the lists in Lefebvre’s notebook could have been used as roll call sheets for the members of the PD who were there.

Seth was up on his feet again and gleefully pointed out Irene and his mother as they appeared on the screen. When Seth Randolph came on, he was momentarily solemn. “There’s the boy I got my name from,” he informed Frank. “He was in the newspaper, too. He fought bad guys, but he died. My dad loved him like he would have loved me if he knew about me, so my mom gave me his name.” Although he was serious during this recital, he seemed to take all of this as simple fact and did not seem overly disturbed by it. He was too enthralled at seeing his father in something other than still photos to remain solemn for long. He showed an obvious dislike of Tory Randolph, making a “gag me” motion when she was speaking and once yawning loudly.

“Seth,” Elena warned.

And then Frank heard it — softly but distinctly. Amid all the chatter and the sounds of movement on the audio track, he almost missed it. Most likely, if he hadn’t already come across it in Lefebvre’s notes, he would have never noticed the tones among all the other recorded noises.

Do-re-mi, do-re-mi…

They heard Lefebvre’s voice saying, “Easy… Seth, it’s all right.”

“He said my name!” Seth shouted.

“Let’s hear it again,” Frank said, pausing and rewinding the tape back to the point just before he heard the electronic notes. This time he tried to watch reactions, to see if the camera caught anyone moving or responding to the sound, but the camera was focused on Tory Randolph, who seemed not to notice the sound at all.

But as he kept watching, it seemed clear to Frank that Seth Randolph had reacted to the sound. In early shots, the boy appeared uninterested — almost bored — by the press conference. After the sound was heard, he was pale, frightened, and holding on to Lefebvre.

Frank glanced at Elena, who appeared almost as shocked as Seth Randolph did on the tape.

On the tape, Lefebvre said, “A little too much excitement,” in answer to Tory Randolph’s anxious questions. “Perhaps it would be best if we let Seth rest.”

The tape ended. He would watch it again later, Frank decided. For now, he focused on the boy who was bouncing around his living room, elated.

“I’ll get a couple of copies of this made for you,” Frank said.

“Really?”

“Really. One for your mom and one for your treasure box.”

“Thank you!” Seth said. “Thank you so much!”

It was some time before he wound down enough to go to bed, but he didn’t argue with Elena when she asked him to put on his pj’s and brush his teeth. He hugged Irene, and then Frank, and then the dogs, and even Cody, who — to Frank’s astonishment — put up with it. He came back to Frank and gave him a second one, then went off to bed with Elena.

Frank tried to think of all the things that might make the “do-re-mi” sounds like the ones on the tape. A pager, a cell phone — the alarm on a watch.

A watch.

“Would you mind playing the end of the tape again?” Irene asked. “There was something going on — I remember now that I wanted to stay and ask Phil about it.”

“Yes, I think I know what it was, but I’m just not sure what it means.” He told her his theory of the alarm on the watch. He had just finished when Elena came back into the room.

“I didn’t want to get into this in front of Seth,” she said, “but there’s something important on that tape.”

“The alarm on the watch?” Frank asked.

Startled, she said, “You already know about the watch?”

“Until now, guesswork. Why don’t you tell me the rest of it?”

34

Thursday, July 13, 10:15 A.M.

Chief Ellis Hale ’s Office

“A watch?” Chief Hale asked in disbelief. “You think he was killed over a watch? What was it, a solid gold Rolex?”

Until that moment Frank thought Hale had been softening a little. He had been unsettled by the story of the fire at Lefebvre’s condo. He had listened almost patiently when Frank explained that the person who had stolen the florist’s license plate had probably set the fires in the garage and on the staircase.

“No, sir. A model of a Time Masters watch called Time Master Three.”

“A Time Master?” he scoffed.

“The watch in the evidence box for the Randolph case.”

“You believe Lefebvre was killed over a watch like that? Before I was briefed about the one in the box, I’d never heard of them. How many of them can there be?”

“I spoke to the manufacturer today. The answer is, over a seven-year period, about sixty-five thousand, mostly in California. Not as big as Timex or Rolex, perhaps, but too many to track their owners down one by one. Although—”

“Why would I want to find any of them?” Hale interrupted.

“They can be programmed so that the alarm makes a particular sound — part of a musical scale. Do-re-mi.”

“Harriman—”

“Humor me, sir.”

“What the hell have I been doing so far?” he groused, but waited.

“I want you to take a look at this.” Frank plugged in the AV cart he had rolled into the chief’s office — over an aide’s objections concerning the potential ruin of Hale’s carpet — then put the Logan tape into the VCR. To his relief, both the VCR and television worked — never a given with the aging department equipment. The tape was cued up to the moment just before the watch sounded. He explained to Hale where he had obtained the tape. “You’ll hear the sound I’ve told you about. I want you to notice Seth Randolph’s reaction to it.”

Hale watched in brooding silence. Frank rewound the tape and played it again. Then he waited.

“Could be a coincidence,” Hale said. “Something else in the room — or someone else — could have upset the boy.”

“But not Lefebvre. You saw how the boy turned to him.”

Hale frowned.

Frank told him about Lefebvre’s notes and what Elena Rosario had said about Lefebvre’s attempts to discover the identity of the owner of the watch.

“And the reason she didn’t come forward? Or Matt Arden? For God’s sake — if she didn’t know any better, he did!”

“They didn’t think they would be believed.”

“Nonsense!”

Frank met his stare.

Hale lowered his eyes, frowning.

“The watch supposedly left in the evidence box by Lefebvre had signs of wear on it, but it had never been worn by Lefebvre. Lefebvre wore an old Omega inscribed to him from his sister. I know about that because Ben Sheridan took cadaver dog teams up to the mountains a couple of days ago and found Lefebvre’s watch near the wreckage of his plane.”

“Maybe he had two watches—”

“You don’t believe that, do you? I checked on it anyway. Dale Britton did the original examination of the Time Masters watch. He was vague about the alarms — said the watch made ‘various patterns of musical notes.’ I suppose he was more interested in clues about the man who wore the watch — so he used the wear marks on the band to figure out where it had been fastened and took some measurements. That allowed him to estimate the size of the man’s wrist. I’m sure the idea was that, if Lefebvre was caught, they could prove it fit him.”

“Well? What of it?”

“It’s too bad Lefebvre wasn’t arrested before he reached Seth Randolph’s room. Maybe he would have been shown to be innocent then and there, and lived. Ben gave the watch he found to the coroner, but being a forensic anthropologist, he couldn’t let it go without making every possible observation about it that he could. I called him late last night and asked him to look at his notes on the watch — especially the size of the metal wristband.”

“That wouldn’t be accurate,” Hale said. “A metal band can stretch.” He pulled on the segments of his own watchband to illustrate his point.

“Yes, but it can’t shrink down past a certain size. Take your watch off.”

Hale did.

“You see? When the tension is off the segments, they close up to a fixed size. A person with a larger wrist than yours might be able to wear your watch. But if a person with a smaller wrist than yours put it on, it would slide around on him. The wear pattern on the Time Masters watch indicated a man with a smaller wrist.”

“So it wasn’t Lefebvre’s watch in that evidence box. That doesn’t mean he didn’t put it there.”

“I think that’s unlikely. Lefebvre only saw that box once, very briefly, and not long before he was murdered.”

“No — you’ve got that much wrong. His name was on the evidence log twice.”

“His name, but not his signature. The first signature was forged. Ask Flynn if you don’t want to buy that off me.”

“Flynn? How the hell many members of this department have been hiding this for the last ten years?”

“Flynn just discovered the forgery on Monday. He got curious about people who had looked at that evidence box, because Bredloe had looked at it just before he went to the Sheffield Club. And Bredloe was asking Flynn questions — wanted to know who in the department knew what was in that box.”

“Damned near everybody, unless I miss my guess.”

“Flynn said as much to Captain Bredloe.”

“So what are you going to do? Go around making everyone who was at that press conference try the watch on? It will probably work something more like O.J. and the glove than Cinderella and the slipper.”

Frank shook his head. “Even if I had that original Time Masters watch, people gain and lose weight over ten years.”

“What do you mean ‘that original’?”

“Someone replaced that watch since Lefebvre disappeared. The one down in the box in Evidence Control isn’t the one that Lefebvre saw that night.”

“Replaced? Why?”

“I’m not sure. All I know is that the watch that was substituted for it is newer. From the looks of it, it hasn’t ever been worn. And when I spoke to Time Masters this morning, I learned that this one was made seven years ago. They could tell by the serial number and by the ‘China’ stamp. They were making them in the U.S. until then.”

Hale sat down heavily in his chair, his face set in stubborn lines. But he said nothing. As he watched the chief, Frank took hope from that silence. He knew that Hale was going over all that he had said, looking for holes, for weaknesses. Hale was the bishop in this little cathedral, and the man clearly didn’t want to change religions at this point — for ten years, Hale had knelt at the altar of Lefebvre’s guilt and preached it to not only his congregation, but city hall, the press, the public.

“Whatever else you want to believe about Lefebvre,” Frank said, “you know he couldn’t get up out of that wreckage to go buy a watch, then stick it into an evidence box before heading off for his final reward.”

“Don’t get cocky. It may have been impossible for Lefebvre, but it was nearly as impossible for anyone else to do so, with security cameras, and—”

“Seven years ago, sir.”

“Oh, back to calling me ‘sir,’ are you?”

“Seven years ago.”

Hale’s face reddened. “Don’t push me, Harriman.”

“Seven years ago, sir, Flynn was not in charge of the property room. Five years ago an investigation into the theft of drugs and other materials from the—”

“Yes, yes, you’ve made your point. There were no cameras before Flynn, and we did have problems with evidence control.”

Hale stood up and began pacing.

“Whom do you suspect?”

“No one in particular yet, sir.”

“So you’re telling me that you’ve spent your first week creating chaos.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, sir.”

Hale stopped pacing. “No. Neither would I.” He paced again.

“I want to talk to a couple of commissioners today, sir.”

“Police commissioners? About this? At this stage of your endeavors? Don’t be an ass.”

“No, sir, about Trent Randolph. I need to know who in this department identified him as an enemy.”

“Maybe you’re still looking at Dane, you know. Dane hated him, and while I will admit that there appears to be insider help here, we’ve always known that Dane must be getting at least some assistance from someone in this department.”

Frank said nothing.

“You don’t believe it.”

“Why would Dane frame himself?”

“If he knew he would have insider help getting out of trouble, he might have found it all a pleasant game.”

“He wasn’t at the press conference.”

Hale sighed. “I’m not happy, Harriman. I’m not happy at all.”

“No, sir. But you’ll do what’s right.”

Hale smiled a small, quick smile. “That sounded more like hope than certainty to me.”

“If I doubted you, I’d be talking to the attorney general instead of you, sir.” He kept to himself the fact that he had looked up the number this morning but hadn’t called.

Hale gave a bark of laughter. “Laugh, Harriman, because that had better be a damned joke. I don’t want you to talk to anyone. Not anyone. Not even Pete Baird.”

“I’d rather you didn’t ask that of me. Pete can be trusted to keep it to himself. As it is — I like working with Pete, sir. He knows about Elena Rosario and her son, and—”

“And your partnership is feeling the strain of this case,” Hale said. “I’ll think about it. With Rosario and her son under your roof, you’ve probably blabbed to your wife — did you swear her to secrecy?”

“She won’t talk to the paper about it, if that’s what you’re asking — sir.”

“Which commissioners do you want to talk to?”

“Soury and Pickens.”

“Hmm. You’ll get very different views of Randolph. Be sure to tell them this is in the strictest confidence.”

“Yes, sir. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way—”

“Not so fast. One other thing you should know.” He tapped the ends of his fingers together, looking suddenly ill at ease. He cleared his throat, then said, “When someone is appointed to a commission that will be reviewing highly sensitive materials such as those seen by the police commission, we very naturally do a background check on that person.”

Frank waited. There was something slightly defensive in Hale’s tone.

“A couple of years before he became a commissioner,” Hale said, “Randolph had been involved with studies of the department and so on, so we were aware of him. He seemed to be a very straight arrow. He dumped his wife, but no one had ever been able to stand her, and he threw her over for a woman that had every man in the department green with envy. A real beauty — blond hair, blue eyes, gorgeous. But then, just after he was appointed, we learned that the woman he was dating was associated with Whitey Dane.”

“Tessa Satel — the one he left his wife for?”

“Yes. We had never observed her anywhere near Dane. We might never have made the connection except for a lucky break. One of our surveillance teams had noticed that Dane visited this one house fairly often. Turns out it belongs to an aunt of his — his mother’s sister. Good-looking woman. No criminal activity that we could discover — can’t exactly arrest everyone whose nephew grows up to be a jerk. He was over there often, though, so we started to watch the place. Every day, she picks up a little girl after school, baby-sits her until the kid’s mom comes by. Nobody stays around, nobody carries packages in and out of the house — nothing even remotely criminal.

“So we take the surveillance off. Dane visits his aunt — big deal. Some of these creeps, you know, they’re saints in their own families. Guilty of murder, theft, drug dealing, every sort of crime you can think of — but he loves his dear old auntie — who isn’t all that old. He’s more of an auntie than she is, you ask me. Have you ever seen who works at that house? I guess you met one of his houseboys yesterday.”

“About this relationship of Randolph’s—” Frank said, refusing to be sidetracked.

“Oh, yes — well, I’m getting to that. One day, while I was at lunch with Trent, he told me that he felt sorry for Tessa, because she and her daughter were all alone in the world. According to him, she’s a widowed orphan and has no family whatsoever — no brothers, no sisters, no nothing. And I had this funny feeling — you know, something bothered me about this for no apparent reason.”

“Except that if a person wants to hide her past, she might give out a story like that.”

“Exactly. So I decided to let someone outside of Narcotics take another look at her—”

“Why?”

“I wanted to know more—”

“No, I mean, why not someone in Narcotics?”

Hale shifted uncomfortably. “They hadn’t done a very good job of checking her out. That’s all.”

“And you suspected someone in Narcotics of working for Dane.”

Hale shrugged. “Such things are always a possibility. In any case, I asked Pete Baird to see what he could learn. On the first day he followed her, guess where she went after work?”

“Dane’s aunt’s house.”

“Right. Because guess who did the child care for her while she played tickle the bird with Trent Randolph?”

“The aunt.”

“Right. And the aunt isn’t charging her a dime. Because Tessa is her daughter. Tessa is Dane’s cousin.”

“So you told Randolph about this?”

“Yes. That was very difficult. But in truth, I think he had tired of her. He broke up with her not long before he died.”

“Which made you further suspect Whitey Dane of killing him.”

“I didn’t need that to suspect him! Whitey Dane had been seen by the only living witness!”

“Seth Randolph.”

The chief nodded, then suddenly smiled. “So maybe you had better think of this possibility — maybe Dane put on a different watch on the night he killed Trent and Amanda. Maybe someone in our department was indeed wearing a similar watch — after all, you tell me there were thousands of these watches sold.”

Frank didn’t say anything.

“It’s a possibility,” Hale said defensively.

“Why wasn’t the information about Trent Randolph’s girlfriend in the file on his murder?”

Hale said nothing.

“It wasn’t in there,” Frank answered, “because you wouldn’t let it be placed there.”

“There was no need. He was on the police commission, for God’s sake!”

“And if the public found out a pro-department commissioner might have been under the sway of a woman with close connections to a crime lord like Dane — when Dane was eluding the police, and suspicions about a leak in the department were rife — well, then, that would have made Trent Randolph’s good friend, the chief of police, look bad indeed.”

“Don’t presume you can understand the various pressures on a man in my position!”

“No,” Frank said, standing. “I’m sure I can’t understand them.”

“Am I supposed to be deaf to the insult in that reply?”

“I’m sure I can’t, sir.”

“Harriman—”

“I’m too unsophisticated,” Frank said, pausing as he reached the door. “But maybe I could have understood something simpler. If you had told me, for example, that you believed Randolph was an honest man and you couldn’t stand to see your friend’s good name damaged after he was no longer around to defend himself — or that you couldn’t bear to see young Seth Randolph shamed at a time when he had already been through so much — that sort of thing, I might have understood.”

Hale lowered his gaze to the top of his desk. “You don’t realize—” he began, but Frank Harriman was already gone.

35

Thursday, July 13, 10:15 A.M.

Greenleaf’s Café

Greenleaf’s Café was within walking distance of the Las Piernas Police Department, and the Looking Glass Man was certain that it obtained most of its customers from members of the department. He patronized it not because of convenience, but because it was one of the cleanest eating establishments in the city.

He seldom ate food prepared by others. He mistrusted their commitment to personal hygiene, their willingness to adhere to safe food preparation practices. Even if he could force himself not to think of rampaging bacteria, he could not prevent himself from considering what vermin one might encounter in the cupboards, let alone the floors of such places — this was enough to make him choose fasting over dining out.

However, Greenleaf ’s was a notable exception. The counters were kept clean and sanitized, the floors scrubbed, the tables wiped down. The kitchen, entirely visible to the patrons, could have been cleaner only if it had been his own. Even the windows sparkled.

At this particular moment, he was sitting in the warmth of summer sunlight coming in through one of these windows. He was not warm.

He was nearly alone here. The breakfast crowd had left, the lunch crowd had not yet arrived. He could sit here, drinking his coffee, so excellently prepared and thoughtfully warmed up for him by Mrs. Greenleaf, for as long as he chose to do so.

Louise Oswald, adrift without her beloved Captain Bredloe, had stood before his desk not long ago on the pretext of bringing some paperwork to him. The moment he saw her, he realized she was big with news and invited her to make herself comfortable.

To obtain this news, he had to play the game her way, which was irritating but ultimately worthwhile. And so he agreed with her when she said that no one could appreciate the burden the captain’s absence had placed on her, nodded mutely when she said that the chief’s decision that she should report to Lieutenant Carlson for the time being was a bad one, agreed that Carlson, puffed up after this announcement, was an insufferable horse’s ass unfit to supervise anyone, and so on.

Carlson, generally the sort of political animal who knew better, had been so stupid as to criticize her habit of making certain kinds of improvements in the memos he dictated to her, and would undoubtedly find it difficult to recover from this fall from grace. It was one thing to ride roughshod over one’s underlings. To mistreat the person who sat outside the boss’s door was downright dumb.

Finally, she began her confidences. (“Don’t tell anyone,” she said, invoking the favorite phrase of those who tell everyone.) Her news was that the rebellion against Carlson — whom she had once supported, but against whom she was now ready to don armor and do battle — was gaining ground. Her two best indications of this were that yesterday afternoon the chief himself had ordered Carlson to send Detective Baird on a particular assignment and that Frank Harriman — who hadn’t reported in to Carlson in days, much to Carlson’s wrath — was sitting in the chief’s office that very moment.

“And I hope he is telling him that we in Homicide can’t take much more of Lieutenant Carlson. Carlson is worried sick, I’m happy to say. I was going to tell you about Pete yesterday afternoon, but you weren’t in,” she said. He disliked the speculative glance that accompanied this remark.

“Why is Frank Harriman talking to the chief?” he asked.

“It has something to do with the Randolph cases,” she said. “And watches.”

“Watches?” he asked, unable to hide his surprise.

“Yes,” she said, smiling knowingly. “I passed by his desk before he went into his meeting with the chief, and he was asking someone when a watch with a particular serial number was made.”

“That might have been in connection with any of his cases,” the Looking Glass Man said, hoping she didn’t detect his uneasiness.

“No, he had the Randolph files open. He locked those away, then gathered his notes and took them in with him when he went to see the chief.”

He could not go near the chief’s office without attracting unwanted attention. Unlike the relatively open area surrounding the office of the captain of the Homicide Division, the chief’s office was in the center of a labyrinth filled with administrative creatures who jealously guarded his time and attention.

And Harriman was invited in. To talk about watches.

This was so much worse than he had suspected. Harriman must have seen the evidence. Harriman had handled the Randolph case evidence, but the Looking Glass Man had not received a message on his pager, as he had when Captain Bredloe had examined it. What had happened? Had his little property room computer hacking been discovered? Were they searching for him even now, as he sat here?

He remembered a moment from the day before, when he had looked in the mirror and thought himself invisible. Invisible! Far from it.

He gazed into the window next to him, not at the street beyond, but at the window itself. He could see his reflection. It was the reflection of a fearful man. He looked away.

He arranged the bottom of the folded paper napkin to the right of his coffee cup, moving one edge up a quarter of an inch or so, so that it was aligned parallel to the edge of the table. He then lifted the fork and placed it carefully on the napkin, so that the upper edges of the tines were parallel to the top of the napkin.

Pleased with the result, he felt calmer, and checking his reflection again, he saw that indeed, he appeared to be more himself now.

He began to think about this problem of Harriman.

Yesterday he had overreacted. He had laid himself open for premature discovery. He must approach this problem logically, or he would fail again.

He could not indulge in strange, frightening fantasies of Lefebvre being alive. Now — sitting in this clean booth, his hands on the hard, shiny table, fingers forming parallel lines — the panic that had come over him yesterday seemed alien, something that another man had experienced. Not him.

Today he could consider his position coolly.

The difficulty lay in not knowing how much Harriman knew or to whom he had spoken. That he did not know everything was certain. That his suspicions continued to lead him in dangerous directions was equally clear. So many people might now share these suspicions of Harriman’s — the chief, Pete Baird, Irene Kelly, Elena Rosario, Matt Arden. Then again, Harriman had so alienated his fellow homicide detectives, it was entirely possible that no one had spoken with him. How could Harriman convince them of any theory he might be developing if they refused to do so much as give him the time of day?

He returned to considering plans for Harriman’s demise. Any number of them could be set up within the next few hours. And in the meantime he would take steps to throw Harriman off his scent. He would then stay in Las Piernas only long enough to fulfill his most important obligations before making his escape.

Escape. Far from engendering visions of a carefree life, the word saddened him. Once the Looking Glass Man retired, who would see to it that justice was done? Who would be able to stop the next Judge Lewis Kerr?

The Looking Glass Man acknowledged to himself that it was all coming to an end. He had always known that it would have to, sooner or later. He was, of course, prepared for the possibility of discovery. As years of work for the Las Piernas Police Department had taught him, there was a vast difference between being discovered and being caught. He had no intention of being caught.

He had a great deal to do, then.

He would need to go to the several banks where he had stored cash and identification papers of one sort or another. Once he had gathered these, he would go to the airport and, staying below radar, fly his lovely Cessna to Mexico. He would not stay there, of course. Depending on the actions of law enforcement personnel, he had several alternatives available. At the moment, he was considering a cool climate.

He would have to part with the Cessna at some point, probably in Mexico. The loss would be painful to him. He had not owned a Cessna ten years ago. He had only rented planes. All the same, destroying Lefebvre’s Cessna had bothered him almost as much as it had bothered him to kill Lefebvre. Now he would have to leave his own plane behind. Harriman deserved everything that was coming to him.

The Looking Glass Man had only two other remaining objectives: Whitey Dane and Judge Lewis Kerr.

Kerr was hardly a worry now. Everything was already in place. He consulted his watch. In a little more than twenty-four hours from now, Judge Lewis Kerr would no longer be able to lead justice astray.

Whitey Dane was proving to be a bigger challenge than the judge — the Looking Glass Man feared that he would have to wait even longer for his revenge against Dane. Years, perhaps, when it was safe to return to Las Piernas.

Dane’s workers were a vigilant and suspicious lot, so one could not dress as a gardener or a florist or an alarm systems repairman and get past them. The Las Piernas Police Department’s relentless pursuit of Dane had resulted in making him a less vulnerable target — Bredloe, a captain of detectives, had been easier to harm.

The Looking Glass Man had tried to needle Dane into exposing himself to danger — teasing him in ways that might tempt him to come out into the open. He had hoped for a more personal response to the flowers. Instead, he had almost caused that poor florist to lose her life.

Harriman had done what was expected of him, though. The Looking Glass Man smiled, picturing what Frank Harriman’s face must have looked like when Mrs. Garrity called him the illegitimate brother of Lefebvre’s!

“I’m glad to see you perk up a bit,” a voice said beside him, causing him to jump.

He looked up to see Mrs. Greenleaf, exchanging his cold cup of coffee for a fresh, hot one.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I startled you.”

“I was daydreaming, that’s all,” he said, and thanked her before she went back to the kitchen.

He glanced around. The café was still empty, but that would change soon. He had taken a few precautions at work, but needed to stop by a drugstore before going back there — there were a few inexpensive but necessary purchases to make. His other errands would need to wait until this afternoon. He was an efficient man and knew he could manage everything before him, but still… He looked across the street again at the police department. With so many errands, he wouldn’t be able to spend as many hours inside that beloved building as he’d like. Very little time remained for him there.

He took out his wallet, in which all the bills were facing the same way, smallest denomination to largest, and left a large tip. Just before he refolded the wallet and put it away, he allowed himself a brief glance at the single photograph within it.

He felt the same surge of grief and hopeless longing that he felt every time he saw it.

Yes, he must do something about Mr. Dane.

The idea of killing Harriman troubled him less and less. Harriman deserved some sort of punishment for not listening to his superiors. Hadn’t everyone in the department told him what must be done? But had he listened? No. Just like Lefebvre and Trent Randolph — if they had only left well enough alone! To have his work disrupted by meddlers who never would be able to grasp the importance of it — who would never see that the criminal justice system was damaged beyond repair, that he was fighting the evil that men like Judge Lewis Kerr set loose upon the innocent — no, that sort of interference was not to be borne!

As these thoughts occurred to him, he felt a little hum within his bones, a little heat within his blood. He looked at his reflection to see if he looked different to himself. He did — he really did! He knew what it was now, this heat and hum, and how to handle it. It was a mixture of fear and anger. Just a little of each. This time, he knew how to mix it up right. Yesterday he had let the fear dominate. Today it would be anger.

He put the wallet back in his pocket and stood. Although he knew the restroom in the Greenleaf Café was as clean as it was possible for a public restroom to be, he decided to wash his hands at work, where he could use the brand of soap he preferred, and his own towels and hand lotion.

36

Thursday, July 13, 12:18 P.M.

Office of Michael Pickens

Commissioner Michael Pickens agreed to talk to him, but warned that he could spare only a few minutes. Pickens owned a large chain of tire stores and managed them from a building not far from the department.

Frank rode the elevator up to a suite of plush executive offices. The door to Pickens’s office was closed, but even through it, Frank could hear him haranguing someone. His secretary, who had timidly asked Frank to wait, cast a worried look at the door, then resolutely returned to her paperwork.

“One of his good days?” Frank asked.

She glanced up nervously.

“So they’re all this good, right?” he said. “Or does he ever take a vacation?”

“Never,” she said sadly.

“If you tell me he also enjoys perfect health, I’m going to really feel sorry for you.”

“Never sick a day in his life,” she said, but smiled.

“How inconsiderate can a man be?” he asked, and she laughed.

The door opened and a red-faced employee strode past them, eyes downcast.

Pickens stood in his office doorway, watching him go. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand.

“Mr. Pickens,” the secretary began, “this is—”

“Betty, let me show you something,” he said. The large man marched over to her desk and began berating her — he disliked the angle at which she had placed the staple in the corner of several reports. “That’s not the way to do it!” he said again and again, not sparing her anything on account of an audience.

When he finally acknowledged Frank’s presence, it was to say, “I suppose I’ll have to talk to you now.” He turned on his heel and marched toward his office. As Frank passed Betty’s desk, he surprised her by picking up her staple remover. He rapidly worked it like a set of maniacal teeth, chasing after Pickens’s back end.

Pickens turned at the sound, but Frank, looking all innocence, quickly palmed the device. He returned it to her desk only after Pickens resumed his angry strides toward his office. She smiled up at Frank as he left to follow her boss.

“So you’re interested in Randolph,” Pickens said, taking a chair behind an oversize desk. “A little late, aren’t you?”

Realizing that waiting for an invitation would be futile, Frank found a chair and sat opposite him. “The case is old,” Frank agreed, “but that doesn’t mean we should forget about it.”

“I have. Hardly remember the man.”

“Word is, the two of you didn’t get along very well.”

“No, that’s untrue. We disagreed over the matter of the lab, but that wasn’t anything personal. He wasn’t a man I admired. He didn’t understand how to finesse things. Just rolled right over everybody. If he thought there was a problem with something, he’d write himself a report, issue it to half the planet. He rolled along through your department like a bazooka-proof tank division. He had something to say about everything, and nothing could stop him.” He laughed, then added, “Well, now, I guess Whitey Dane stopped him.”

When Frank didn’t join in his laughter, Pickens fell silent.

“Why would Whitey Dane choose him for an enemy?”

“Randolph donated all kinds of money and equipment to the lab so that they could do fingerprint comparisons by computer, and some other load of gadgets so that they could do something else to do with chemical analysis. Randolph enjoyed that, too — playing Santa.”

“And this upset Dane?”

“Sure. The chemical analysis goodie helped the department bust up one of his drug operations. And the fingerprint system allowed the department to find out the real names of some of his key people. Surprise, surprise — many of them had outstanding warrants. So that hurt. Whitey recovered from all of that, but he didn’t like what it cost him.”

“Do you have any of the reports Randolph made to the commission?”

“Reports by Randolph?” He looked away, then said, “Nope. Not a one. Now, if that’s all…?”

Frank tried asking him other questions — about Randolph’s plans for that Catalina weekend and who might have known about them. He received vague answers. “So long ago,” Pickens kept saying. Frank tried to get more specific information about possible enemies of Randolph’s, with the same result. He decided to try his luck with Soury.

As he walked out, he noticed that Betty, Pickens’s secretary, was away from her desk. Maybe she wised up and decided to resign, he thought. But then, as he walked out of the elevator into the lobby, he found her sitting on a bench nearby. She was holding a dusty box, but when she saw him, she stood and spilled its contents onto the marble floor in such a blatantly contrived manner, he hoped that if she did have plans to resign, she wasn’t aiming for a career on the stage.

“Oh, how clumsy of me!” she said.

Grateful that he was the only audience for this performance, Frank bent to help her pick up the folders and steno pads that had fallen out.

“Thank you!” she said, then extended a spiral-bound phone message log toward him. “Would you mind holding this for a moment? If you’ll do that, I can get the rest of these old files back into the box in order.”

The message log was open, and he immediately saw a name that caught his attention: Trent Randolph. The message was dated Thursday, May 31. No year was shown. At eleven-fifteen that morning, Randolph had called to ask Pickens to join him at a meeting in Chief Hale’s office at eight o’clock the next day. There was an additional note: “Soury, Larson, also to attend.”

Frank turned the page and saw another message from later in the day — Chief Hale canceling the meeting, rescheduling it for the following Monday — by which time Trent Randolph and his daughter were dead.

“I overheard you in his office,” Betty said. “I remembered that he was supposed to meet with Mr. Randolph that Monday, because he was extremely upset about it.”

“Upset in what way?”

“Oh, not exactly grief-stricken over Randolph’s death, although I think he was shocked — everyone was. But mainly he was convinced that someone might have it out for the members of the police commission. He was scared out of his wits. For weeks, we had guards around the place. Eventually, he calmed down.”

Frank thanked her for her help, and after a moment’s hesitation, handed back the message pad. If he managed to arrest someone in connection with these murders, he didn’t want any courtroom problems to arise out of how he had obtained the evidence. He’d get a warrant. “You have a safe place to keep this?” he asked.

“Yes, absolutely. You’ll have a warrant if you need it again?”

He smiled. “If you can think of anything else I’ll need to name on it, let me know.”

“Oh, I will. Not for nothing have I worked for a police commissioner — although some days, it feels that way.”

He waited on the deck near the north end of the indoor Olympic-size pool. Rapidly coming toward him, in the lane reserved for fastest swimmers, was the man he hoped to speak to, but Commissioner Dan Soury finished the lap, completed his turn, and headed for the other end without seeing or hearing Frank.

Although he had been trying to capture Soury’s attention for only a minute or two, it was too warm and humid to be standing around an indoor pool in a suit, breathing air saturated with the scent of pool chemicals. This meeting might turn out to be even less pleasant than the one he had just finished with Commissioner Pickens.

“Mr. Soury?” Frank called out. His voice was better today, but he still couldn’t shout as loud as usual. The acoustics in the room must have helped, though, because Soury nodded. He was a slender man of medium height. There was a goodly amount of silver in his short dark hair and in his mustache. The mustache made Frank remember something — in the Randolph file, he had seen a group photograph of the commission members. Soury had worn a beard. He didn’t fit the description of the man who attacked the Randolphs on the Amanda.

This thought, in turn, reminded him to pick up Seth Randolph’s computer. There might be more information about the attacker on it.

Soury’s workout had left him slightly out of breath; he swam back at an easier pace to where Frank waited.

Frank introduced himself and told Soury that he wanted to talk to him about Trent Randolph. “Your secretary told me I might find you here. I hope you don’t mind—”

“Not at all, not at all. But you must be uncomfortable. If you’ll wait for me in the club’s lobby, I’ll be out in fifteen minutes.”

Frank used the time while he waited to call Mayumi. She put him in touch with a friend at the FAA, who promised to check a list of names for him. Whoever had sabotaged Lefebvre’s plane knew something about aircraft. Frank wanted to know if any of the names on Lefebvre’s lists were licensed pilots.

He didn’t have time for any other calls — Soury had taken no longer than he said he would. Attired in a dark, elegantly tailored suit, he smiled as he approached Frank and apologized for keeping him waiting.

“Have you eaten?” he asked. “There’s a pasta place next door.”

They walked the short distance to the small restaurant.

It was soon clear that Soury was a regular and favorite customer. Although the restaurant was crowded, they were given a private booth near the back.

Soury made small talk until their beverages were brought and their orders taken. When the waiter walked away, he said, “So what can I do for you, Detective Harriman?”

“I’m trying to learn more about Trent Randolph. I’m especially interested in the last few weeks of his life, and I hope you can tell me about any projects he was working on just before his death.”

“Projects in connection with the police department?”

“Yes.”

Soury seemed amused. “Why? Is Whitey Dane no longer the department’s favorite suspect for every crime in Las Piernas?”

“I’m just covering all the bases.”

“It’s about time someone did,” he said. “I don’t imagine Chief Hale is pleased with you for it, though.”

Frank hesitated. “He knows I’m talking to you. He knows what some of my suspicions are. He didn’t forbid me to ask any questions.”

“I’m greatly relieved to hear that.”

“Do you know if Randolph had any enemies within the department?”

“Enemies? A strong term. People who bore him some sort of grudge? You could find them quite easily — starting with his ex-wife, but by no means ending there.”

“But within the department or on the commission?”

“Within both. Trent was subject to all the problems of those who are very bright. He didn’t converse, he lectured. Few adults enjoy that. He also loved to solve problems and attacked them with enthusiasm — fine, but if he found a solution for a problem, he was impatient with any delay in implementing it. Very tough on bureaucracies such as the one you work in. He was sometimes a little quick to criticize. Not bound to win friends that way. And he was not easily fooled — at least not by men. Which was terribly difficult for those who tried to blow smoke at him.”

“When you say ‘at least not by men — ’”

“Oh, the only woman in his life who was worth a damn was his daughter, Amanda. His ex-wife is a shrew. His girlfriend — Tessa? A lovely, doting nothing. Scratch the surface and you could see daylight out the other side. She’s the only reason I’ve ever considered the possibility that Dane might have actually killed Trent.”

“I don’t understand,” Frank said.

“Don’t you? Trent told me that he broke up with her because she had lied about her past. When I questioned him a little further, he told me that he thought she had connections to the criminal world. In Las Piernas, that is spelled D-A-N-E. And Dane was not pleased at the progress Trent was making with the police lab, so perhaps he did have him killed.”

“Do you remember the last conversation you had with Trent Randolph?”

“Yes,” Soury said, suddenly solemn. “Yes, I do. He called me at my office the day before he left for Catalina, to ask if we could reschedule a meeting with Chief Hale. I’m not certain, but I think Pickens and Dr. Larson were supposed to be there, too. Trent wanted to talk at length, but I was in a hurry, so I… I interrupted him. Cut him off. Told him he could give me all the details on Monday. That’s when we were to meet — first thing Monday morning. By which time, of course, Trent and Amanda had been murdered.”

“What was the subject of the meeting?”

“I confess, I hadn’t listened very carefully. He had been studying the property room and the lab and had already made some suggestions. But I think this had to do with narcotics and homicide investigations. I remember he used the phrase ‘disturbing patterns.’ Later, of course, we stumbled across what he had seen all along — the lack of security and proper handling of evidence in the property room. Too many people had access to too many areas. Unfortunately, the mismanagement and theft of evidence continued for some time before any of the rest of us saw those ‘disturbing patterns.’”

He was interrupted by the sound of a man saying, “Dan! How are you?”

“Fine, Lew — Judge Lewis Kerr, do you know Frank Harriman? One of our detectives. Homicide Division.”

Kerr smiled. “Yes, of course. You’re Irene Kelly’s husband, aren’t you? Just saw her yesterday. Will you be joining us at the courthouse ceremonies tomorrow?”

“No, I’m sorry, I won’t,” Frank answered.

“How about you, Dan?”

“Wouldn’t miss it. Saw you on the news, Lew — congratulations on the award.”

They continued to chat for a moment. Kerr wasn’t a favorite of Frank’s — he thought the man was a better politician than judge. Around the department, he was often known as Judge Curse, not because he did, but because he was considered the kiss of death to any case that wasn’t rock solid. Kerr was too inclined to make life easy for the defense, as far as Frank was concerned. Irene liked him, though — and once, when they had argued about Kerr, threatened to buy “Bill of Rights wallpaper” for the bedroom.

Seeing him hadn’t made the day any more pleasant. Not long after Kerr went back to his table, Frank took his leave of Soury.

On the drive back to the department, Frank thought about the meeting Randolph had tried to schedule. He felt sure that Randolph wasn’t setting it up because of the problems in the property room. According to Flynn, Randolph had already made recommendations for that area, even if the report was bureaucratically buried by those who were threatened by it.

But evidence didn’t go to just the property room — it was also handled by detectives and the lab. He considered the fact that Al Larson was invited to Randolph’s meeting. Randolph’s strongest area of expertise in connection with the department was scientific — the lab. He might have seen some problem in the control of evidence going to and from the lab or ways in which a detective might compromise it before it got there. Perhaps he had even noticed patterns in connection with a particular detective’s work.

Frank called Tory Randolph and made arrangements to pick up her son’s computer.

“It isn’t working, you know,” she said. “They told me everything was erased off it. And the battery is dead. It’s one big blank. Really outdated now. People probably have watches with more memory in them.”

“I understand. But we might be able to find something on it anyway.”

“I guess those lab types come up with new stuff all the time. That’s why I married Dale. Never a dull day.”

He pulled into the department garage, noticed how damned many white Chevy vans were parked in it, and found a space. He sat in his car for a moment, thinking about watches. Why would the killer go to the trouble of switching a new watch for an old one? Even for someone inside the department, and despite the lax property room procedures in effect until recently, it would have involved risk. Why?

The old watch could not have had any damning bits of evidence on it — bloodstains or the like — Britton’s examination would have discovered them ten years ago.

What had happened seven years ago to trigger that change? Some event?

He got out of the car hastily, abrading his knuckle on the edge of the door as he did. He glanced at it. A little sting — it didn’t even bleed, just scraped the skin up a little.

Skin. No blood.

Suddenly he recalled Tory’s comments about labs coming up with new stuff all the time and saw what he had missed.

The sort of DNA evidence the Las Piernas Police Department lab could not have handled ten years ago, but could handle now. DNA testing that had evolved from the earliest versions — now capable of detecting DNA patterns from the skin cells that might have rubbed off the wearer of a watch and onto a watchband.

He hurried upstairs, not noticing the man who waited in the dark interior of one of the many white vans.

37

Thursday, July 13, 12:55 P.M.

The Cliffside Hotel

Robert Hitchcock left enough cash on the table to cover the bill and a fifteen percent tip. He dabbed his forehead with his cloth napkin, then added a few more dollars to bring the tip up to twenty percent. Hitch worried that in a swanky place like the Cliffside, fifteen percent wouldn’t do. He didn’t want to tip too little or too much. His concern had nothing to do with the excellent service he had received. Hitch didn’t want to be remembered — not for generosity, not for stinginess.

He was distracted for a moment by the sight of the money on the mirror finish of the salver that had held the tab. He knew that there was at least a trace of cocaine on almost every piece of American currency. Cash and drug dealing. During Prohibition, he wondered, had every dollar reeked of gin?

At this thought, he held his hand up as if he were about to sneeze, in front of his nose and mouth. He exhaled softly through his mouth, then inhaled through his nose. No, he didn’t reek of gin. At least he didn’t think he did.

If someone had been watching him, they might have seen that he rose from the table a little carefully. He had enjoyed the martinis. The Cliffside was famous for serving a good martini. It also boasted one of the best restaurants in the city. Today, the first time he had dined here, he discovered that its good reputation was well deserved.

Hitch had been eating lunches in fine restaurants all week. The Cliffside hadn’t been able to give him a reservation until today, and he was almost tempted to see if they could give him another reservation for next week. But what use would that be?

Harriman. That stubborn asshole.

Hitch had been around long enough to read a guy like Frank Harriman. They could fire Harriman and Harriman would work the case on his own. He had seen that on Sunday. Vince Adams was wasting his time trying to pressure Harriman. Why couldn’t Vince see that?

Hitch left the restaurant, stood awhile in the hotel’s grand lobby, then walked outside. It was terribly hot, he thought, and started to dab his forehead. To his horror, he realized he had taken the napkin with him. Jesus! Was the waiter on his way out now to accost him? He would be remembered. He would be the man who stole the napkin. The cop who stole the napkin. Quickly, he stuffed it into his pants pocket, which made the pocket bulge clownishly. It seemed as big as a damned tablecloth in there now, that napkin. He hurried toward his car. He unlocked it, tossed the napkin into the front seat, shut the door and locked it, locked it away from him.

He stepped back from the car, feeling a little dizzy, breathing heavily. He turned and stumbled toward the low wall that ran along the far side of the parking lot, at last leaning against the railing there, looking out over the cliff that gave the hotel its name. The wind was stronger here, blowing hard across the beach and up the face of the sheer rocky surface, on to his own heated face. He needed the cool ocean air to calm him, the sound of the sea to soothe him.

Hitch told himself that he had no reason to feel vulnerable. But that was bullshit, and he knew it. He had been vulnerable for ten years. Not long after Lefebvre disappeared, he had been terrified, certain he would be next. When Rosario left the force, he had gone down on his knees before God and begged for mercy.

He got a miracle. For ten years, nothing.

Now this. His miracle, it seemed, had an expiration date.

Maybe Dale Britton was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Elena Rosario he had seen at the funeral.

A voice behind him said, “Did you drop something?”

He turned to see Myles Volmer holding the napkin. He was smiling.

Hitch felt his spine turn to cold jelly.

“Wh-what are you d-doing here?” he stammered, noticing two other burly giants standing not far away.

“Isn’t the question what are you doing here?” Myles asked.

Hitch glanced nervously toward the hotel, at the large, tinted windows that looked out toward the water.

“You’re right,” Myles said. “It isn’t good for us to stand out here where we might be seen. Although I doubt many police officers lunch at the Cliffside. A bit above your touch, isn’t it?”

“How did you know—”

“Hold your hands out to your sides,” Myles said, suddenly stepping very close to him.

Hitch’s legs felt wobbly. The bastard was going to take his weapon from him. He knew he shouldn’t let him do it, but Hitch couldn’t find it in himself to resist. He wanted to weep from the fear and shame he felt as Myles reached for the button of his suit coat and unfastened it. Myles smiled down at him again, a hard, icy smile. Myles’s hand moved slowly inside the jacket — then he startled Hitch by plunging that hand into Hitch’s pants pocket and pulling out his keys.

Myles stepped back, still smiling, and tossed them to one of the other men.

Hitch felt a rush of relief that Myles all too apparently observed, so that the relief was quickly followed by anger and a deeper sense of humiliation than he had felt when the other man was touching him.

“What?” Hitch said with false bravado. “All of a sudden you need keys to get into my car? Or were you just copping a feel?”

“Let’s go,” Myles said in a bored tone, then turned and started walking toward a white limo.

“Fuck, no!” Hitch said, knowing whose limo it must be. “You’ve probably just blown everything. What is it with you guys? You were fool enough to show up at that funeral, one of his other men causes a scene — at a flower shop, for God’s sake—”

Myles kept walking.

“I’m telling you, the department is watching his every move!”

Myles stopped, turned, and said, “Do you want to see me in a mood as foul as your language?”

Hitch hurried after him.

Myles held a door to the limo open, making a mocking “after you” gesture.

As he bent to enter, Hitch hesitated. The interior of the limousine was warm and white and smelled of sex.

He saw the woman first — her white stiletto heels, her lacy underwear around her slender ankles, her white silk skirt pushed up almost to her hips, her nipples dark beneath her thin white blouse, her full red lips, her blue eyes, her long blond hair. He had seen her a few times before, of course, but never this close. She wasn’t young, maybe in her thirties, but he had seen plenty of women in their twenties who didn’t have half of what she had going for her. Even in his anxiety, he responded to her. She leaned back lazily, posing alluringly in the corner, her long legs falling slightly apart at the knees.

Hitch blushed. She smiled at him.

Then he saw Dane. If someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on his crotch, it could not have more effectively taken his mind off the woman.

He had known Dane would be in the car, of course. Dane wasn’t looking at him, or at the woman, but he felt sure that Dane knew he had been staring at the woman’s thighs, at the way her nipples showed through her blouse. Dane’s own clothes were not in the least disarrayed.

“Get in,” Myles said behind him, and Hitch climbed in, perching his large body on the edge of the long leather seat opposite Dane. Through the tinted rear window, he saw his own car pull up behind the limo.

Myles entered after Hitch, shutting the door. As soon as it closed, the limo began moving, pulling out of the parking lot. The driver of Hitch’s car followed.

The woman leaned over to pull her panties up from around her ankles.

“No, Tessa,” Dane said, not looking at her. Tessa sat back, seemingly untroubled by the idea of leaving the panties where they were.

Hitch averted his eyes, not looking at either of them for a time. But soon he found himself watching Dane, and only Dane.

Dane sat silently, looking out the window nearest him, his head turned so that Hitch saw only one side of his face — the left side, the side on which he wore the eye patch. Hitch was always uneasy when beholding that black wedge on Dane’s pale face, and it now seemed more menacing than ever, as if that unseeing profile were all-seeing, as if his every thought had been scanned by that darkness, his fears absorbed through its cloth into Dane’s awareness. It stared at him, and nothing could be hidden from it.

He remained silent, knowing that Dane would not take kindly to an initiation of conversation. He had learned this early on. He did not ask questions, although his head was full of them. Or at least one question.

It was not Where is he taking me?

It was Is he going to kill me?

Hitch felt his fine midday meal roiling in his stomach. The martinis threatened to rise with it into his throat. He looked for a switch to lower a window, but found none.

“An old friend of yours is in town,” Myles said, startling him.

“Who?” Hitch asked, a little tremor in his voice making him sound, even to his own ears, like an ailing owl.

“Elena Rosario — but please, don’t ask any other question to which you already know the answer.”

Hitch looked over at Dane, who hadn’t moved.

“Mr. Dane has questions for Ms. Rosario,” Myles said.

“Look, I haven’t seen her in ten years. She won’t talk to me about anything, so I can’t help you. I didn’t even know she was back — someone told me she might have been the veiled woman at the funeral yesterday—”

But this protest was cut short when Myles, in a move Hitch never saw coming, jabbed him hard and fast in the ribs with an elbow that seemed to be made of steel. Hitch’s breath expelled in a whoosh and he doubled over, eyes tearing as he held his side.

Hitch felt the gun at his hip, and for a brief second he thought of using it, of pulling it out and blowing a hole right through Myles’s fucking head, and then through Dane’s dead eye, but he looked up to see that Dane had turned his face toward him, and the impulse quickly faded.

“As much as I enjoyed that,” Dane said, “he won’t be able to play his part this evening if you injure him too badly, Myles.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Oh, don’t apologize. As I said, I quite enjoyed it. Perhaps now, Detective Hitchcock, you will be so good as to refrain from interrupting.”

Hitch said nothing.

“Mr. Dane has questions for Ms. Rosario,” Myles began again. “Mr. Dane will need your assistance in order to obtain her full cooperation.”

Hitch opened his mouth and drew breath to speak. He felt the ache in his ribs and stayed silent.

“You know where Detective Frank Harriman lives, is that correct?” Myles asked.

Hitch nodded. “Went over there after a hockey tournament once.”

Dane said, “Of course. You attended college on a hockey scholarship, as I recall. What a wreckage you’ve made of yourself since then. I confess I’m rather amazed that you can still manage to skate.”

“I can skate.”

Dane smiled at the hint of defiance in Hitch’s voice.

“Tonight you will visit Detective Harriman’s home,” Myles said.

“I’ll see him at the game tonight — my team plays his.”

Myles looked over at Dane. Dane nodded. Myles slapped Hitch across the face, hard enough to make Hitch’s head snap back against the seat.

“Are you paying attention now?” Myles asked.

Hitch rubbed the heated mark on his face, but nodded.

“Tonight you will visit the Harriman home before the game. Ms. Rosario is staying there.”

Hitch grew wide-eyed.

Dane leaned forward. “Your reaction interests me, Detective Hitchcock. Is it one of surprise? Anticipation? Or fear?”

“Surprise. Like I said—”

“Yes, my hearing is fine, thank you.” But he studied Hitch in a way that made the detective call upon whatever shreds of courage were left to him in order not to shrink back. After what seemed to Hitch an eternity, Dane smiled, released him from his gaze, and turned to Myles.

Myles immediately said, “I have further instructions, Detective Hitchcock. I will give them to you in a moment.” He picked up a cell phone and handed it to Hitch. “First, call your bank.”

“My bank?” Hitch said.

“Apparently his own hearing is suffering,” Dane said.

Hitch cringed, expecting another blow. When it didn’t come, he began dialing.

“No,” Myles said. “The other bank. Where you keep the account the Internal Affairs Division will have difficulty tracing to you.”

Hitch hung up, and — hands shaking — dialed again.

“Use the automated, self-service system to check your account balance.”

Hitch froze. Myles took the phone from him and entered all the required information, including the account number and the phony Social Security number Hitch had used to establish the account.

Myles handed the phone back just in time for Hitch to hear the mechanical recorded voice say, “Your account balance is four dollars and fifty-two cents.”

All color drained from Hitch’s face.

“Shall we save some time?” Myles said. “Or would you like to hear what has become of your airline reservations?”

“Tsk, tsk,” Dane said. “After all our years together? Not even a kiss goodbye? I feel so used, Detective Hitchcock!”

“Has Mr. Dane ever treated you unfairly?” Miles asked.

Hitch shook his head.

“No?”

“No.”

“Has he ever required you to do anything that you could not easily do?”

“No.”

“Has he ever failed to richly compensate you for the risks you took on his behalf?”

“No.”

“Then you will not hesitate to be of service to him in this small matter, will you?”

“No,” Hitch said miserably.

“Do you begin to see that if certain parties were made aware of the extent to which you have helped Mr. Dane and shown readily available documentation regarding the rewards you have received in his service, you would soon find yourself in prison?”

“Yes,” Hitch whispered.

Myles paused, then said, “And do you see that it would be extremely unwise to fail him, or to return his generosity with double-dealing, or to in any way disappoint him?”

“Yes,” Hitch said, tears rolling down his face.

“Then please pay the strictest attention to the instructions I am about to give you.”

As Myles spoke, Dane reached over to Tessa, moving his long white fingers along the inside of her thigh. She sighed in pleasure and moved closer to him, reaching for his belt buckle.

Hitch noticed none of this, and later, when the sounds they were making intruded on his concentration, he forced himself to keep his eyes on Myles Volmer, so that when the limousine stopped and he was left standing at the side of the road, near the open door of his own car, he had an imperfect idea of what had taken place between Whitey Dane and Tessa Satel, but a perfectly clear understanding of what he must do that evening.

38

Thursday, July 13, 4:10 P.M.

Las Piernas Police Department Crime Lab

After talking to Soury, Frank had spent an hour or so looking over Lefebvre’s notes. The Wheeze stopped by his desk and gave him a note saying that Larson wanted to talk to him, but when he called the lab, he just got Larson’s voice mail.

He went downstairs to see if he could find him. He took a quick look around, but didn’t see the lab director. He walked by Larson’s office, but the door was closed. Frank knocked, but didn’t get an answer. Frank wasn’t surprised — he seldom saw Larson in his office. Larson spent most of his time at meetings or in the lab itself.

He decided to talk to Koza, the questioned documents examiner. Koza told him that the business card found on Lefebvre was Elena Rosario’s, but that an address and phone number had been handwritten on the back. Frank had the Randolph case files with him and thumbed through one of the folders until he found an old interview with Elena. Elena’s old home address and number matched those on the business card. Another dead end.

He stopped by the lab director’s office again.

“Looking for Dr. Larson?”

He turned to see the toxicologist standing at the end of the hall. She was fairly new here, had only worked for the lab for about six months. He couldn’t recall her name, and he was too far away from her to read it off her ID badge.

“Sorry,” she was saying, “Al went home sick. One too many mocha lattes, you ask me. Paul Haycroft asked me to send anyone who was looking for Al to talk to him.”

Frank still wanted to take a more careful look through the folders Professor Wilkes had given him, and that would take plenty of time. But at the toxicologist’s suggestion, he decided to talk to Haycroft again as long as he was down here — he had more questions about the Amanda lab work. The toxicologist told Frank he could find Haycroft working on a set of latents in the fingerprint-identification area.

“Frank!” Haycroft said when he looked up from the fingerprint computer system. Frank saw that he was using the lab’s new digital imaging software to enhance an image of a partial fingerprint. “The big man himself was down here just before lunch, talking about you.”

“Hale?”

“Yes. Asking about paper airplanes. Seems you gave him something to think about.”

“Thinking about asking me to resign, you mean.”

“No, I doubt that. Did you get Al’s note?”

“Al’s note?”

“He left early — some sort of digestive problem. But he said if you came by, to make sure you got the note he left for you on his desk. I guess he wanted to talk to you earlier, but the chief said you were visiting commissioners this afternoon.”

Mentally cussing out the “big man himself” for blabbing that to Haycroft and Larson, Frank said, “I’m trying to talk to anyone who knew Trent Randolph. While I’m here with you — mind if I ask you about the Randolph cases?”

“Not at all.”

He was distracted by watching Haycroft clean the screen on the computer monitor.

“No wonder you think Pete’s a slob,” Frank said.

“Helps to see the image better,” he said, then smiled. “I’m not just being anal-retentive.”

“Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying orderliness is a bad thing. I suppose it’s especially important down here.”

Haycroft shrugged. “I’ve seen cluttered crime labs. Larson wouldn’t stand for it here, though, and I think he’s right. Why give a defense attorney — or the D.A., for that matter — an opportunity to say you were careless or contaminated the evidence?”

“One of my questions is about that,” Frank said, opening one of the file folders he had with him and turning to a page he had marked. “There was some problem with cat hair?”

“Let me try to remember. May I see that?”

Haycroft read the notes and said, “Oh, yes, now I remember. A few stray hairs inside the shoes we recovered. Unknown source. We thought Vince or Dale might have brought them to the scene when they were searching Dane’s boat, but when we tested their cats’ fur against a sample, it didn’t seem to match in color.” He frowned. “I recall talking about this to Lefebvre, showing it to him under the microscope. It bothered me, because Dane is highly allergic to cats. And also, Vince was so touchy about the whole business — his lieutenant had to pressure him into letting us comb his cat. Then Vince told me not to talk about it to anyone.”

“But you have — and you wrote it up in the report.”

“Vince isn’t my supervisor.” He suddenly seemed embarrassed and said, “I’m not as brave as I’m making it sound. I added the information to the formal report after talking to Lefebvre about it. Then he disappeared, and no one seemed to care about what I’d written. The cat hairs were gone with all the other evidence, so what did it matter?”

“You examined the watch that was left in the evidence box?”

“I didn’t do more than take a look at it. Dale Britton did the real work on it.”

“And it was definitely worn? I mean, not a new watch?”

“Not new, no. As I recall, Dale got a wrist measurement from it. I don’t suppose your forensic anthropologist friend might be able to help us compare it with Lefebvre’s?”

“I’ll ask him,” Frank said, deciding not to let Haycroft know that Ben had already discussed it with him. “Do you remember anyone else around here who had a watch like that?”

“Well, yes. We all did.”

“What?”

“Everyone in the lab. One of the vendors gave Al a dozen of them when we bought some equipment. He gave one to me, one to Dale, one to each of the technicians, and then a few to detectives — Vince received one, I believe. Pete, too. Lefebvre must have been given one also.” He hesitated, then said, “They weren’t that expensive — not meant as a bribe or anything of that nature.”

“Not asking about it because of that — listen, are you sure Dr. Larson gave them all away?”

“Well… I hate to say that any were stolen, but I think some people may have believed that if the watches were a giveaway, they were free — so why not take one without asking? Al was looking for one of them a few years later and couldn’t find them in the place where he’d left them. Really became upset about it.”

“Remember when that happened?”

“Oh, about six or seven years ago.”

“What makes you think it was then?”

“Because that same vendor sold us the DNA equipment. I suppose that’s what made Al think of the watches. That’s seven years ago, I believe.”

“Maybe Dr. Larson just misplaced them,” Frank said, wishing the vendor had been less generous.

“Misplaced?” Haycroft said in disbelief, then laughed. “Have you ever been in Al Larson’s office?”

“Not more than once or twice,” Frank said. “Now that I think about it, I haven’t ever been inside yours. Usually, when I’ve come down here, you’ve both been in the lab itself.”

“Or we’ve come up to your desk in Homicide. If you’d like to take a look in my office, go right ahead. I’m in the middle of doing this comparison or I’d show it to you myself.”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

“Yes, I imagine you have better things to do than look at my desk. Anyway, my point was that Al doesn’t misplace things. When you pick up the note he left for you, take a look around his office and tell me if you think the man who occupies it ever had a disorganized moment in his life.”

“Any idea what he wanted to talk to me about? I’m a little uncomfortable about going into his office if he’s not in—”

“The door is never locked.”

“Still—”

“You aren’t going to tell me you’ve never been in an office without the owner’s knowledge?”

“Never a colleague’s office.”

“No need to take offense,” Haycroft said. “He left the note for you there, after all.”

“I wonder why he didn’t just send it up to my desk?”

“Well — he probably wasn’t thinking straight. Not to get into embarrassing detail, but from what he told me, he seemed to have a case of food poisoning — stomach cramps and so on. He was distracted, as you might imagine, and left in something of a hurry.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sure he’ll feel better by tomorrow. And I wouldn’t tell you to go into his office if I thought you’d be violating his privacy or compromising cases. He’s very security-conscious, Frank — his desk and file cabinets will be locked. You don’t need to touch anything — just pick up the note. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

“Okay, but one other question — back to the cat hair business. Actually, not the hairs, but the shoes you found them in — the shoes that were discovered aboard the Cygnet. You examined them, but there were no wear patterns noted.”

“May I see the photos?”

Frank showed him the photos of the shoes and of the bloody footprints on the Amanda.

“Now I remember. The shoes were brand new. There was blood and little else on them. As far as we could tell, Trent had hosed down the decks of his yacht just before Dane arrived.”

“Any attempt made to find out if Dane had bought the shoes around here recently?”

“Yes, but we weren’t successful. That doesn’t mean anything — he could have had closets full of shoes he had never worn, bought them months earlier.”

Or, Frank thought, someone else bought a pair to match ones seen on Dane.

Frank again stood before the door of Larson’s office, telling himself that he had no real reason to feel so uneasy. He reached for the doorknob and turned it. As Haycroft had predicted, it was unlocked.

Gone for the day — not feeling well after lunch, Haycroft had said. And Hale had been down here asking about paper airplanes and talking about commissioners just before lunch.

Frank pushed the door open and stepped into the room. In the darkness, he could smell a faint odor of glass cleaner and furniture polish. He reached for the light switch.

In the sudden illumination, Larson’s desk, which was protected by a thick piece of glass, was the first thing to catch his eye. It held only two objects: a telephone and a framed photograph. The telephone was squared with the right-hand corner of the desk; the photograph, which was facing away from Frank, was at a forty-five-degree angle on the left. Although as an administrator Larson must have handled a tremendous amount of paperwork, there were no loose papers anywhere in the office. The wastebasket was empty.

Frank took another step inside.

The bookshelves were neat and dusted. Diplomas and other certificates hung perfectly aligned. Rolled up against another wall, a typewriter cart with wheels held a laptop computer. Frank could see that locks on the file drawers were pushed in, in the locked position.

Frank put his hands in his pockets, conscious of a desire not to leave any personal mark on this blank setting. He walked farther into the room, around the desk, so that he stood behind the large chair. He could see his own reflection in the desktop.

No note. Maybe Larson had sent it upstairs after all.

He was about to leave, but the photo on the desk caught his interest. A young boy, perhaps three years old, holding a tabby cat.

He hadn’t known that Larson had a son. He was a little surprised that the boy was so young. He vaguely recalled hearing that the lab director had been divorced for a dozen years or so. Didn’t he have a more current photograph of his child? Frank picked up the photo and studied it. A boy with a cat. Had the cat in this picture lived with Al Larson ten years ago?

“You lost?”

He jumped guiltily at the sound of the voice. He looked up to see the toxicologist watching him speculatively.

“I was told Dr. Larson left a note for me.”

She walked over to him, disbelief written all over her face. He saw her ID badge then — Mary Michaels. She held out her hand, palm up, and he realized he was still holding the photo. He handed it to her, then felt absurd for doing so.

She glanced around, and he thought she was looking to see if all the degrees were still on the wall.

“Look, Paul Haycroft—”

“Oh, Paul Haycroft comes in here all the time when Dr. Larson isn’t around. Just because he’s been in here doesn’t mean—”

“No, of course not,” he said quickly. “I don’t suppose that you’ll believe me if I tell you that I objected when he suggested it?”

She softened a little. “I’m sure he couldn’t resist having you see how neat and clean it is.”

“Exactly. And like I said, there was this note…”

“They are the weirdest pair of guys, if you ask me,” she said, interrupting. “And they have been working together way too long.”

She was still holding the picture. Seeing the direction of his glance, she said, “I’ll put it back for you — unless you’d like me to give you a tour of Haycroft’s office while you’re snooping around?”

“For God’s sake, I was not snooping around.” Not really, he added silently.

She clearly didn’t buy it.

They heard another voice say, “Mary, surely you don’t suspect Detective Harriman of burgling the office of the lab director in the middle of the day?”

To Frank’s relief, Haycroft stood in the doorway.

The toxicologist shook her head, then said, “If you really don’t think Dr. Larson would mind — you know him better than I do. I’ve got to get back to work.” She started to walk out, realized she still held the photo, and quickly handed it to Haycroft as she left.

“Thanks for the rescue,” Frank said.

“No problem,” Haycroft said absently, studying the photo before placing it back on the desk.

“Have you met his boy?”

Haycroft looked up. “Don’t you know? Kit’s been dead for many years.”

“Kit?”

“Christopher.” He turned the photograph toward Frank. “Kit for short.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“He was killed in a bank robbery.”

“He worked in a bank?”

“Oh, no,” he said sadly. “He was only four years old when he died. His mother, his stepfather, a stepsister, and Kit. A long time ago now, before you were in the department. A parent never gets over such a thing, of course — you’ve seen that in your own work, I’m sure.”

“The cases involving children are always the hardest to take. And you’re right, the parents never really get over it.”

“This affected all of us. Still does. Because the case hit so close to home, that photo of Kit has become — oh, I guess you could say it reminds us that this isn’t just lab work — reminds us that what we do is important to the families. Does that make sense to you?”

“Perfect sense. Listen — there was no note in here.”

“I’ll be darned. I wonder what the heck he did with it? I’m sorry, Frank, I could swear it was in here.” Haycroft frowned, pulled the chair back, and looked beneath the desk. “Here it is. Must have fallen.” He bent and picked up a white envelope. Frank’s name was neatly printed on it.

Frank thanked him and pocketed the envelope without opening it.

On his way out of the lab, he saw Mary Michaels again. He had the feeling the toxicologist had been watching for him.

“Detective Harriman—”

“Frank.”

“Look, I’m sorry about how I acted back there.”

“Don’t be. You had every right to ask me what I was doing.”

She hesitated, then said, “He talked to you about Kit?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t been with the department very long, so I don’t know the whole story, but I guess it was big news around here ten or twelve years ago, because it had something to do with another cop or detective, too.”

“Involved in the robbery?”

“No — maybe someone else was killed in the robbery? Some guy’s wife?”

“I wasn’t with the department then, either,” he said, although now he had a feeling that he had heard something about this robbery, and not so very long ago. What was it?

He wondered, as he climbed the stairs toward the homicide room, if he was going to be able to manage finding Lefebvre’s killer without a damned history book.

Unfortunately, except for a PR publication or two, there was no department history book for the LPPD, which was what he’d need. The local newspaper, whose reporters didn’t always seem to grasp the full story, was as close as anyone could come.

The elusive memory suddenly returned to him. It wasn’t something someone told him recently — it was something he had been thinking about himself, here on this stairway. He paused halfway up, then raced to his desk, hoping to catch Irene before she left the Express for the day.

He read Larson’s note while he waited for Irene to call him back. After all he had been through to receive it, the note wasn’t all that exciting. On a single sheet of his letterhead, in neat block letters, he had written:

IMPORTANT THAT I TALK TO YOU REGARDING THE RANDOLPH CASES. NOT FEELING WELL TODAY, BUT HOPE WE WILL BE ABLE TO MEET TOMORROW AFTERNOON.

The phone rang. Frank set the note aside and answered the call.

“Frank? It’s Irene. I found something. I’ll fax it over.”

“Thanks — you’re amazing. I know I didn’t give you much to go on—”

“I’ll figure out some way for you to repay me.”

He smiled. “Can’t wait.”

He stood by the fax machine, retrieving each page as it emerged, anxiously reading over one as the next printed. It had taken Irene less time than he thought it would to locate the article. He had only been able to supply a vague description of what he needed. He had asked her to look for a story about the bank robbery in which Vince Adams’s ex-wife had participated. He wasn’t sure what name the ex-wife had used then — was she still calling herself Lisa Adams after they split up? He didn’t know the date of the robbery, wasn’t even positive about what year it took place. He thought it was about a dozen years ago, but that might be wrong.

There was also a possibility that Mary Michaels was talking about some other bank robbery. But the toxicologist had said the robbery was big news, and most weren’t, especially not ten or so years ago. They were so frequent in the area then, at one point the L.A. office of the FBI had the slogan “Bank Robbery Capital of the United States” printed on its letterhead. Still, a robbery that ended in the killing of a family of four would make news. It would be even bigger news in the department if an officer’s ex-wife was involved.

Now, as he read the newspaper story, he was certain it was the same robbery. The article mentioned that a young boy named Christopher had been killed, but his last name wasn’t given as Larson in the story — all the last names were given as Dillon, the stepfather’s name. The fifth victim was a security guard. The five photographs didn’t reproduce very well over the fax, but he could see enough of the boy’s photo to tell that it was the same child as the boy in the portrait on Larson’s desk.

The article barely mentioned the victims, focusing instead on Lisa Adams — Vince’s ex-wife — and Carl Sudas, the suspected robber, who escaped. Sudas had been recently out of prison after serving time on a felony assault charge. He was arrested not long after his release, this time on drug charges. Judge Lewis Kerr tossed that case out during the preliminary hearing. Kerr ruled that the arresting officer, narcotics detective Robert Hitchcock, had acted improperly when he searched Sudas’s car and failed to show the probable cause necessary for a warrantless search of the vehicle. Within six months of his release, Sudas met up with Lisa Adams and sought her help with the robbery.

Frank took the pages back to his desk. He reread the article more slowly now. The largest photo was of Lisa Adams, looking blankly at the camera. Even in this poor reproduction, she appeared to be in shock. He was studying the photo when suddenly the fax was snatched from his hands.

“You asshole,” Vince said, tearing the pages in half and crumpling them into a ball. “You fucking asshole. You want to get back at me, you leave Lisa out of it!”

“This isn’t about her, Vince. Or you. That’s not why I was looking at that article.”

“Bullshit! Reading that crap in the paper.” He tightened his fists. “What’d you do? Get your wife to help you find something on me? Maybe I’ll start dragging your wife’s name through the mud. See how you like it.”

Frank stood up. “I said, this isn’t about your wife or you.”

“I don’t give a shit how big you are, Harriman,” he said, leaning closer. “You damned liar.”

“Get out of my face, Vince. Now.”

“I can’t believe you’d sink this low.”

Reed and Pete walked in the room just then. “Vince!” Reed called. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

Vince threw the torn fax at him without saying anything. He reclenched his fists.

Reed uncrumpled the ball, saw what the fax was about, and said, “Frank?” in a tone full of disappointment.

“I told him,” Frank said, “this isn’t about his ex. I was checking out something else.”

“Well, then,” Reed said, relieved. “Nothing to be upset about, is there, Vince?”

Vince was silent.

“Pete, help me out here,” Reed said. “Frank wouldn’t lie to any of us, right, Pete?”

Pete said nothing. Outraged, Frank turned to look at him. Pete looked away — just as Vince threw a punch.

Frank had expected it, though, and easily dodged the blow. He grabbed Vince’s wrist and pulled him halfway across the desk, then pinned him to it, holding him down with most of his weight. He pressed Vince’s face into the desk and said, “The only person around here who has mentioned her name is you.”

Vince struggled, but Frank was stronger. And nearly as angry.

“Frank…” Reed said.

“I’ll let him go when my partner asks me to,” Frank said. “Oh, wait — I can’t. I don’t have a partner.”

He straightened and shoved Vince off the desk. Vince wasn’t able to get his footing and landed hard on his ass.

Carlson came into the room just then.

“What’s going on here?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Vince said.

“Then why are you on the floor?”

“I slipped and fell.”

Carlson looked at the other three. No one spoke. When the lieutenant turned toward Frank, Reed silently pocketed the fax.

“You,” Carlson said, pointing at Frank. “You seem to be at the center of a number of disturbances in our office lately.”

“It wasn’t Frank,” Pete said. “It was me. Just a joke I played on Vince that got a little out of hand, that’s all.”

“Read the department regulations!” Carlson said, rounding on him. “Horseplay is strictly forbidden!” He pointed a finger at Pete’s chest. “Do you know what we can do to those who engage in horseplay?”

“Ask for a blindfold and a cigarette, Pete,” Frank said. “They say it goes easier that way.”

The others laughed, with the exception of Carlson. He marched off toward his office.

The moment he was gone, the sour mood descended on the others again. Vince regained his feet and left the office. Pete and Reed followed suit.

39

Thursday, July 13, 7:55 P.M.

The Kelly-Harriman Home

He placed his skates, helmet, and uniform in a large duffel bag — already occupied by shin guards, elbow pads, and other hockey gear — and hoisted it onto his shoulder. He was choosing a pair of sticks when the dogs began barking, and soon after, someone rang the doorbell.

He swore softly. Irene wasn’t home — she had taken Seth to the skating rink not long after dinner, to enjoy some of the public skating time before the evening’s hockey games started. Elena was depressed or pouting or both — he couldn’t tell which — and had stayed behind, shutting herself up in the guest room. And now, just before he needed to leave, someone was at the door.

But by the time he was inside, the dogs had stopped barking and were merely standing before the door, apparently listening to something on the other side. He noticed the guest room door was open now.

“Elena?” he called as he set the equipment down.

No response.

He looked through the peephole and saw Bob Hitchcock standing on the front lawn, talking to her. Hitch seemed to be pleading, Elena looked obstinate. Hitch wore a dark golf shirt and slacks and was dabbing at his face with a handkerchief.

What the hell was Hitch doing here? he wondered. He stepped outside.

“Frank!” Hitch said with a smile, but it wasn’t a smile Frank liked much. Although the evening air was cool, Hitch was sweating, and Frank could see the pulse in his neck.

But Elena’s reaction bothered him more. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“What brings you to my door, Hitch?”

“I heard my old partner Rosario was staying with you, Frank.”

“Heard it where?”

“Word gets around.”

“Really? Who brought it around to you?”

“No, no — I’m not naming names. Besides, that’s not important. I gotta talk to the two of you.”

“About what?”

Hitch looked toward the ocean, as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Jesus, this is a great setup you have here, Frank. This close to the water — I never could afford a piece of property like this.”

Elena muttered something, and Hitch dabbed at his chin with the handkerchief. “I’m not implying anything,” he said quickly. “Everybody in the department knows the old lady that lived next door rented it to him and then sold it to him on the cheap ’cause she liked him. Well, who could blame her? Say, how about we take a walk along the beach?”

Elena glanced at Frank then, but Frank let the silence stretch. Hitch shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Talk about what?” Frank asked again.

“Lefebvre. The Randolphs. There are things I should have spoken up about before now.” He stared at Elena for a moment. “Jesus — and now I learn he had a kid with you, Rosario — God damn, that was a shock.”

Frank thought it was the first time that evening Hitch had been completely truthful. “I’m curious, Hitch — why now? In the evening, at my home? Why not just talk to me at the game tonight?”

“Screw the game!” He tried another smile. It looked more forced than ever. “Well, take a gander at me, Frank. I’m a fucking wreck — I can’t sleep, I’m on edge all the time — I can’t live like this, Frank.” He looked to see if he was having any effect. A little more desperately, he said, “Tonight I thought of being out on the ice with you, surrounded by everybody else on your team, knowing what I know—”

“Didn’t bother you much a few days ago at breakfast. Surrounded by the same guys.”

“Jesus Christ almighty, Frank, please don’t start being stubborn about this!”

“Leave Frank out of it, Hitch,” Elena said tonelessly. “This mess is between the two of us.”

Frank turned to her in surprise, but she had already moved away, starting to walk quickly toward the beach. He hurried after her.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked when he reached her, but she said nothing and still wouldn’t meet his eyes. “If you’re in some kind of trouble, Elena, for God’s sake tell me. You know I’ll try to help you.”

She halted for a moment, but in the next instant Hitch caught up to them, and she shook her head and kept walking.

Hitch was panting now, straining to match her pace. “Could we go just a little slower?”

She speeded up.

She reached the stairs, paused briefly, then resolutely made her way toward a group of three men on the beach.

Frank had no difficulty recognizing them. Whitey Dane, Myles Volmer, and the wasp man. He turned to Hitch and said, “You’re on his fucking payroll, aren’t you, you bastard?”

Hitch wheezed and held his hands up as if to ward off a blow.

Frank turned his attention to the others now, ready to do all he could to protect Elena. But he soon realized that she wasn’t acting afraid.

Despite all the possibilities he considered in those few moments, he was still surprised to hear Dane call out, “If it isn’t my dear old friend Elena.”

40

Thursday, July 13, 8:10 P.M.

Las Piernas Beach

“I’m not your friend, Dane,” Elena said. “Not then, not now.”

Dane placed a hand over his heart. “You wound me.” As Frank approached, Dane extended a hand and said, “Detective Harriman! So good of you to join us.”

Frank stood with his fists clenched.

“There is no need for hostility or violence, Detective Harriman, I assure you. I’m not wearing a gun, and neither are Myles and Derrick. Have you met Myles and Derrick?” He smiled. “You may have seen them around town, at funerals or florists.”

Frank didn’t trust Dane to be telling the truth about being unarmed. He thought of his gun, locked away out of concern for Seth’s safety. He looked up and down the beach, but the nearest group of people were some way off, on the boardwalk near the pier.

“I would have preferred a comfortable little coze in your living room,” Dane went on, “but I asked Detective Hitchcock to bring you to me here — you see, I understand you share your home with a rather large Felis catus. There is much I admire in cats,” he said, taking a long and considering look at Elena. “However, ultimately, they may be the death of me.” He smiled, then turned to Frank. “That is, I am severely allergic to them. And I must admit that I also sent the intrepid Detective Hitchcock to your door because I thought you might be a tad more willing to open it to a fellow detective than to me.”

“‘A tad,’” Elena said, mimicking his voice. “Whitey thinks that bullshit way of talking makes him sound elegant, but he still acts like the little pimp from Pittsburgh he’s always been. That’s a tad pathetic, isn’t it?”

Derrick moved forward a little, but Dane checked him with a small gesture. “Still too impulsive for your own good, aren’t you, Elena? I wonder — all those years ago, was it impulse that led you to betray me?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Such poise! When I compare your response to the rather anxious one of your former partner, I must say, I’m tempted to believe you.” Dane studied her again, then glanced at Hitch, who was edging back. “Derrick, please make sure Detective Hitchcock remains with us.”

“Mr. Dane, please—” Hitch began, but fell silent as Derrick put an arm around his shoulders — a friendly gesture belied by Hitch’s wince — and moved him closer to Dane. Hitch’s face was pale, but he said nothing.

“Let’s not waste time,” Dane said. “Let me tell you my concerns. It’s just so — how shall I say it? — so inconvenient to be accused of murders one hasn’t committed. And now, at a time when I am winning the trust of businessmen and civic leaders—”

“Buying votes and favors is more like it,” Elena scoffed.

“Calling the kettle black, my dear? In return for a favor, I believe I once received certain assurances from you.”

She flinched and glanced at Frank. In a low voice, she said, “I kept my word, Whitey, and until tonight you kept yours.” She smiled coldly. “At this rate, I’m going to stop believing in the old adage about honor among thieves.”

“How tragic that would be! Perhaps I have been misinformed.” He turned toward Hitch, who appeared to be close to fainting, then back to Elena. “But you, my dear, seem so much more likely to have been an enemy posing as friend! Someone who had information about where I would be that evening. Someone who knew I would be among friends whose — shall we say, histories? — might be an obstacle for jurors asked to believe my alibi.”

“I’m not the only one who knew where you’d be that night,” Elena said. “And neither is Hitch, for that matter. You surround yourself with all these muscle-bound boy toys, they start to get jealous and spiteful.”

He shook his head. “Elena, Elena. Do strive to be more original.”

“What are you worried about, anyway?” Frank said. “The Randolph case never went to trial.”

“Oh, that’s another sore point. I’ve never been allowed to prove my innocence, have I? Indeed, I’d even settle for having all that phony evidence in my own hands. But someone else has it. Suppose it’s suddenly rediscovered in the LPPD property room?”

Frank shrugged. “Then your lawyers say the department lost control of the evidence for ten years, and the D.A. says good-bye to the case.”

“Detective Harriman, I have no doubt I would be able to extricate myself from any legal difficulties, but surely you understand how offended I am that someone attempted to set me up?”

“Get over it,” Elena said.

“No, I’m afraid I’m the type who isn’t forgiving. I keep thinking of all the elements that had to be in place, and I cannot help but see that I was betrayed by someone who knew me.” He began counting off points on his long, milky fingers. “Someone who knew that I favored deck shoes of a particular type, who knew that I would not be out on the Cygnet myself that night, who knew how to steal a boat — and let’s face it, who learns more about tricks of the criminal trade than police officers? — someone who made sure Lefebvre, the department’s star homicide detective, was at the marina and made certain that he discovered the Amanda.”

“Phil made that discovery on his own.”

“Did he? Or were you there to make sure he lingered near it? You see, I’ve heard a recent rumor that my old friend Elena Rosario—”

“I have never been your friend!”

“—Elena Rosario was being naughty with Lefebvre. You can hardly deny that rumor, my dear.”

“I’m proud of every moment I spent with Phil.”

“But when it comes to me—”

“I can’t think of anything I’m more ashamed of.”

Dane laughed. “Derrick?”

Frank stepped forward to protect her, but he had misjudged the target — the wasp man moved like lightning and planted a hard right in Hitch’s gut. Hitch doubled over and went to his knees, retching on the sand.

“On the other hand, Detective Hitchcock, I’m afraid, has no shame,” Dane said. “That’s what leads me to believe he lied to me a few years ago when he told me you tipped off Lefebvre.”

Elena stared at Hitch in disbelief. Hitch was weeping.

“Yes,” Dane said, looking between them, “I do believe I have my answer now. To one question at least. Myles? Derrick? Detective Hitchcock seems to be in need of medical attention. Let’s remove him to a place where he will get the level of care he deserves, shall we?”

“Frank, Elena!” Hitch pleaded. “I’m begging you, please! Don’t let him take me!”

“What happened to ‘no violence’?” Elena said to Dane.

“Oh, dear. I’m afraid I meant to you or Detective Harriman.”

Myles hoisted Hitch to his feet and held on to him, keeping Hitch’s arms pulled back.

Frank stepped a little closer to Derrick, who in turn moved back slightly, staying out of range. Frank wondered at this — he didn’t believe for a moment that Derrick was afraid of him. He glanced at Elena. She met his eyes now, and although she did not betray it by any signal to him, he knew she was calm — and ready. Again watching Derrick, he said to Dane, “Let Hitch go.”

“You would speak up on behalf of this piece of offal?” Dane said. “Well, then — perhaps I should hear what Detective Hitchcock has to say for himself.”

Derrick moved closer to Hitch, his right side toward Frank. Frank shifted his own stance.

“Mr. Dane,” Hitch began, “you’ve got to believe me — I didn’t know what he planned.”

“Of whom are you speaking?”

“I don’t know! The guy called me — that’s all it was, a phone call. Disguised his voice. I swear it. I swear it!”

Dane waited.

“I told him where you’d be, that’s all. Nothing more than that — nothing! He — he paid me. He left a little cash for me, but I swear to you, I didn’t know he was gonna try to stick you with a murder rap! You’ve got to believe me, Mr. Dane!”

Dane sighed. “A false assumption. Derrick?”

Just as Derrick’s fist connected with Hitch’s face, Frank moved, landing a hard kick to the outside of the wasp man’s right knee. Frank heard a muffled cracking noise — Derrick gave a shout of pain and lost his balance as the knee gave. He rolled to the right. Elena grabbed his left wrist as he fell, yanked his arm out straight, and kneed him hard in the face. He dropped like a stone.

“Enough,” Dane said.

Myles dropped Hitch, whose bloodied nose sent a crimson flow over the front of his shirt. He held his hands open, out at his sides, a gesture of half-surrender.

“Now look what a mess you’ve made!” Dane scolded. “None of this was necessary.”

“You thought I’d stand here and watch you beat the crap out of Hitch?” Frank asked.

“He can’t be very precious to you. You’ve just halted the only punishment he’s likely to receive.”

“You’ve learned what you wanted to know. Besides, if you think he arranged the killings on the Amanda, you’re a hell of a lot dumber than I think you are.”

“Detective Harriman! I’m so pleased. Now we come to my interest in your investigations. I believe you can see why I’m determined to bring Trent Randolph’s killer to justice.”

Derrick rolled to his side and groaned.

“It had better wait, unless you want to watch your lapdog suffer.”

“Arrest him,” Elena said, and Frank could see the misery in her — that she knew what that would mean to her. “Arrest all of them.”

“I don’t think he will,” Dane said. “You see, I believe Detective Harriman is better at thinking ahead than you are, my impulsive — oh, don’t scowl — all right, you aren’t my friend.”

Frank bent to help Hitch to his feet.

“Take Detective Hitchcock, for example. Detective Harriman realizes that he has no real proof of anything other than Detective Hitchcock’s confession of conspiring to convict me of murder.”

“He just saw two of your men assault an officer, on your orders.”

“And he knows that poor Derrick never attempted to defend himself from either of you. Besides, I promise you, your name will not be left out of any statements I make to the police.”

She hesitated, then said, “Don’t let that stop you, Frank. This is your chance.”

Frank pulled Hitch’s arm over his shoulders. He knew an impulse of his own, to reach down and grab a handful of sand and throw it into Dane’s good eye. Childish, he told himself. “Help me with Hitch,” he said to her.

Elena moved to Hitch’s right side, but as they lifted him, she reached across Hitch’s shoulders to place her hand on Frank’s arm. “Frank—”

“What would happen to Seth then, Elena?”

“Maybe he’d be better off with—”

“Fuck you and your self-pity,” he said. “Think of Seth.”

She lowered her hand to Hitch’s waist, so that she was no longer touching Frank.

Dane came closer and patted Hitch’s cheek. “You do know I hate unfinished business, don’t you, Robert? I know you lied to me to protect your own hide, but why did you choose Elena for your scapegoat? Revenge because she let Lefebvre get into her pants?” He laughed.

Frank suddenly felt Hitch’s full weight — Elena had let go of him.

Her punch came from Dane’s left — hard and fast across the bridge of his nose, catching him in the right eye. Dane howled and grabbed at her.

Frank dropped Hitch and stepped between them, shoving Dane aside. Myles tried to come to Dane’s aid and soon demanded all of Frank’s attention. He landed a dizzying blow above Frank’s eye, splitting his brow. Frank brought his own left up hard under Myles’s jaw and followed it with a quick right to his gut. Myles’s head snapped back, and the air left his lungs in a whoosh. Frank deflected a wild punch and hit him again in the face, throwing everything he had into it. Myles fell on his ass with a thud. He stayed there.

“Myles, Myles, Myles,” Dane said. “What were my orders?”

Myles lowered his head as if in shame.

Frank tried to wipe the blood from his right eye and saw that Dane had Elena pinned beneath him. He stumbled toward them. Dane tilted his head, trying to see around the swelling in his own right eye. Seeing Frank’s injury, he laughed.

“Shall we leave it at an eye for an eye, Detective Harriman?”

Frank nodded.

“Elena?”

“Yes, damn you.”

Dane released her and said, “Myles, help Derrick.”

Elena came toward Frank, but he turned away. He pulled his T-shirt off, which required a set of motions that made his head swim. He held it to his brow to stanch the bleeding.

“Get up,” he heard Elena say to Hitch. “You’ve had enough time to get your wind back.”

Hitch shakily came to his feet.

“Another time, Detective Harriman,” Whitey Dane said as they slowly walked away. “Another time.”

41

Friday, July 14, 3:30 A.M.

The Kelly-Harriman Home

“You need your sleep, too,” Irene whispered as she came into the guest bedroom.

“Can’t,” he said. “Careful — don’t trip over the dogs.”

“Your head still bothering you?”

“I’ll be all right. It’s a good thing I was awake, anyway — he just had a nightmare about the fire. I think all of this is tougher on him than he lets on.”

Seth and Irene had returned from the rink, worried when Frank hadn’t shown up for his game, pulling into the driveway just after Hitch drove off.

Irene had rolled down a window, said, “Get him into the backseat” to Elena, but Frank went inside long enough to wash his hands and face, get another shirt on, and lock up. In the car, Seth had been frightened and wouldn’t let him out of his sight. Frank thought of lying to him and telling him he had tripped over something in the garage, but decided against it. He wasn’t going to lie to Seth if he could help it.

“I had a fight with a bad guy,” he said.

Seth’s eyes widened.

“He kicked the bad guy’s ass,” Elena said.

“Cool! Is the bad guy dead?”

“What a bloodthirsty kid you are,” she said, making him laugh. “No, he isn’t dead, but he knows better than to mess with Frank.”

“Did you help Frank fight him?”

She glanced nervously at Frank. “No, Frank didn’t need any help from me.”

Irene must have heard Elena’s slight hesitation, though, because she looked into the rearview mirror at them.

“Tell me about skating,” Frank said.

While he was waiting to get stitched up, and out of Seth’s and Elena’s hearing, he told Irene the full story.

Now she sat beside him on the edge of Seth’s bed. He put an arm around her, but left his other hand in Seth’s grasp.

“You’re disappointed in Elena, aren’t you?” she whispered.

“Yes,” Frank said. “I am.”

“What about Hitch?”

“So far he’s leaving Elena’s name out of it.” Hale himself had called to give Frank the news that Hitch had walked into headquarters with his lawyer in tow.

“Do you think he could cause her trouble?”

“Maybe. At some point she knew Hitch was on Dane’s payroll. I don’t think she was on it herself or Dane wouldn’t have let her walk away from her job with the narcotics squad — she would have been too great an asset to him. And he would have kept better tabs on her after she left.”

Irene nodded. “She couldn’t have had much dirt on either of them, or they would have seen her as a big threat.”

“If he had ever really believed that, Dane would have had her killed. He came here tonight because he had questions. I don’t know if he believes Hitch about the anonymous call, but I do. Lefebvre wrote notes about getting an anonymous tip on the night the Amanda was attacked.”

They sat in silence for a time, listening to the steady rhythm of Seth’s breathing. The dogs awakened and moved out of the room. Frank could hear their nails clicking on the floor as they moved toward the front door.

Irene said, “So if Hitch had come forward earlier about the anonymous call—”

“Then maybe the department wouldn’t have stayed so obsessed with the idea that Dane was the killer. And who knows? Maybe Seth Randolph and Phil Lefebvre would be alive today. Instead, an asshole like Hitch is crying for mercy, and four good people are cold in their graves. You can play the ‘if ’ game another way — if Elena had told what she knew about Hitch, maybe he would have caved in ten years ago and Lefebvre would be alive.”

Suddenly, the dogs began barking wildly — startling both of them.

Seth awakened and sat up, wide-eyed with fear.

“Just the dogs,” Frank said, but Seth held his hand more tightly.

They waited, expecting the dogs to quickly settle down. Instead, the barking increased in intensity.

“What the hell has gotten into them?” Irene said, and started to get up.

“For God’s sake, stay here,” Frank said, pulling her back. “I’ll check it out.”

The dogs were growling now, focusing on something beyond the front door. They began barking again.

Seth held tightly to him. “It’s the bad guy. He’s come back.”

“You didn’t believe your mom when she told you I kicked his ass?” Frank said lightly. “Stay here with Irene, okay? I’ll ask your mom to come in here, too. I’m going to take a look outside. The dogs are probably just after a skunk or something, but let’s play it safe.”

“Okay,” Seth said, but he still looked scared.

As Frank stepped out into the hall, he saw that the dogs had awakened Elena. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’ll handle it,” he said curtly. “Your son needs you.”

She looked away from him, but didn’t argue.

Frank took his gun from its locked compartment, loaded it, and moved to the front of the house. He looked through the door’s peephole and noticed it was dark out on the porch. He glanced at the switch — it was on. The bulb was new; he had just changed it about a week ago.

His head started throbbing again.

There weren’t many windows on this side of the house — no way to get a clear view of what was out there. He moved to the back of the house instead, and after taking a moment to look around, opened the door to the patio. The dogs liked the plan, too, and raced out ahead of him, rounding the corner of the house. Dunk, the German shepherd, was pawing furiously at the back gate in a “let me at ’em” style. Frank used their noise to cover his own movements and reached the back gate just as he heard an engine start up. He let them out, and they sprinted toward a white van — Deke, the black Labrador, giving chase even after it pulled away. Dunk, meanwhile, concentrated on Frank’s car, sniffing all around it, especially curious about the driver’s side.

Frank started toward it, then came to a halt.

Watch your back, Detective Harriman.

The thought made him look over his shoulder. His next-door neighbor’s lights were on. Jack was a night owl — and a good friend.

He called the dogs back. Deke had joined Dunk now, and they were reluctant to leave the driver’s side of the car. Frank called to them again, more sharply.

He hurried them inside the house. “Grab some clothes and the animals,” he said to the others, “and let’s go over to Jack’s.”

Once there, he made a series of calls.

Not long after they reached Jack’s, the bomb squad arrived. The explosives experts only looked at the car for a few moments before rapping on the door of Jack’s house and asking for Frank.

“You were right to call us — there’s at least one device on the car. Why don’t you take everybody down to the beach? We’re going to evacuate the neighborhood.”

There was some grumbling among his neighbors, but most were more anxious than angry. Jack had the foresight to bring some wood, and they built a fire. Cody yowled pitifully from inside his cat carrier, and Seth had to be convinced again and again that only the cat’s dignity was wounded and that it would not be a good idea to let him out. Elena sat slightly apart from all of them, looking out at the water and not conversing with the others.

Seth asked Frank where the bad guy lived, and seeing that he was feeling afraid, Frank tried to distract him. The water was relatively calm, and so he showed Seth how to find a good skipping stone and how to throw it. Seth took to it quickly and was soon challenging Jack to try to beat his record.

Frank had wondered if Jack’s biker appearance — his tattoos, shaved head, and scarred face — would make Seth feel uneasy, but the two of them hit it off immediately. Seth listened with rapt attention while Jack began regaling him with stories from his days on the road.

“You’ve heard them all before,” Irene whispered to Frank. “Catch a few z’s. Seth will be safe.” At her urging, he pillowed his head on her lap, and as she softly stroked his hair, allowed himself to fall asleep.

She roused him some time later, when they were told they could return to their homes. The sun was up, but it was still cool along the beach. He shook off his sleepiness and stretched, then did his best to get past the aches from the fight with Myles as they made their way back. Seth took his hand, but talked of nothing but Jack. Frank almost wished he hadn’t seen Irene’s look of sympathy.

Seth’s new hero had fallen back to the rear of the group, to talk to Elena. Frank told himself that being angry with her accomplished nothing. But he would think of the man in the wreckage of the Cessna, and this boy without a father, and he could not bring himself to forgive her for her silence.

His aging Volvo was, he was relieved to see, still in one piece.

“Two devices,” one of the bomb squad members told him. “And for working so quickly, he worked neatly. One was on your ignition. Actually, that was the backup device, in case the first one failed — a pressure device.”

“Where was that one?”

“Under the driver’s-side seat. When you told me the dogs had been interested in that side of the car, I made sure we checked it out. The device was rigged so that if you sat down on the seat, your weight would trigger an explosion. If something went wrong with that, when you started the car, you would have triggered a second device, under the hood.”

Frank’s mouth went dry, but he managed to ask, “Any clues to the identity of the bomber?”

“When we study the devices, we’ll probably know more about him than he’d ever guess we could know. They weren’t unique in construction, per se, but — strange thing is, they are built almost exactly like the ones a guy named Wendell Leroy Wallace built seven or eight years ago — same materials, same design, everything — and the really weird thing is, his initials were on this one — W.L.W.”

“I remember those cases,” Frank said. “Series of car bombs. He had some grudge against the company he worked for.”

“Right, that’s the one. But Wendell’s been dead for years. He went the way of a lot of the guys who take up this bomb-making work — the on-the-job training is murder. I’ll bet there are still little pieces of him embedded in the oak tree near what was left of his garage.”

Frank thought for a moment, then said, “Who did the lab work on those cases, county or city?”

“County, mostly. We’ve got the bomb squad. But of course, there was cooperation between your lab and ours. On that case, we were going all-out, so I’m sure the information was shared.”

“You’ve been in this business awhile?” Frank asked.

“Yes, and I’ve still got all my fingers, although my hearing’s going.”

“How long?”

“About eighteen years. Why?”

“What’s your guess about this guy — the one who placed these bombs?”

“An off-the-record guess? Whoever made them hasn’t done this sort of thing around here lately, because I would have recognized anything done in Wendell’s style. So it’s someone who has read about Wendell, or studied him somehow, because I don’t believe that Wendell’s come back from the dead. I almost would believe that, because like Wendell, this guy is as anal as all get-out.”

“What do you mean?”

“A neat little set of packages, all lined up just so, everything clean, ends of the wires carefully clipped and attached, and so on. I’d like to see him caught, because I don’t need any careful bombers — especially any who can install quickly — working in my neck of the woods.” He looked at the stitches in Frank’s eyebrow, the black eye and other bruises, and said, “I suppose it’s foolish to ask if you have any enemies?”

“A few.”

“Well, in your line of work, I guess that’s a given.” He started to walk off, then paused and turned back. “Hey, you think you could show me how to fold a paper airplane the way you do?”

“What?”

“We found this one under the passenger seat, figured it must be yours. I’ve never seen one folded so elaborately.”

“I have,” Frank said as the man showed him the plane. “Once before.” And he suddenly remembered the form in one of Professor Wilkes’s folders — the contest entry that had been filled out so neatly by W. L. Wallace.

42

Friday, July 14, 3:30 A.M.

The Dane Mansion

“Myles, why these lucubrations?” Dane said, entering Myles’s small study. “Are you feeling guilty about striking Detective Harriman?”

Myles looked up from his desk to see Mr. Dane smiling at him. Mr. Dane was clad in a blue silk dressing gown into which a pattern of swans had been embroidered. Only the slight swelling and darkening of the area around his right eye marred his beauty.

“I do regret that deeply, Mr. Dane, but only because it went against your wishes.”

“Naturally you felt compelled to defend me, Myles. Please don’t lose another moment’s sleep over it.”

“Yes, sir. But I should point out that I’ve stayed up late going over these papers because I believe I’ve found the pattern we were looking for, sir. I wanted to be certain I was on the right track.”

“What track is that?”

“I’ve found something in common in many of the eleven cases you asked me to look into — something other than the fact that the defendants either died unexpectedly or were later convicted of crimes of which you believed them to be innocent.”

“Yes?”

“Judge Lewis Kerr, sir.”

“Kerr? Are you certain?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Myles.”

“Of the eleven, nine of them had been tried before Judge Kerr on other charges.”

“And found guilty?”

“No, sir. The judge dismissed their cases. On what some would call technicalities.”

“Yes, but we all know what that means. When the police fail to obey the law, that law is suddenly reduced to a technicality.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the remaining two cases?”

“I believe we are looking at random chance there, sir.”

“You interest me, Myles. Tell me more about the other nine.”

And so Myles spent an hour reviewing cases with Mr. Dane. At the end of that time, Mr. Dane said, “I would like to have a conversation with Judge Kerr. I don’t think he is our enemy, but he has met our enemy.”

“‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’?”

“Something like that, yes.”

Myles glanced at the clock. “Later today Judge Kerr will dedicate the new courthouse building — the new annex, I should say.”

Dane smiled. “My dear Myles, what would I ever do without you?”

43

Friday, July 14, 7:00 A.M.

Las Piernas Airport

The Looking Glass Man sat in the cockpit of the Cessna, engine running, cleared for takeoff. He had completed his final preflight checks and taxied to the assigned runway, but now he hesitated.

He had laid his trap for Harriman. Harriman would be dead before he could back out of his driveway.

He knew Harriman had seen his van — damn those dogs! Still, he doubted Harriman suspected more than a little late-night snooping. At most, he might check to see if an arsonist had placed gasoline-soaked rags on his front porch. That was the behavior Harriman would expect of a man in a white van.

The Looking Glass Man had taken care of the porch light first. He had simply used a stream of ice water from a spray bottle to accomplish that. Then he had broken into the car and put the pressure bomb in place without incident. It was only when he lifted the hood that the dogs gave the alarm — the ignition device, probably an entirely unnecessary precaution, was the one that had nearly got him caught. But nearly getting caught was not what made him hesitate now.

It was Hitchcock, of course.

He had failed to see how deeply involved the man was with Dane. That was irritating. Years ago, when he made his plans to kill Trent Randolph, he had used Hitchcock — chosen him, because of all the members of the task force that was after Dane, he seemed the most vulnerable. Hitch often complained of being in debt. But like others in the department, he seemed completely devoted to putting Dane away.

To think he had been fooled! Fooled by that doughnut-eating dumpling Hitchcock!

It took so much of the pleasure out of Dane’s defeat. Why hadn’t he seen that if he could bribe Hitchcock, so could Dane?

The tower called, asking if there was a problem.

He replied that he wasn’t sure, that he was going to return to the hangar.

He had time to spare. One should never fly an airplane while distracted. If he had lived, Phil Lefebvre could have given lectures about that.

He made up a story for the mechanic about the engine not running smoothly. The mechanic, who had long shown his resentment of the Looking Glass Man’s desire for perfection, agreed to take a look at it.

The Looking Glass Man removed the smallest of the canvas bags from among his luggage, went into the restroom, and, after unfolding the plastic trash bag he carried in his pocket and laying it out on the floor, set the canvas bag on top of it. He took out a second, smaller bag and placed it on the edge of the sink. On this he neatly aligned the disinfectant spray, paper towels, glass cleaner, and good plain soap that he always carried with him, making sure all the labels pointed the same way.

His complaints to the owners of this property had ensured that this restroom was cleaner than many public restrooms, but that was not saying much at all.

He sprayed the disinfectant first, not because he would ever use the toilet in a place like this or even because he thought the spray was effective.

He liked the smell of it.

His mother had believed in the powers of this particular brand and had sprayed it rather liberally about their house. For the Looking Glass Man, this scent was as homey as that of baking cookies or hot mulled cider to others.

Next, he cleaned off the mirror.

He studied himself.

The man in the mirror seemed a trifle sad.

I know just the thing to cheer you up, he told the man in the mirror.

The man in the mirror appeared bashful.

Yes, I thought so. You should have just spoken up, you know. There’s really no reason to deny yourself the treat, is there?

The reflected face showed its complete agreement.

It’s settled, then. You’ve worked hard all these years. That was the trouble, wasn’t it? You can’t walk away — or fly away — now. Not when all you’ve dedicated yourself to is about to reach its conclusion. Well, you shall have your treat! A few minutes of watching the dust settle over Judge Kerr’s tomb won’t bring you to harm.

He looked away from the mirror and began to wash his hands. He didn’t use antibacterial soaps, because he believed that overexposure to antibiotics was bad policy. Warm water and soap would do the job. No use overdoing it.

When he was finished, he would don gloves and put everything away, carefully bagging the trash in the large plastic bag without touching the filthy bag itself. For now, he enjoyed the almost scalding water on his hands.

He heard a sound, an unfamiliar sound, that stopped almost as soon as he became aware of it. He smiled a little nervously as recognition came to him. He had been humming.

He never hummed.

Maybe he was happy.

He looked in the mirror and thought perhaps he was.

But still, he couldn’t be sure.

44

Friday, July 14, 7:00 A.M.

Las Piernas Police Department

Although the bomb squad had assured him that the car was free of explosives now, it had been hard for him to get in the driver’s seat and turn the key. He started to park in the department garage, decided he didn’t want to make it easy for the bomber to take another shot at it, and left the car a couple of blocks away.

There were three calls on his voice mail, two that had come in after he had left the office on Thursday. The first was from the FAA. Vince Adams, Michael Pickens, Paul Haycroft, and Dr. Al Larson had pilot’s licenses. No one else on Lefebvre’s list of suspects was on the FAA’s list.

The second was from Blake Halloran, the arson investigator, asking Frank to give him a call back. Frank called, but got Halloran’s voice mail. Phone tag.

The third was from Chief Hale’s secretary. The chief wanted Frank to meet with him at a quarter to nine.

He took the paper airplane from his pocket and studied it, then looked over at Vince’s desk.

The surface was dusty. Papers were piled up loosely in the in box. The phone sat in the middle of the blotter, where Vince had left it after his last call. Vince was only slightly less sloppy than Pete. Not the man he was after. Had he ever believed in the possibility? Vince? He felt a wave of shame. Yes, he had.

Then he told himself that he should have felt shame only if he hadn’t considered Vince as a suspect. He had to consider everyone, no matter how close they were to him. That was the problem with these cases all along — no one had looked at any member of the department other than Lefebvre.

Commissioner Pickens would not have had access to the property room. Which left Haycroft and Larson. Something Dane had said came back to him: “Who learns more about tricks of the criminal trade than police officers?”

A crime lab worker — especially one with years of experience. He wouldn’t just see it all, he would study it in detail. There was incredible range in these cases, the sort of range a criminalist would see, especially in a lab the size of the LPPD’s. Arson, explosives, booby traps, forgery. Murder.

He felt his stomach tighten. The implications of having a murderer working in the crime lab went far beyond the Randolph cases or Lefebvre’s death — what else had been tampered with? And how could such an expert be caught?

The lab wasn’t just a place to learn how crimes were committed, he realized. A criminalist would also know how to avoid getting caught — how to avoid leaving evidence — or how to leave just enough false evidence to point an investigation in a particular direction. He’d have easy access to the property room. Frank, working in an elite detective group like Homicide, didn’t have as much access to evidence.

While a detective handling evidence from a case to which he wasn’t assigned would risk discovery, lab workers handled evidence from many cases. A criminalist knew which investigators were working which cases — so that he would have known how to devise an anonymous tip that might interest Lefebvre or anyone else.

And somewhere along the way a forensic scientist might easily have learned how a man like Wendell Leroy Wallace devised a signature bomb to be placed under a car seat.

He felt his mouth go dry.

The bomb squad expert had said the maker of the bomb was neat and tidy — anal.

Al Larson’s pristine office came to mind. Even other workers in the lab thought he went too far in his demands for neatness. He would have the most access to the highest number of cases. He could walk into any crime scene and never be suspected of doing anything other than being a hands-on supervisor. He was probably the department liaison to the county investigation of the Wendell Leroy Wallace car-bombing cases. He had not only worn the type of watch the Amanda’s attacker wore, he had had a supply of them so that he could replace the DNA-laden watchband when new testing capabilities made that necessary.

He had means. He had opportunity. And he had motives in every case.

Randolph had been a man of science, someone who could have noticed irregularities in the lab. He had supported improvement of the lab, but he had also been critical of it. He was murdered the night before he was due to meet with the chief and other commissioners about problems in the lab. Larson had known about the meeting.

What if Larson suspected that Randolph’s report would lead to his being fired or worse?

Or worse. Frank frowned. What could have been worse for Larson?

Being discredited, unable to work in the field or to testify? Having previous cases overturned because of incompetence? Or corruption. Cases fixed against people like Whitey Dane. Tainting of evidence.

What if Trent Randolph was about to reveal something that might eventually lead to criminal prosecution of Larson? Frank thought of the lax property room procedures that had been in effect before Flynn stepped in. He thought of the watch in the evidence box.

Ten years ago, and Larson had been on the job at least fifteen — more than long enough to have learned all about Wendell Leroy Wallace. Jesus — how many cases might be affected?

Randolph had urgently wanted to meet with Hale, Pickens, Soury, and Larson. How desperate might Larson have been to prevent that meeting? There would have been a reprieve of sorts when the chief delayed the meeting until Monday morning. Time had been running out, though. Larson could have easily learned that Trent Randolph was going to take his new yacht to Catalina that weekend. He could have laid his plans and seen an opportunity to get a measure of revenge on an old enemy — Whitey Dane.

Larson had an excellent motive to seek revenge against Dane. One of Dane’s minions had murdered Larson’s only son.

Trent Randolph had to be stopped before he had a chance to meet with Hale and the others. The marina presented an opportunity to lay the blame on Dane.

Frank wondered if Amanda and Seth Randolph would have been spared if they had remained belowdecks. Amanda had gone up the companionway because she heard her father arguing with someone. Had she been killed because she heard Randolph say something that might identify his attacker? Perhaps Larson had planned to kill them — he could control physical evidence more easily than he could control witnesses.

Ironically, until the moment at the press conference when he reacted to hearing the watch, Seth was useful in pointing the blame toward Dane. Likewise, Phil Lefebvre became dangerous once it was clear he doubted that Dane was the killer.

Great, Frank thought. Now all he had to do was prove that any of it was true.

He called Hale’s office to say he’d be there at nine. Last night he had given the bomb squad expert the paper airplane contest entry form, on the remote chance that the sheriff’s department lab could learn something from it. He trusted Koza, his own department’s questioned documents man, but he found himself wanting to keep the evidence for these cases out of the reach of the LPPD.

Suddenly he remembered the neatly printed note from Larson, the one saying he had gone home sick, but wanted to meet about the Randolph cases. What had he done with it? He had read it and set it aside on his desk. He looked through his in box and all the desk drawers. Nothing. He told himself that it was one of hundreds of pieces of paper that crossed his path in a week, that he wasn’t clairvoyant and that yesterday he had no reason to think the note might become a piece of evidence. Still, he cussed himself out for not locking it up.

He decided to work with what he did have. He was going over Lefebvre’s notes again, looking at them to see if anything excluded Larson as a suspect, when Pete came in, sat down at his desk, and said, “Wish you would have let me know you didn’t plan to show up at the game last night. But maybe Vince is right — you don’t give a shit about anybody but yourself.”

Frank looked up.

Pete’s jaw dropped. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph — what the fuck happened to you?”

“I kicked a bad guy’s ass.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just a run-in with an asshole on the beach. I meet assholes everywhere these days.”

Pete frowned and looked as if he had more to say, but the phone on his desk rang. “Baird,” he answered.

Frank went back to Lefebvre’s notes, but he became aware, from Pete’s side of the conversation, that the grapevine was humming. “Hitch” and “Dane” and “confession” and “bomb squad” were said frequently. Without ever looking over at him, Frank knew Pete well enough to tell from his voice that he was shocked. The long silence that followed his hanging up the phone was as big an indicator as any. Frank timed it at a full five minutes before Pete said, “So…”

Frank waited.

“So… I hear you had a little trouble out at the house.”

Frank gave a short laugh.

“You doing all right?”

His head felt as if a team of mules was trying to buck its way out of his skull, he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in a week, and the simple act of starting his car this morning had nearly required more courage than he thought he could come up with. “I’m fine,” he said.

Vince came in, followed by Reed. They looked at him uneasily. So they knew, too.

“Everybody okay at your place?” Vince asked.

“Just dandy.”

He saw the others exchange glances.

“All this must be hard on the kid,” Pete said. “I like the little guy. He’s a tough little kid.”

“Lefebvre,” Frank said angrily. “The kid’s name is Seth Lefebvre. I know you don’t like the name much.”

“Oh, no,” Pete said. “I love the name Lefebvre. I can’t get tired of saying it. I’ve got the zeal of a convert now. Build a statue to the guy. Call the town the City of Lefebvre. I mean it. I can admit when I’m wrong.”

“Very big of you, Pete — but you’re wasting it on me. In another ten years, ask Seth to accept your apologies.”

“Frank—”

“Tell him you’re sorry you all had your minds made up about his dad, because his dad didn’t know how to be one of the boys. That you’re sorry you put your faith in a guy like Hitch instead of Lefebvre, because Hitch showed up for hockey games. Tell him that because of bullshit like that, you’re sorry his dad never had a chance to see what a ‘tough little kid’ he is.”

Vince and Pete looked away. Reed said quietly, “You’re right.”

“That’s no comfort to the kid, is it? Two nights ago he brings out one of his big treasures to show me. You know what it was, Vince? An answering machine tape. A goddamned answering machine tape. That’s the only way he could hear his own father’s voice. He’s nine, and he’s played it over and over — less than a dozen words. That’s what you left for the son of Phil Lefebvre.”

The room was silent.

“You give Lefebvre the cold shoulder, like the one I’ve been getting around here lately? What did he do to get cut out of the herd?”

“Look, I apologize for that, too,” Pete said. “But Phil — Frank, he was always a loner.”

“From birth? You never did anything to make the guy feel isolated, is that it?”

Pete opened his mouth to protest, closed it, and looked away.

“Yes, I read the files,” Frank said. “And you wonder why the guy didn’t trust you? Any of you?”

Pete turned red.

“Frank,” Vince said, “can’t we just put this all behind us?”

“What, Vince? Get together for breakfast, like old times?”

Frank strode out of the room.

Without conscious thought, really, of where he was going, he ended up at the lab. Once there, he decided to look for Haycroft. As the assistant director of the lab, Haycroft might have an idea as to Larson’s expertise and recent movements. The door to Haycroft’s office was closed, and Frank received no response when he knocked. He thought of the reprimand he had received from the toxicologist on the previous day, then tried the doorknob anyway. It was locked. Maybe the toxicologist had told everyone that he was going around stealing personal effects, such as photographs.

He looked through other areas of the lab, but didn’t see Haycroft. He noticed Larson’s door was open and peered in. There was a neat stack of papers in the center of the desk. The photograph was gone.

“Frank! What brings you here this morning?”

He turned to see Al Larson walking toward him. Smiling, although it faltered slightly at the sight of his black eye.

Frank forced a smile of his own and said, “What a surprise, right?”

Larson looked at him uncertainly. “What can I do for you?”

He was tempted to say, “You haven’t seen that note you left for me yesterday, by any chance, have you?” But he could see he had already made Larson wary — which wouldn’t help him build a solid case against the man. Or stay alive. “Actually,” he said, “I wanted to talk to Paul Haycroft.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Paul’s taking some time off. He won’t be in for a week.”

“Really? He didn’t mention anything about that when I saw him yesterday.”

“No, probably not. A death in the family. He called me at home late last night — he so seldom misses work, I couldn’t think of denying his request. Will this cause difficulties with any of your cases in progress? I’d be happy to give my personal attention to anything you need.”

I’m sure you would. “Thanks, but I’ll just wait until he returns.”

“Fine, then. Let me know if you change your mind.”

He had almost reached the door of the lab when Mary Michaels, the toxicologist, saw him. She winced at the bruises on his face.

He held up his hands and said, “I’m not taking anything with me this time, I promise.”

“Hmm,” she said, eyeing him. “Maybe I ought to pat you down, just to make sure.”

He looked away, embarrassed by the comment.

“Hell, no,” another voice said. “If you’re going to make offers like that, tell him you’ll strip-search him.”

He turned to see Vince.

“Jesus, Harriman,” Vince said, laughing. “You’re blushing.”

“Well,” she said to Vince, “nobody’s going to offer to strip-search you. You’ve already let every woman in the department see that you aren’t carrying a thing.”

“That’s not true,” Vince said. “I’ve never been naked with Louise Oswald.”

She made a face and walked away.

“We used to date,” he explained to Frank.

“Ah. That accounts for the rapport.”

Vince shrugged. “Yeah, that’s me. Mr. Smooth. You got a minute?”

Frank almost said no — it would have been easy to make up an excuse. He felt awkward, and angry still, and wished that Vince would have given him a little more time to cool off. But he wasn’t proud of losing his temper, and he didn’t want the tension between them to get worse. So he said, “Sure. Let’s move out of the doorway.”

A small table and two chairs were nearby. They moved a few steps closer, but neither man sat down.

“Upstairs,” Vince began, “you said something that’s been eating at me. About Phil. You really think he didn’t trust us? I mean — the guy seldom worked with partners, but I just figured he always thought he was better than us. Shit, he was better — at the job, anyway. But that’s different from thinking that the people you’re working with are crooked. And that’s what you meant, right?”

Frank hesitated, then said, “I don’t think it was a personal thing, Vince.”

“What the hell are you talking about? How can that not be personal?”

“I’m saying he didn’t know who in the department could be trusted, who couldn’t. It wasn’t a matter of mistrusting any one individual.”

Vince was clearly unsatisfied with this answer, but seemed unwilling to start a new argument with Frank. He indicated the lab door and asked, “You coming or going?”

“Going. I was trying to see Haycroft, but he’s on funeral leave.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry to hear that. That poor guy can’t have much family left.”

“What do you mean?”

Vince looked extremely uncomfortable. “You know — you read about the robbery.” Seeing Frank’s blank look, he added in a low voice, “The fax Irene sent you from the newspaper.”

“That was Larson’s son,” Frank said, bewildered.

“The hell it was. You think I don’t know who died in that robbery?” He sighed and shook his head. “Let me tell you something, Frank. Not a day goes by I don’t think about that family — every single one of those five people who were killed — and wonder if somehow — maybe if I’d been more patient with Lisa or forced her to get help…” He swallowed hard. “But I gave up on her, and look what happened. I let her go her own way after the divorce, and she gets mixed up with one of Dane’s bunch, and that prick Sudas kills the security guard, Haycroft’s ex-wife, Haycroft’s son, the ex’s new husband — Dillon — and Dillon’s little girl from his first marriage. And Lisa — I know Lisa, and I know she didn’t know what was going to happen, not really — and God knows fucking Sudas might as well have shot her, too, because in her head, that’s the last day that ever was. I know that as sure as I’m sitting here. I haven’t been able to look Haycroft in the eye ever since. He’s never said a word to me about it or blamed me in any way, but I sure as hell know that boy was his.”

Frank sat down. “My God.”

“Hey,” Vince said, “you feeling okay? You look a little pale.”

Frank leaned his elbows on the table and cradled his forehead in his palms. “My God…”

“Frank? Maybe you should have taken the day off. You’re looking like hell.”

“No — no, it’s not that, it’s just that — Haycroft — Jesus, Kit was Haycroft’s boy?”

“How many times I gotta tell you? Yes. Kit Haycroft. That’s why I feel sorry for the guy now—”

“Don’t. Don’t feel sorry for him,” Frank said. “When I think of those photographs of Amanda Randolph… and all the others! Christ, what a bastard!”

Vince narrowed his eyes. “You aren’t making a hell of a lot of sense.”

“Listen, you were asking about Lefebvre not trusting anyone. He was trying to figure something out — a day or so before he was murdered—”

“Murdered?”

It hit him, then. Just like Lefebvre, he had been working alone, not trusting anyone. He didn’t really blame Lefebvre — things had happened too quickly for him to figure out whom he could trust. Lefebvre didn’t have much more than a day to work out what might be going on with the case.

And now, ten years later, things were happening quickly again. If Haycroft’s arson attempt had succeeded in destroying the condo and everyone in it, who would have known where to look for Frank’s own killer? Or if one of the car bombs had done its work? In either case, Dane would have doubtless been blamed.

Over the past few days, Hale had heard Frank’s theories, but Hale was an administrator. He’d never get involved in a case the way these guys would. At the end of the day, Hale was what any other chief of police was — a politician. A politician who would always be thinking about the department’s image.

Frank looked at Vince, who was waiting for him to explain. He decided he wasn’t going to play it Lefebvre’s way.

“I’m talking about the fact that Phil Lefebvre was killed by someone in this department.”

Vince looked at him in utter bewilderment, as if Frank had suddenly spoken in a foreign language. “What?”

Frank looked over his shoulder — this part of the lab was still empty, but he felt ill at ease being anywhere near Haycroft’s territory. “Let’s go upstairs. I need to talk to you and Reed and Pete about this.”

Looking at their faces, seeing the mixture of disbelief and confusion and anger there, Frank thought that if he had taken the bombs that were in his car a few hours earlier and set them off in the middle of the squad room, the effect wouldn’t have been any less devastating.

They listened patiently while he outlined what he had learned as well as his theories. They had questions, but he could see that as each minute passed, they became more convinced. If he had given them the same information the day before, they would have accused him of going to wild lengths to clear Lefebvre’s name. But the events of the night before had changed everything.

At one point the Wheeze came by, and Frank asked her who had told her Larson wanted to speak to him the previous day.

“Paul Haycroft,” she said. “I’m sorry, I guess Dr. Larson had gone home by the time I gave you the message.”

“Haycroft must have put his son’s picture on Larson’s desk,” Frank said when she had left. “And then he made sure I went into Larson’s office when Larson wasn’t there. I walked into a staged scene.”

“Must have also made sure Larson went home sick,” Reed said.

“Mary did mention something about mocha lattes—”

“Oldest trick in the book,” Vince said. “Wonder if Haycroft bought any chocolate-flavored laxatives somewhere yesterday?”

“Why did he leave the photo?” Pete asked. “That was a big risk on his part.”

“Yes, but maybe not much of one. How likely was it that I would know whose child that was? He wanted me to walk away with a particular set of ideas about his boss.” Frank shook his head. “And I fell for it. I have to admit, the photo was the part of that whole scene that ultimately convinced me.”

“You didn’t have time to ask a lot about it, right?”

“I was in there late in the day,” Frank agreed.

“It’s like what you said about Lefebvre,” Vince said. “Haycroft did the same thing to you — he put pressure on you. You can be damned sure he knew what was safe for him to do and what wasn’t. You’re married to a reporter who’s lived here most of her life, so he probably figured you’d ask her if she remembered the story. He knew what was in the newspaper about his boy. If it was your kid, you would have had that article memorized, too.”

“The toxicologist almost blew it for him,” Reed said. “He had to be the one to tell you the story that went with that photo.”

“But if I had asked you, Vince—”

“He knew what the situation was in here — everybody in the department knows you’ve been getting the silent treatment.”

“Haycroft only needed to throw you off his scent for a few hours,” Pete said grimly.

“Right,” Reed said. “Just so he could have time to rig a couple of bombs and put them in your car. As of this morning, you weren’t supposed to be a problem.”

They again fell silent, looking at Frank in a way that made him say, “Cremation. And don’t let Pete give the eulogy — nobody wants to sit in a pew that long.”

“That’s not even funny,” Pete said. “You’ve come too damned close to being cremated already. That fire at Rosario’s place…” He shook his head.

“Pete’s right,” Reed said. “Think of what Haycroft knows about crime and killing people.”

“And here we were, being such fucking assholes—”

“I’m not ready to walk through the exit door yet,” Frank said, but he wondered what Haycroft’s next plan of attack might be. Once Haycroft realized that Frank was still alive, would he give up — leave the area? Or would he make some other attempt?

“So you think Randolph might have been on to something oddball going on in the lab?” Pete asked.

“Yes. I think that’s why it was important that he not be allowed to hold that meeting with the chief and the other commissioners. Until I talked to Vince about Haycroft’s boy, I thought the problem had been with Larson. Now I think Trent Randolph was probably going to ask Larson to get rid of Haycroft.”

“Or to charge him with a felony,” Vince said.

“Let’s talk to Larson,” Pete said.

Frank looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get over to Hale’s office. And I want to talk to Irene — since I don’t know what Haycroft might try next.”

“I’ll call downstairs and see if we can get a unit out to watch your place,” Vince said. “Between the car bombs and that business with Dane last night, no one should question it.”

“What are your plans for the day?” Frank asked, trying to keep his voice casual.

“What’s wrong?” Irene said. “Has something else happened?”

He briefly told her about Haycroft. “You remember what he looks like?”

“I think so. Brown hair, medium build?”

“Yes. Keep an eye out for him, but stay the hell away from him.”

“Sure. Okay to tell Seth and Elena about this?”

“Yes, absolutely — now tell me your plans.”

“Seth is coming to work with me this morning — he’s excited about seeing the newspaper. Elena has an appointment with her attorney.”

“She can afford one?”

Irene hesitated, then said, “None of our business, is it?”

“You talked Brennan into helping her out.” Brennan was one of Las Piernas’s top attorneys. Irene — who had needed his help more than once — was a personal favorite of his.

“She’s going to do some investigative work for him to repay him.”

He felt his anger toward Elena return, but decided that he had bigger worries for the moment. “So you’ll be in the office all day?”