They're Watching

Gratitude welled in my chest. My wife, reiterating the vows we'd made to each other on a cloth-draped altar, when everything was simple and the road ahead clear. I didn't realize back then, standing on weak knees as the priest droned on, what those vows meant. I didn't realize that they mattered most when they were hardest to uphold.

"No matter what"--my voice was low, hoarse with emotion--"we stay in it together."

Her arm tightened over my chest, and that sense of protectiveness rose in me again, even stronger.

"They weren't expecting me to get out of jail," I said. "I should get us each a gun."

"You know how to fire a gun?" Her head rustled against me as she looked up. "Me neither. And I doubt a firearm license would clear for the Davis family anytime soon. Plus, I don't think we want an unregistered gun floating around, not this week."

"They're still out there," I said. "And no one's looking for them. But you can bet they're watching us."

"Yes," she said. "But so is everyone else." Beyond our dark ceiling, a helicopter carved an arc, the whirring rising to a whine and then fading. "That makes us safe, at least for tonight. No one's gonna sneak in here past the klieg lights and threaten us. There are advantages to being watched. Everything that's thrown at us, we have to figure out how to use to our advantage. That's the only way out of this."

"Play the hand you're dealt."

"Detective Richards told you as much," she said. "There are questions we need to answer before a jury writes your name in the blank space with permanent ink."

"Who wanted Keith Conner dead. Who stood to benefit from his death. Who's standing behind a left-handed guy wearing size-eleven-and-a-half Danner boots with a pebble stuck in the tread."

"Tomorrow I'll look into criminal lawyers."

"And I'll keep digging," I said. "If I get something tangible, Sally and Valentine will have to listen."

"Or we'll find someone who will."

I slid down next to her. Moonlight, even through the cinched blinds, bathed our sheets in a pale glow. Ariana lay on her stomach, facing me as I was facing her. The line where her skin met the mattress perfectly halved her face. My hand was out, palm flat, before my cheek. Hers beside mine. We stared at each other, two parts of a whole. I could feel her breath on my face. I took her in. Right here, in front of me. The nearest beating heart this night and nearly every other for the past eleven years. Those dark curls, climbing the pillow she'd shoved up against the headboard. Etched at the edge of her eye, premonitions of crow's-feet. I'd watched them creep into existence these past few years, and I owned them as much as she did, owned the hurt and laughter and life that had gone into them. I wanted to be with her to see them deepen, and now I could no longer take for granted that I'd get to. She blinked long, and then again, and her eyes stayed shut.

I cleared my throat. "In good times and in bad."

She put her hand over mine, mumbled, "For better or worse."

I thought, Until we are parted by death.

Sometime around daybreak the helicopters left.

Chapter 38

After a few hours of stone-dead slumber, I jolted up, puffy-faced, the recollection of the prior day raging in my skull along with a headache I could practically hear. Transmitters and hidden lenses had haunted my sleep, and the first thought to chisel through my stirring panic was of Ariana's raincoat.

I crept downstairs. Seven A.M., and golden morning light fell through the break in the living-room curtains. Faint as it was, it made me squint. A harsh world out there, waiting.

The coat was hanging in the front closet, and I sat on the foyer floor and draped it across my lap. Deep breath. My fingers pinched the seam. Metal beneath. The tracking device remained, sewn into the fabric. I wasn't sure how long I sat there, rolling the bulge between finger and thumb, appreciating its existence, but I was startled to hear Ariana behind me.

"I already checked that it was there," she said, "after the cops left."

"Whoever's behind this removed the one from my Nikes but kept yours in," I said. "Which means they don't know that we were aware they bugged our clothing."

She held the jammer loosely at her side. "Why remove the one from your shoe and leave mine in?"

"I was supposed to be arrested, in which case the cops would've put my clothes and stuff through a security scanner. And they'd have been hard-pressed to explain why I planted a tracking device on myself."

"So what do we do with this?" She pointed at her jacket.

"Don't wear it. It's not raining, so even if they are still monitoring it, it won't seem suspicious that you left it behind. If you go out or into work, keep your cell phone off--remember, they can track that, too. Have Martin or one of the carpenters meet you in the parking lot and walk you from your car."

"I'm not going in today," she said. "It's a mad house even there, and besides, I need to start calling lawyers."

"Whenever you're home, keep the alarm on."

"Patrick," she said, "I know how to be careful."

She went into the kitchen, surveyed the mess on the floor where the cops had dumped the drawers and the trash bin, then gave a shrug, plucked a pan from the heap, and set it on the burner. I took the jammer, went up to my office, and stared at the blank desk. My thoughts were scattered, but I figured I had to start with Keith. Getting information about a movie star's private life was hard enough, even without a murder complicating matters. I needed people who knew how he spent his days and with whom, people who might not mind talking to the lead suspect in his murder. The list was short. In fact, it was two names.

Using the throwaway cell phone I'd given Ariana, I tried to dial, but the thing wouldn't work. After a few more attempts, I realized that the jammer was knocking out the signal. So I returned the jammer to Ari and went out into the backyard, which I figured more likely to be clear of surveillance devices. I made an anonymous call to my former agency and had a kid in the mail room get me the number of the production office for The Deep End. When I called over, giving a fake name, the assistant was short with me, weary from fielding calls about Keith's murder. She refused to give me any contact information for Trista Koan. Keith had mentioned that Trista had flown in for the production, which meant corporate housing, hotels, or a sublet, which in turn meant no easy trace. Predictably, I couldn't turn up a listing on her by calling information. And I didn't know where she was from.

Back in my office, I rifled through my drawers and finally came up with an ivory card bearing the name of the second person on my list. I found Ariana's laptop in the bedroom and Googled him. Endless photo credits--he was real, not an invention like Doug Beeman and Elisabeta.

Back outside to dial. The phone rang, and finally he picked up.

"Joe Vente."

"Patrick Davis."

"Patrick. Don't you think it's a little late to sell out Keith Conner?"

"I need to see you."

"That shouldn't be hard."

"Why not?"

"I'm camped out in front of your house."

I hung up, walked back inside, and peeked through the living-room window. Shadows in drivers' seats, but I couldn't make out faces. My car and Ari's remained floating off the curb; I'd have to move hers into the garage before I left for my meeting at school. From the kitchen Ariana called out, "Poached eggs?"

"I don't think I can eat."

"Me neither. But going through the motions seems like a good idea."

I pointedly didn't say anything, and a moment later I heard a click--her turning on the jammer. After sixteen years her ability to read my mind was staggering. I called out, "I'll be right back. I'm going to see Keith's paparazzi stalker. He's right outside."

She said, "Play the hand you're dealt."

When I stepped onto the porch, a few car doors opened and slammed, and then a couple of guys jogged toward me toting cameras and trailing wires. A female reporter ripped the paper makeup collar from around her neck and charged, wobbly on her high heels. I felt tentative, exposed in the sunlight, but I had the world to face and everything to prove, and I wasn't going to prove it holed up in my house with the curtains drawn. On blind faith I walked to the end of the walk, and sure enough a van materialized and the door rolled open. I stepped in, and we pulled out and away. Joe hunched forward, smoking, humming along with Led Zeppelin on a crackly stereo and tapping the wheel. His shiny scalp was visible through thinning yellow hair, and he was growing the back out into a ponytail that hadn't quite gotten there. The van was equipped for a stakeout--cooler, sleeping bag, hot plate, camera with giant zoom lens, swivel chairs, stacks of magazines and newspapers with porn mixed in.

He drove around the block, pulled over, then climbed back to sit opposite me. The carpeted interior held the fragrance of incense. "You're a hot ticket."

"I want to talk to you about Keith."

"Lemme guess: You didn't do it."

"No," I said. "I didn't."

"Why are you bothering with a scumbag like me?"

"I need to know what Keith was up to in the days before he was killed. I figure nobody followed him as closely as you."

"You got that right. I know every fucking coffee house and production office and midnight booty call. Hell, I know every dry cleaner his clothes visited." His cell phone piped out an old-fashioned ring, and he snapped it open. "Joe Vente." He chewed a chapped lip. "Britney or Jamie Lynn? What's she wearing? How many frames they have left to bowl?" He checked his watch, rolled his eyes for my benefit. "Not worth the drive. Call me next time right when they get there." The phone disappeared back into a pocket, and he bared his teeth at me. "Another day in paradise."

"Did Keith ever overlap with a company called Ridgeline, Inc.?" I asked.

"Never heard of it."

"Do you know his life coach?"

"Life coach?" He snorted. "You mean that hot blond bitch? Course I do."

"Can you get me an address?"

"I can get you whatever you want."

I waited. Waited some more. Finally asked, "In return for what?"

"Photos of you and a rundown of exactly what happened in that hotel room. And I want it for tomorrow's headlines."

"Not gonna happen. Not for tomorrow. But I can promise you an exclusive as this thing unfolds."

"'As it unfolds'? My business is all about tomorrow. No one's gonna pay my quote as it unfolds. As it unfolds, everyone gets it. It becomes a court and press-release game, not an inside sneak peek. The more it drags on, the more it favors Big News."

"Big News?"

"You know, legitimate--and I use the word with great reverence--news outlets. Not opportunistic camera whores like me. You need to understand that you're a perishable commodity. There's a limited window for Patrick Davis in His Own Words. Look at your front yard. There were, what, fifty of us there last night? Eight this morning? By next month it'll be the lone sharks sipping from brown paper bags and hoping to catch you sunbathing nude so they can make page four of The Enquirer, because pages one, two, and three will be filled with bullshit leaks from RHD and squalid details of the investigation."

"I don't even have a lawyer yet. I can't go on record. I can't talk about anything to do with this case."

"Then why are you coming to me about Conner's schedule?"

"I can offer you a long-term play. And it's a good one."

"I'm not a long-term thinker."

I leaned over and rolled the door open. When I turned, the giant zoom lens covered his face, the clicking a continuous whir. I held up the film I'd stripped from his camera, then tossed it past him into the messy interior. "If you change your personality, give me a ring."

Chapter 39

Pulling in to the faculty lot, I felt enormous relief. Finally something recognizable. Some part of a routine preserved from the time before I entered Room 1407. I was human here, again.

I checked my rearview to make sure the news-van tails hadn't reappeared, then parked and headed for Manzanita Hall. At the edge of the quad, a few guys sat on a bench, spitting sunflower shells, and it was only once I passed behind them unnoticed that I registered the camera straps around their necks. Like most of the other paparazzi I'd seen, they weren't the sweaty pigs of the movies, but attractive young men in trendy shirts and slick North Face jackets, their designer gloves cupping lenses. They looked like you or me. Chagrined, I noted a few more camped out on the front steps of Manzanita, along with a news crew. My soft leather briefcase, full of student papers, felt suddenly like a prop. A few heads swiveled my way.

I hurried around behind the building, startling an Asian student, who took one look at my face and gave me a wide berth. The back door was locked. I could hear approaching footsteps from around the corner, so I banged on the window. A face appeared inside.

Diondre.

For a frozen moment, we regarded each other. His trademark do-rag was off, his hair made up in cornrows. Down the length of the building, a cluster of photographers spilled into view. One spotted me, and they surged forward. I gesticulated behind me helplessly, then at the door.

Finally Diondre got it, reached over, and pushed down the door handle.

I slid inside, yanking the door shut after me. It locked just as the paparazzi swarmed into sight. Diondre tugged down the window shade.

Though I was shaking, he gave me the carefree grin. "Guess I was wrong about Paeng Smoke-a-Bong. Couldn't be a student stalker. No-o-o--you had to have bigger plans."

I managed a weak smile and nodded at the door. "You just saved my ass."

"Did you do it? Kill Conner?"

After everything, it was refreshing to have such a straightforward conversation. "No," I said.

"I hear that." He clasped my hand, grabbing it around the thumb, and we parted ways. That was all he needed to hear. That's what I loved so much about students--they could distill the complexities down to simple questions. And answers.

A few steps away, Diondre paused. "I know it ain't the most glamorous job in the world, teaching. But I'm glad you're doing it."

I looked down, my face warm. I couldn't manage to get the right words together, so I said, "Thank you, Diondre. I'm glad, too."

He half nodded and walked away.

I took the stairs up and slunk through the halls, my name audible in the whispers that followed me.

The department assistant's hands were folded on her blank desk. "She's waiting for you."

When I entered, Dr. Peterson looked up from some papers. "Patrick. Please, sit down."

I did, mustering a faint grin that felt hard and rigid on my face.

She said, "The department has been inundated with press inquiries. It's been something of a spectacle."

I waited, my dread mounting.

She said, "We received numerous complaints even before the unfortunate events of . . . of--"

I said, "Keith Conner's murder."

She flushed. "Not just about the missed classes, but I guess your grading on their scripts has been delayed?" She nodded at my briefcase, which sat on my knees, a beacon of my incompetence. "Are they done now?"

"No," I said. "I . . . I'd like the chance to make it up to them." She started to say something, but I held up my hand. "Please," I said. "I'm sorry for the impact that this has had on the department, but just because I'm a suspect doesn't mean . . . I don't know how long the investigation will last. Months, maybe. Life has to go on, even if . . ." I was crumbling. I hated the sound of my voice, but I couldn't stop. "Our financial situation--I really need to earn a living. I know there's some damage control I'll have to--"

Mercifully, she cut off my rambling. " 'Damage control'? I don't believe you have any idea what kind of a disruption this represents for this college."

"I'll work double-time. I won't miss another class."

"What do you think? You can defend yourself against potential murder charges and somehow improve your attendance record?"

I didn't know what I had thought. In light of everything I had before me, it certainly sounded stupid now. I said hopelessly, "Maybe I could take a leave of absence."

"Funny, it seems that's what you've been doing." She rearranged the papers on her desk. She jotted a note. "Our feeling is that this isn't a tenable situation."

Through the gap in my briefcase, I could see those student papers staring out at me. For two weeks I'd kept those kids on hold. Some of them, like Diondre, could scarcely afford tuition, and yet I'd spent all this time scrambling to defend myself against one threat after another. I took a deep breath, tried to pull myself together.

She continued, "We've kept documentation. It's quite cut and dried. I hope you won't consider . . ."

I could hardly muster the energy to lift my head. "What?"

"Legal . . . ?"

"No. Oh, no. Of course not. You took a gamble on me, and I blew it." I rose to offer my hand across her desk, and she came up to a crouch above her chair, her hand cool in mine. I said, "Thank you for the opportunity."

She did her best to disguise her relief. "I'm sorry for all your trouble, Patrick. I really am. And I'm sorry to come on like a hard-ass when you're dealing with . . ."

I set the papers at the edge of her desk, gave them a tap with a knuckle. "Find someone good for my students."

Walking out, I was overtaken by a profound sadness. It sank in just how much I loved my job, but that wasn't what hit me the hardest. The grief I felt came from how infrequently I'd paused to appreciate being here, as with so many other aspects of my life I'd failed to recognize and savor.

From the outer office, I peeked out into the hall, checking that it was empty. Feeling like a fugitive, I hurried through the corridors. In the faculty lounge, Marcello reclined on the fuzzy plaid couch, pretending to grade, and Julianne was fussing irritably over the coffeemaker. Like old times.

From the doorway I said, "I'll miss you guys."

They both looked up, and then their expressions changed.

"Really?" Julianne rushed over and embraced me tightly.

"Yeah. I just relinquished the last of the student papers."

"Goddamn it, Patrick. This sucks." Her breath smelled of cinnamon gum.

Marcello offered his hand. I said, "C'mon," and hugged him.

Julianne was hovering. "How's Ariana? What can I do? There's gotta be something I can do."

"Honestly?"

"No, I was just being polite."

"I need a couple of addresses for people. A commercial actress and one of the producers from that documentary Keith was gonna do."

"Industry folks?" she said. "That shouldn't be hard."

"The cops had no luck with the former, and I'm having trouble with the latter."

She said, "Neither of you has a degree in investigative journalism from Columbia."

Marcello said, "Neither do you."

Julianne shrugged. "Columbia, Chico State, whatever."

Sitting, I jotted down, Elisabeta, aka Deborah B. Vance and Trista Koan--The Deep End.

Julianne took up the slip of paper and said, "If I can't get a bead on them myself, I still have good contacts at the papers."

"I should go," I said. "I've got . . . you know, a lot I have to figure out. Thank you. For the whole thing. The job. Getting me back on my feet. It was a good time for me."

Beyond the lounge, doors opened and closed, the buzz of students growing louder.

"I should go," I said again. But I was still sitting there.

"What's wrong?" Marcello asked.

I took a deep breath.

He followed my gaze to the door. "Scared?"

"Little bit."

"Wanna go out like a man?"

I said, "Yeah."

Marcello cleared his throat. "A NEW BEGINNING . . ."

I got to my feet.

"A MAN ALONE . . ."

I walked to the door.

"AND NOW HE WILL LEARN THAT NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME."

The hall was alive with motion and noise. When I stepped out, the nearby students froze. The reaction rippled outward, faces turning in wave after wave, hands and mouths pausing midmotion, until the corridor was so silent I could hear the squeak of a sneaker against tile, a BlackBerry chiming in someone's pocket, a single cough. As I stepped forward, the nearest clique parted, drawing back and gaping anew.

My voice sounded gruff, preternaturally low. " 'Scuse me . . . 'scuse me."

The kids farthest away were up on tiptoes. A professor leaned out the door of her classroom. A few students snapped pictures of me with their cell phones.

I forged my way through. A conversation burst from the opening elevator doors, gratingly loud in the strained silence, and then two girls stepped out, took stock of the scene, and ducked giggling behind their hands. I passed them stoically, dead man walking.

The elevator had gone, leaving me to confront blank metal doors. I pushed the button, pushed it again. Glanced nervously across the sea of faces. Way down the hall, Diondre stood on a chair he'd pulled from a classroom. I raised a hand in silent farewell, and he smiled sadly and tapped his chest with a fist.

Mercifully, the elevator arrived, and I vanished into it.

Chapter 40

Muted by a coating of dust, the crime-scene tape fluttered across the door. The knob hung a little crooked, broken from the forced entry, and it came off in my hand. I pushed the door open, ducked under the tape, and stepped into the lonely little prefab house I still thought of as Elisabeta's.

The emptiness was startling. Most of the furniture had been cleared out. No bowl of cashews, no banana peels, no porcelain cats and wicker bookshelf. The coffee table stood on end. How clean the place had been. I'd taken it as a reflection of Elisabeta's quiet dignity, never guessing that the furniture had no dust because it had probably just been rented. Another misassumption I'd been primed to make.

I'd been hustled like a rube in a Chicago pool hall.

I crouched, my face burning, fingertips set down on the thread-bare carpet for balance. It wasn't embarrassment, but shame. Shame at my transparency, at how common my hopes and needs must have seemed to this cast of players. At how common they had proven me to be.

With noble indignation, Elisabeta had crossed this very floor to her granddaughter's bedroom. I pictured her, that grave face taut with grief, that hand resting on the knob of the closed door. You come see this beautiful child. I will wake her. You come see and tell me how I am to explain her this is her story.

And me, the concerned fool: No, please. Please don't disturb her. Let her sleep.

I followed Elisabeta's path, opened the door.

A coat closet.

Two wire hangers and a trash bin into which Elisabeta's snow globes had been dumped. They lay cracked and dribbling, price tags still affixed to the bottoms. Props. Beneath them the school photo of the little girl with the frizzy brown hair. The frame had cracked. I raised it, sweeping off the pebbles of broken glass. The picture was thin and came out easily. Not a photograph, but a color copy.

It had come packaged with the frame.

A chill crept along my scalp, down the back of my neck. I dropped the frame into the trash again.

When I stepped back outside, the wind whipped up clouds of dust and snapped my pants at my shins. I walked the front of the house, finally finding what I'd been hoping for: a hole in the hard dirt of a flower bed where a rental sign had been staked. Driving slowly around the housing loop, I called the numbers on various signs hammered into front lawns until I tracked down the right Realtor who also represented Elisabeta's house. When I told her I was interested in the property but curious about the crime-scene tape, she'd been only too eager to reiterate what she'd already told the cops and, from the sound of it, everyone else: It had been a one-month rental paid by money order, the transaction conducted by mail. She'd never seen a soul, and no one had even bothered to come back to collect the balance on the security deposit. Of course, she'd never imagined . . .

Nothing linked that house to me except my word and my memory, both of which were of questionable merit.

Elisabeta was my only breathing connection to the men who had killed Keith and framed me. She alone could corroborate my story, or at least a key part of it, which would go a long way toward clearing my name. She was also at grave risk. Valentine had been unable to locate her, and I doubted that Robbery-Homicide was knocking themselves out to do better.

I thought about jail, about prison, the movies I'd seen and the horror stories I'd heard. That tattooed inmate I'd passed in the corridor at the Parker Center, how the metal chains seemed barely to contain his muscles, how I'd flinched away, a pebble before a crashing wave. What could a man like that, unbound, do to a man like me?

If I couldn't find Elisabeta myself, she'd wind up like Doug Beeman.

And, chances were, so would I.

* * *

I vaulted over our rear fence, one foot on the greenhouse roof, and then down onto the overturned terra-cotta pot and the soft mulch of the ground. A reversal of the leap the intruder had made when I'd discovered him on the back lawn. I'd left my car up the street behind our house so I could come and go unmolested by the media stragglers out front. Since I didn't carry a key for the back door, I circled toward the garage. When I yanked open the side gate, I nearly collided with someone crouched by the trash cans. He and I both let out startled yells. He fell over himself running away, and only then did I see the camera swinging at his side.

Leaning against the house, I caught my breath in the grainy dusk.

Ariana was sitting cross-legged on a spot of cleared kitchen floor, notes fanned in a half circle around her. We hugged for a long time, my face bent to the top of her head, her hands gripping and regripping my back as if she were taking my measure. I breathed her in, thinking how for six weeks I could have done this whenever I wanted and yet for six weeks I hadn't done it once.

I followed her to her workstation--she was always most productive spread out on the floor--and we sat. The ubiquitous fake cigarette pack sat beside her laptop, and a sturdy Ethernet cord trailed to the modem she'd moved into the kitchen; wireless Internet couldn't work with the jammer on. She clicked through a few e-mails. "I was on the phone with lawyers all day," she said. "Referrals and referrals from referrals."

"And?"

"Referrals from referrals from referrals. Okay, I'll stop. The bottom line is that to get anyone worth having, we're gonna need at least a hundred grand for a retainer in case the arrest happens. Which, based on courthouse scuttlebutt that most of them were too happy to impart, seems to be more of a when than an if." She watched this news sink in, her face matching what I was feeling. She continued, "I was on with the bank, and we can max out the home-equity line, which with our income--"

I said quietly, "I got fired."

She blinked. Then blinked again.

"I don't know what to do but keep apologizing," I said.

I braced for anger or resentment, but she just said, "Maybe I can sell my share of the business. I've had buyers sniffing around in the past."

I was speechless, humbled. "I don't want you to do that."

"Then we'll have to sell the house."

When our down payment was sitting in escrow, Ariana and I used to drive up here and park across the street just to look at the place. The trips felt charged and vaguely illicit, like sneaking out at night to loiter beneath the window of your high-school sweetheart. When we'd moved in, with Ari's eye, my back, and our sweat, we'd dressed it up, planing out the cottage-cheese ceilings, switching the brass hinges for brushed nickel, replacing rust carpet with slate tile. I watched her eyes moving around our walls, our art, the countertops and cabinets, and I knew she was taking stock of the same sentiments.

"No," she said. "I won't sell this house. I'll go in tomorrow and see what I can figure out. Maybe a loan against the business. I don't . . . I don't know."

For a moment I was too moved to respond. "I don't want you to--" I caught myself, rephrased. "Do you think it's safe for you to go in to work?"

"Who knows what's safe anymore? Certainly not you prying around. But we no longer have any options."

I said, "You do."

Her mouth opened a little.

I said, "This is hell. And it's going to get worse from here. It makes me sick to think about you having to . . . Maybe we should think about putting you on a flight--"

"You're my husband."

"I haven't been much good on that front lately."

She was angry, indignant. "And, if you want to keep score, I've been a shitty wife in a few obvious ways. But either the vows mean something or they don't. This is a wake-up call, Patrick. For both of us."

I reached for her hand. She squeezed once, impatiently, and let go. I said, "No matter how many years it takes, I will figure out some way to make this up to you."

She managed a faint smile. "Let's just worry about making sure we have those years." She shoved a fall of hair out of her eyes, then looked at the notes around her, as if needing to take refuge in details. "Julianne called. She said she looked into the names you gave her, to no avail. I guess between the cops, the agents, and the press, everything around The Deep End went into information lockdown, so there's nothing on Trista Koan. And Julianne had no more luck than Detective Valentine finding out about Elisabeta--or Deborah Vance or whoever. She was very apologetic, Julianne. She's desperate to be helpful. Did you check out that prefab house in Indio?"

I told her what I'd learned--or hadn't learned--on the trip. "What was so amazing is the level of detail that woman saw to. I mean, the accent, the banana peels. Her performance was amazing."

"Where would you find people to play those roles? I mean, how would you even locate talent like that? Let alone talent willing to work a con?"

As usual, she'd jumped into my stream of thought. "Exactly. Exactly. You'd need an agent. A sleazy agent willing to plug his clients in to cons."

"Would an agent do that?" she asked.

"Not any I've heard of. So I'd imagine if you found one willing to play ball, you'd probably stick with him."

She got it immediately. "Doug Beeman's agent," she said. "That message. On Beeman's cell phone. Asking him why he missed his call time on the set for the shaving-cream commercial."

"Deodorant," I said. "But yes. Roman LaRusso."

Already she was typing. "And what was Doug Beeman's real name?"

"Mikey Peralta."

She paired them, and the search engine threw back its results. Sure enough, a Web site. The LaRusso Agency, in an average neighborhood that the site announced as "Beverly Hills-adjacent." Head shots of various clients formed a row, the photos spinning like slot-machine reels, replacing themselves. From the looks of it, LaRusso repped character actors. Barrel-chested Italian, cigar wedged between stubby fingers. Scowly black woman, curling red nails pronounced against a yellow muumuu. Mikey Peralta, grinning his offset grin. We watched with held breath as the little square head shots flipped and flipped, replenishing themselves. All those cheekbones, all those dimples, all that promise. The precious slideshow seemed an inadvertent commentary on Hollywood itself--dreamers and wannabes tethered to a gambling machine, their faces replaceable, interchangeable. And, as Mikey Peralta had learned, expendable.

I tensed with excitement and pointed. There she was. Her photo flashed up only for a few seconds, but there was no mistaking those doleful eyes, that profound nose.

Ariana said, "That's exactly how I pictured her."

The deck of photos shuffled Elisabeta back into obscurity.

I sat in the dark of the living room, peering out at the street. The front lawn gleamed with sprinkler water. I couldn't make out any vans or photographers or telescopes in the apartment windows across the street. They were still there, hidden in the night, but for a moment I could pretend that everything was as it had always been. I had come down to sit in the armchair and sip a cup of tea, to think about a lesson plan or what I wanted to write next, my wife upstairs in a plumeria bubble bath, on the phone with her mom or reviewing sketches, and I would go up, soon, and make love to her, and then we'd slumber, her arm thrown across my chest, cool beneath the lackluster heating vent, and I'd awaken, find her in the kitchen with bacon on the griddle and a lavender mariposa in her hair.

But then Gable and his compatriots came crashing through the fantasy. I pictured them laboring even at this late hour in the detective bullpen, charts and timelines and photographs spread on desks and pinned to walls, piecing together a story that had already mostly been written. Or maybe they were already speeding up Roscomare with renewed determination and a signed warrant. Those headlights there, touching the artless block of boxwood framing the steps of the apartment across. But no, just a 4Runner, slowing to rubberneck, gaping college faces at the window, taking in The House.

My tea had gone cold. I dumped it in the kitchen sink, walked past the spilled trash, and trudged upstairs. A car backfired, and I actually left the floor; I'd been braced for RHD to kick down the front door. How would we live, waiting, knowing that that moment could come at any time, and probably the instant we let down our guard?

The TV was on, Ariana curled in bed, watching a candlelight vigil taking place in Hollywood. Teddy bears and photo montages. A weepy teenager held up a fan picture of Keith as a young boy. Even as a child, he was astonishing to look at. Perfect features, pug nose, that well-proportioned jaw. His hair was sandy blond, lighter than it had become. He held the end of a garden hose and wore a bathing suit and cowboy six-shooters in double hip holsters, and his smile was pure delight.

The news cut away to the Conners' house in Kansas. Keith's father, a fireplug of a man, had a rough-hewn, almost ugly face. I remembered he was a sheet-metal worker. His wife, a stocky woman, had the pretty cheekbones and singer's mouth that Keith had inherited. The sisters also took after their mother--small-town pretty dressed up with new money. Mom was crying silently, comforted by the daughters.

Mr. Conner was saying, "--bought us this house right here after his first deal. Put both the girls through college. Most generous soul I've ever known. Cared about the world around him. And he knew what he was doing up there on the screen. Got his mother's looks, lucky for him." A tearful smile from his wife, and he caught her eye and looked away quickly, and then the creases in his wind-chapped face deepened and his bottom lip rose, clamping over the top, trying to hold it still. "He was a good kid."

Ariana turned off the TV. Her face was heavy.

I asked, "What?"

She said, "He was real."

Chapter 41

There was no receptionist, just a desk with a bell. When I rang, a familiar wheezy voice called, "Just a minute," through the open office door. I sat on the lopsided couch. The trades on the glass table dated from November and the sole Us Weekly had been used to mop up a coffee spill. An antique sash window, warped with dry rot, looked out five feet to a brick wall, but a glimpse of billboard was visible in the sliver of sky above. I knew the one; I'd seen it go from Johnny Depp to Jude Law to Heath Ledger and now to Keith Conner. I was weary of this town. My life here had traced a brief arc from obsolete to defunct, and from where I was, even the big time didn't seem so big anymore.

Finally the voice called out again, rescuing me from the waiting room. The office looked to be a movie set from the fifties. Crooked venetians, stacks of files rising architecturally from every surface, an artichoke of cigarette butts blooming in a porcelain ashtray, all suffused with a yellowed light that seemed dated in its own right.

Crammed behind a chipped desk, visible through a flight path between piles of paperwork, Roman LaRusso was overweight, but his face was fatter than he was, blown Ted Kennedy wide at the cheeks so the bulges tugged his earlobes forward. He was immersed, it seemed, in work and didn't favor me with even a cursory glance through the delicate rectangular reading glasses screwed into either side of his jiggling lion's mane. It wasn't a disgusting face, not at all. It was improbable, magical, something to behold.

I said, "I'm interested in Deborah B. Vance."

"I no longer represent her."

"I think you do. I think you hired her out for a con job."

He made a big show of reading something on his desk, frowning down over the glasses and breathing ponderously through his nose, which gave off a faint whistle. Then he put away his glasses in a case the size of a nail buffer and finally looked up. "Admirably direct. Who are you?"

"The lead suspect in the Keith Conner murder."

"Uh . . ." He didn't get further than that.

"You specialize in commercials?"

"And features," he said quickly, by habit. "Did you see Last Man on Uptar?"

"No."

"Oh. Well, a client was one of the aliens."

Eight-by-tens graced the walls, a few I recognized from the Web site, along with midgets, an albino, and a woman missing both arms.

He followed my gaze. "I don't like the pretty ones. I represent talent with character. Actors with disabilities, too. It's sort of a niche. But it means more to me. Don't think I don't know what it's like to be stared at." He put his knuckles on the blotter and tugged to pull in his chair, but it didn't budge. "I give my clients a place in the sun. Everyone wants to fit in. Have a piece of that sunshine."

"Is that what you did for Deborah Vance?"

"Deborah Vance, if that's what you're calling her, didn't need anybody to look after her."

"What's that mean?"

"She's a hustler, that one. Ran lonely-hearts scams. Chat-room stuff. She'd e-mail pictures to men, they'd wire her money to set up a condo in Hawaii for assignations, that sort of thing."

"Her?"

"She didn't send pictures of herself. Thus the death threats."

"Death threats?" It was becoming clear not just why they'd chosen Deborah Vance but how they planned to cover their tracks when they erased her from the picture.

"Nothing to be taken seriously," he continued. "Men don't like being embarrassed, that's all. Especially when their good intentions are preyed on."

"Tell me about it."

"So she went to ground, switched off names, that kind of stuff. We lost touch. Her and me had a good run on commercials a few years back. They were booking a lot of ethnics. I got her a Fiberestore and two Imodiums." He smirked. "No business like show business, right? But I never got involved in her scams."

"Then how do you know about them?"

He hesitated too long, saw that I'd noticed. "We used to talk."

"Why's she still on your home page?"

"I haven't updated that thing in ages."

"Yeah, I noticed a picture of a client who's deceased."

He looked down sharply, his features sliding on their cushioning. A drawer rattled open, and then he mopped at his neck with a handkerchief. "The cops said Mikey had an accident."

"They came to see you?"

"No. I read . . ."

"They know about Peralta and Deborah Vance but haven't figured out you as the connection. You should tell them you sent her to the same guys you sent him to."

His considerable weight settled, and he tugged miserably at his ruddy face. "I get these side jobs sometimes. It's legitimate work. Mall openings. Dinner theater. Kids' parties or whatever. People want to rent certain types sometimes." Sorrow had worked its way into his voice. "I couldn't have known. . . . It was just a hit-and-run. Mikey drank some. The papers said it was a hit-and-run."

"No," I said. "Mikey Peralta was killed because of this job."

LaRusso's face shifted; he'd known but had managed to keep it from himself at the same time. "You don't know that."

"I'm on the inside of this thing. I do know."

He balled the handkerchief in a fist. "Did you really kill Keith Conner?"

"You think I'd be here trying to save your client if I had?" I said. "Make no mistake: They will kill Deborah Vance next. And then they'll probably come after you."

"I don't . . . I don't know anything about the guy. Everything over the phone. Money orders. I never even saw a face. Jesus, you really think . . . ?" His eyes were leaking from the edges, and the tears were confused about which way to go.

"She has to be warned."

"Like I told the guy, all she gives out anymore is an e-mail. I don't even have a better way to reach her." He couldn't hold my stare, and finally he gazed up. He flipped through some papers, tipping a stack of folders onto the barely visible floor and came up with a leather planner. His hands were trembling. "She hasn't been answering her phone."

"Then give me an address," I said. "And get yourself out of town."

She opened the door and laughed at me. It wasn't to mock me, I didn't think, but to underscore the absurdity of our meeting again, here, in a ground-floor apartment in Culver City. Her affect and bearing--her very posture--were completely different from Elisabeta's. Even that cackle had a different timbre; it was somehow accentless. She looked well, as she had in the Fiberestore commercial--less puffy and worn. I wondered how much makeup it took to turn someone into a haggard Hungarian.

The fuzzy red bathrobe hanging to her knees made her look like Blinky from Pac-Man. Stepping back, she waved me in with a dramatic sweep of her arm. The cramped apartment gave off a humid floral scent, and I could hear a bath running. Pinching the lapels over her bare chest, she scurried back and turned off the faucet, then returned. "Well," she said.

I tried to get a read on whether she knew that I was a suspect in Keith's murder, but she seemed too blase about my appearance. No, it seemed I was still just a guy she'd scammed.

"You're in danger," I said.

"I've had people after me before."

"Not like this."

"How would you know?"

I still couldn't get used to the perfect English, how effortlessly her mouth shaped the words. I glanced around. Antique furniture, broken down but hanging on. A Victrola with a dent in the horn. Noir movie one-sheets covered the walls, and vintage travel posters: CUBA, L AND OF R OMANCE! Since moving to L.A., I'd been in a variation of this place countless times. All that style at garage-sale prices, all those fantasies projected onto the walls, the cloche hats, the deco coasters, the metal cigarette cases from another time, not your time--if only you'd lived then, things would've been different, you would've glided seamlessly into all that smoke and glamour. I thought of my own Fritz Lang movie print, bought with such pride at a schlock shop on Hollywood Boulevard the week I'd graduated college. I'd thought it was my initiation into the club, but I was just another kid trying too hard, buying a leather jacket two months after they'd gone out of fashion. If they don't let you walk the walk, doggone it, you can still lease a PT Cruiser.

"If I found you," I said, "they will, too."

"Roman gave you my address, I'm sure, because it's clear that you're harmless."

"You want to stake your life on Roman's backbone?"

"Roman would never hurt me," she said. "He's part pimp, sure, but part daddy, too. No one else connected to this knows my name or this address."

"What is your name?"

"This week? Does it matter?"

It did matter. Paired with an address, a real name--and, I hoped, a real rap sheet--it seemed concrete enough for me to try to reenlist Sally. But I'd have to let it go for now. "Can I call you Deborah?"

"Honey," she said, in a perfect Marlene Dietrich, "you can call me whatever you want."

"Does a company called Ridgeline, Inc., ring a bell?"

"Ridgeline? No."

"You never met whoever hired you," I said. "Phone calls and money orders."

"That's right."

"You must have thought . . ."

"What?"

We were still standing, a few feet inside the closed front door. I noticed her nails, that beautiful manicure that had seemed so out of place on a penniless waitress. "That I was an idiot."

"Oh, no," she said. "Not at all. You were so goddamned sweet it about killed me." Humiliation coursed through me like a fever; I couldn't meet her eyes. "That's why most cons work," she said in consolation . "Everyone wants to believe they're more important than they are."

The pity was worse somehow. And worse even than that, her empathy. I wanted to be nothing like her, and yet of course we shared the same broken promise, the same stymied dreams; she had reached right through the looking glass and tapped me down the primrose path.

"How did you even . . . ?"

"I was e-mailed a script. Well, more like a treatment. It had all the basics--sob story, sick kid, stingy health-insurance company. I filled in the rest. My background is mostly Russian, but how standard is that? Plus, with my luck you'd have had some bubby from the old country and known something about it. But I'm also Hungarian, I guess, and who the hell knows anything about Hungary? So you know how it works--it's like writing, I'd imagine. Those telling details. Budapest is too obvious, so I picked Debrecen, the second-largest city. They'd provided the affliction--the heart thing. But the bananas were my own touch. I figured you'd ask, you know? Sometimes you lead someone in from an angle, they don't see the obvious."

Despite her nod to our colleagueship, I doubted I'd ever had her talent or professionalism. I could no more contain my bitterness than she could her pride. "You're a gifted actress," I said. "You'll go far in this town."

"Too late for that. But I make a living."

"The cash . . . ?"

"A few hours after you left, I delivered the duffel bag to the trunk of a parked car on a quiet street."

"A white Honda Civic."

"How'd you know?"

I shook my head, not wanting to get off track. "They told you about me."

"Little bit. No more than last time."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Last time?"

"There was another guy." Now with the accent. "He come also to help poor Elisabeta and granddaughter with terrible illness."

I stared at her, dumbfounded. "Do you . . . Who? Who was he?"

As quickly as she'd transformed into the world-weary waitress, she'd morphed back again. "I don't remember his name. But he gave me his card. He was big on his business card. I have it here somewhere. . . ." She crossed to an apothecary cabinet with more tiny drawers than I could count and started searching them.

I said, "You don't understand what this whole thing is, do you?"

But she didn't break focus. "Hang on, I know I kept it."

After a few more moments watching her open and close drawers, I said, "Mind if I use your bathroom?"

"Not at all. The damn thing's here somewhere. . . ."

The bathroom window looked across a narrow strip of quartz and succulents to a matching window in the neighboring complex. The waiting bathwater thickened the air, misted the mirror. After closing the door behind me, I eased open the medicine cabinet, praying it wouldn't squeak. No prescription bottles inside, but I found a few in one of the drawers. The neat type read, Dina Orloff.

"Got it!" she called out triumphantly, mimicking my own sentiment. I gently pressed the drawer closed and turned to go, reaching for the knob. The doorbell shrilled in the tiny condo. I froze, the knob twisted in my hand. The button lock popped open into my palm.

Through the door I could hear her mutter something. Then a few padded footsteps.

The door opened with a jangle, and then there were two muffled percussions. A thump of body hitting carpet. Then the door closing, at least two sets of footsteps moving. Dragging.

My stomach clutched, and I fought not to gasp, not to start, not to do anything but breathe and rotate that doorknob slowly and silently back to its resting position.

If they'd followed me, then her death was my fault. And, obviously, they'd know I was here. If that were the case, I wouldn't live long enough for the guilt to seep in.

Barely audible--"Let's move, let's move."

The bedroom door banged open.

They were searching.

Holding my panic at bay, I crept across the bathroom and started turning the crank to open the casement window. The pane made a soft pop as it broke the seal and began to swing outward.

Now I heard the closet shutters one room over, raked back on their rails.

A drop of sweat ran down my forehead and stung my eye. I rotated the crank as quickly as I could, but the window seemed to move in slow motion.

That same voice: "Check the bathroom."

I tried to swallow, but my throat clicked dryly, wanting to gag.

Approaching footsteps. The window lazily rotated outward, wide enough for my foot, my calf, my thigh. Judging from the creak of the floorboards, the guy was right outside the bathroom door now.

I slithered through, the gap still tight enough to mash my nose against the pane. My sneakers grinding the rocks outside, I flattened to the wall, just out of sight of the window.

The bathroom door shoved open, banging the wall behind. Footsteps.

The sidewalk was no more than twenty yards away, but a single step on the rocks would broadcast my position. My head was craned to the side, taking in a thin sliver of bathroom floor. I breathed, prayed, willed my muscles still. If he came to the window and peered through the gap, I was dead.

When the next step creaked the floorboards, I saw the toe of a black boot come into view. Through my terror it hit me that I was probably looking at a size-eleven-and-a-half Danner with a pebble jammed in the tread.

If they had followed me here, he'd probably think to check outside. But that boot remained, still. What was he looking at?

Held breath burned in my lungs. Every muscle taut. My unblinking eyes stung. He was maybe four feet away; I could probably reach through the window opening and tap him in the chest. The faintest sound would buy me a face-to-face. My hand curled into a fist. I forced myself to plan an attack in case a face appeared in that narrow window gap. Eyes and throat. Then a wind sprint.

The boot withdrew silently, and I heard a hand stir the water, no doubt parting the bath bubbles. Then the steps moved away, and it took a few wild and disbelieving moments for it to sink in that he'd gone.

In the main room, they mumbled, conferred. The front door opened and shut, and then there was a moment of silence.

But no relief.

I remained in full view from the street; depending on which way they exited the building, they'd spot me. A gate creaked open around the corner, jarring me into action. I stepped back through the window into the bathroom and plastered myself against the far wall. Waited. And listened for footsteps across the quartz. But none came.

Sometime after, the held breath burst from my lungs and my whole body shuddered and slid down the wall. I clutched my knees.

I sat there for ten minutes, or maybe thirty. Breathing. Then I stood, my muscles stiff and creaking.

She lay about five feet from the front door. No sign of damage, save a neat hole in the fabric above her ribs and a crimson halo beneath her head; one of the shots must have entered her open mouth. The bathrobe had come open, and thrown on her bare chest was a note composed of clipped magazine letters: LyINg bITcH.

Lonely-hearts scams and death threats and chickens coming home to roost. Another solid cover for a murder that was nothing more than a cold efficiency.

The more I tried to press forward, the more everything spiraled out of control. I had landed, now, in a whole different order of trouble. I was the lead suspect in Keith Conner's murder. I had set the cops on the trail of this woman; from their perspective she was a centerpiece in my paranoid delusion. I couldn't be here, at the scene of her murder. I needed to be across town with newfound submissiveness and an airtight alibi. I needed to flee. But I couldn't stop looking at her.

Sprawled on the floor, vulnerable and hopeless, she was Elisabeta again. And again I would have done anything to help her. Beside her, I took a knee, tugged the bathrobe up over an exposed breast. I didn't know what else I could do for her.

A single drawer in the apothecary cabinet remained half open. I stared over at it for a time before rising.

The drawer itself was no bigger than a business card, and sure enough it held a single ivory rectangle of sturdy paper stock. I withdrew it, read the name, and bit down on my lip to hold my shock in check. It couldn't be. And yet it made perfect sense.

Moving swiftly, I grabbed a paper towel and used it to wipe the bathroom doorknob and surfaces, and then I stepped back out through that window. I tiptoed through the cacti and veered out onto the street, glancing around and blinking against a bright day that seemed an impossible contrast to what I had just witnessed. My heart had yet to slow. I tossed the paper towel down a storm drain.

A half block away, I pulled out that card and double-checked the name, just to make sure I hadn't dreamed it.

Joe Vente.

Chapter 42

He sat in the back of his van in a freestanding swivel chair with stuffing leaking at the seams, facing me and blinking over the business card I'd just handed him, along with an explanation of how I'd gotten it. He'd met me at a park off Sepulveda, and I'd only left my vehicle to step into his. I was badly rattled and doing my best not to show it. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake the image of that sprawled corpse, those striking blue eyes reduced to glass.

"I don't . . . I don't believe this," Joe said. "You met with her, too? The sick kid? The duffel bag of cash?"

"Yes. And the same people who directed me there set me up at Hotel Angeleno."

"That's where that whole thing was leading? Keith's murder?" He smacked both palms down on the top of his head, a childlike gesture of agitation. "Why us?"

"Think about it."

"I can't think right now."

"We both had grudges against Keith Conner. We both have ongoing lawsuits with him. Paparazzo and movie star? It's obvious you two can't stand each other any more than he and I could."

"So we were both prospective fall guys for the murder?" Joe whistled, ran his hands through his stringy hair. "Jesus, I dodged a bullet."

And I'd walked right into one. He could continue snapping invasive photos, a free man, while I scrambled for my life against a ticking clock. The fact that Joe Vente had proven more circumspect than I--that was a bitter pill to swallow.

"What?" Joe was studying me. "You never seen a body before?"

I followed his gaze. A muscle in my forearm was quivering. I reached over, squeezed until it ached. When I let go, my arm was still. "When did you see Elisabeta?"

"A few months ago. I'd been getting these DVDs. Footage of me sneaking around, spying on celebrities. Footage of me getting footage. It was weird as shit, like some French film or something."

The overlap with Doug Beeman's story left me wondering if this was merely another wrinkle in the scam, another ruse within the ruse. Could I know what was real and what was fabricated anymore? I no longer trusted myself, the world. My eyes drifted around the cluttered van, searching out clues that could point to duplicity, gauging the distance to the door handle. But I reminded myself that I'd checked Joe out online, that he was real, or at least as real as anyone got in Los Angeles. Sally and Valentine had interviewed him, too, confirmed his existence. Some of my instincts had to be right; I couldn't stay this worked up and remain functional.

He was saying, "At first I thought it was a rival, one of the guys I beat out for a payday. I mean, makes sense, right? Then, when it got creepier, I figured some rich star had hired someone for revenge. Some celeb, maybe I took a picture of his kid at soccer practice, someone I caught on the can in a public restroom or something."

I tried for casual, covering my jitters. "Who'd you catch in a public restroom?"

He told me.

I whistled. "Crouching Tiger, indeed."

"Then I got an e-mail like you got, but without the 'She needs your help or she'll die' note. Just an MPEG of a car trunk in an alley. It was under my skin, the whole thing. I had to know what the fuck it was about. I found the duffel. I followed the map, delivered it to Elisabeta. Figured out her story, you know, the grandkid. I floated outta there--it was like heroin. A few days later, I get this call, right? And they lead me to a blueprint that shows where they've hidden surveillance crap in my house. Like all over my house. I freaked the fuck out. Pulled all that shit out of the walls and dumped it into some trash can they specified, along with all the DVDs and other shit. That was it for me. They sent me more e-mails, but I couldn't do it anymore."

I stared at him, spellbound. Joe Vente had served as their rough draft. They'd learned what had worked and what hadn't. Then they'd honed their strategy, switching the order of events, adding implicit threats, building a more effective ruse.

"So they just left you alone?" I almost couldn't believe it.

"I stopped playing the game. What the fuck were they gonna do?"

I had no answer, only an echo of regret through the hollow of my chest. "You're smarter than I was," I said. "You had more restraint."

"Smarter?" He snickered. "Restraint?"

"What then?"

He rummaged in a bag, came up with what looked like a recording device, a thin receiver rising from the center of a clear, inverted dome the size of a small umbrella. "You see this? It's a parabolic microphone. You aim and click, and it collects and focuses sound waves. I can pick up a whisper at a hundred yards. I can also hook up a device that reads vibrations off glass. Living rooms, vehicles on the freeway, doctors' offices, the whole nine. What I'm saying is, I know this world. I have it wired." He sat back in the chair, crossed his arms.

I said, "I'm not following."

"I got outgamed," he said angrily. " I did. It fucked with my head. I lost track of which way was up. It wasn't about smarts or restraint. I didn't have the stomach for it. Not for this end of the equation anyway. I'm a hypocrite and a parasite, but at least I don't fucking lie to myself. So I shriveled up. Leave me alone if I leave you alone. And it worked. Not that it doesn't haunt me every fucking day, who got the better of me, where it was leading."

"At least now you know," I said, "what was at the end of the trail."

"The electric chair." He'd meant it as a joke, but he read my expression and said, "Look, I'm just fucking around. You'll get off."

"How? You gonna corroborate my story for me?"

He laughed. "Let's just say that when it comes to the cops, my word probably counts for less than yours. I'd hurt you more than I'd help you. Besides, I've got no evidence. Nothing concrete."

"Neither of us does."

"Yeah, you're out of witnesses. They keep dying." He finally put two and two together, and a ripple of fear moved across his face, left it changed. "That's why you came to find me. To warn me."

"Yes."

"You think they'll really . . . ?"

"I think I wouldn't want to take the chance."

"Jesus, I--" He looked around the van, as if the walls were closing in. His panic sweat clinched for me that he wasn't in on the scam. "Okay," he said. "Okay. I've gotten lost before when the heat's turned up." He stuck a thumb in the upholstery, widened the tear. "You didn't have to come find me. Thanks for the warning."

I said, "Trista Koan. I need an address."

He nodded, one pronounced dip of his head, a man used to dealing. "I'll get one for you. Gimme an hour. What's your cell?" I gave him the number of the throwaway I'd reclaimed from Ariana. He had me repeat it twice and didn't write it down. "What else?" His eyes were light green and surprisingly pretty set in that coarse face.

Those two muffled percussions echoed in my head, making me flinch. The toe of that black boot, barely in view at the edge of the door. Joe was looking at me funny.

I cleared my throat. "I'd like you to call in the location of Elisabeta's body. Anonymously. I can't have anything to do with it."

"Like you said, this broad ran cons and had death threats against her. The cops're gonna connect the dots to draw the wrong picture or to lead back to you. Either way, they'll be all over you once she turns up dead. So why report it?"

"What, just leave her body there?"

"Not like she cares."

"She's got family, I'm sure."

"So what? She'll still have family in a week when the neighbors complain about the smell, but at least you'll buy yourself a few more days to dig around without the cops up your ass. She fucked with us. It's not like she deserves better."

I said, "Her family does. Make the call for me."

"It's your jail sentence."

"Anything else you can give me on Keith Conner?"

"I can give you everything on Keith Conner," he said. "But that's my currency, man. What do I get?"

"You say you want to know who fucked with you. Well, this could be your chance. I'm not even asking you to share the risk."

He was back at his fingernails again, but he noticed and set his hands down in his lap. "From what I've learned, movie stars don't do shit. Meetings, lots of meetings. Business managers, agents, the Coffee Bean on Sunset. And fucking lunches. You just sort of hang in and hope for some break in the routine, something weird. One day, about two weeks ago, I noticed something like that. Another car following him, keeping an eye. Not one of the regulars. We all know each other. And no one trolls in a Mercury Sable with tinted windows. I call the license plate in to my hook at LAPD, and guess what? The number doesn't exist."

He'd lowered his voice, and I found myself leaning toward him. The smell of the van--peanuts, coffee, spent breath--was making me claustrophobic, but the hook was set and I was going nowhere.

Joe continued, "Now I'm curious. So when it peels out, I follow it. I lose it at a light but find it parked two blocks up at the Starbright Plaza, one of those crappy strip malls on Riverside by the studios. You know, stores downstairs, offices up? I go kick the tires. It's got a Hertz sticker on the windshield."

Hertz again. Just like the car Sally traced the VIN back to.

He continued, "So someone had switched the plates. I check the mall directory, walk around, but there's a ton of offices and nothing looks suspicious. I stake the car out for a few hours, then get bored and leave."

"Starbright Plaza?"

"Starbright Plaza. That's the best I got for you."

I pulled open the door, drew in a deep breath of fresh air, and stepped down onto the street toward my car. I'd gotten the key into my lock when I heard the van behind me, sputtering.

"Hey," Joe's gruff voice called out. "If you live, I still want that exclusive."

When I turned around, he was already chugging off.

Chapter 43

A bland-as-hell two-story sprawl, brown wood and beige stucco, named Starbright Plaza. The inadvertent irony was common around these parts, in the slices of neighborhood around Warner Bros., Universal, and Disney. A-List Tires and Rims. Blockbuster Orchard Supply. Red Carpet Motel with FREE cable in every room!

The parking lot was jammed, so I valeted in front of the cafe at the far end of the complex. None of the patrons took note of me, though I assessed their faces with skittish defiance, searching for signs of recognition. Amazing how self-centered a good dose of fear can make you.

The valet handed me a slip featuring a glossy ad with Keith Conner's scowl:

This June, Be Afraid.

This June, There's Nowhere Left to Hide.

This June . . . THEY'RE WATCHING.

Another driver tapped the horn politely; I'd zoned out there a few feet off the curb. I stepped through the mist of the outdoor air conditioner onto the sidewalk and took in the shops and offices, feeling some of the frustration Joe must have felt: How do you search a massive strip mall for something suspicious?

Two workers carried a picture window out of a glass shop, like extras in a Laurel and Hardy sketch. Figuring that the other downstairs businesses, which ranged from a dry cleaner to a Hallmark, were equally innocuous, I walked to the stairwell. A FedEx delivery guy tapping at an electronic clipboard whistled down, not even bothering to glance up as I skipped aside at the landing.

The upstairs hallway, shaped in a wide V, hosted an endless row of doors and windows. Quite a few were open as I strolled by, uncertain of what I was looking for. Cubicles and wall charts, young guys on phones working baoding balls, selling penny stocks and exercise equipment in three no-hassle payments. I passed a fly-by-night insurance shop, then a straight-to-video operation with proudly displayed movie posters featuring giant insects wreaking havoc on metropolises. A few of the offices had been hastily cleared out, clipped cables poking from the ceilings and walls, jumbles of telemarketing phones mounded in corners. Others, with closed blinds and unmarked doors, were as silent as a surgeon's waiting room. Clearly the rentals had a considerable turnover rate.

Ducking the occasional shitty security camera, I kept walking, noting business names and glancing at faces, wondering what the hell I was doing here. Finally I ran out of room, reaching the far stairwell. I was just starting down when the brass placard drilled into the last office door caught my attention: DO NOT LEAVE ANY PACKAGES WITHOUT SIGNATURE. D O NOT LEAVE ANY PACKAGES WITH NEIGHBORING BUSINESSES. A FedEx tag had been left compliantly around the knob. Except for its number, 1138, the door itself was blank, like many others.

I plucked the tag free, stared down at the sloppily penned business name: Ridgeline, Inc.

My face tingled with excitement. And fear. Careful what you look for--you just might find it. In this instance the likely operating base for the men who'd sent me those e-mails, who'd framed me for murder, who'd killed three people and counting.

The orange-and-blue tag indicated a second delivery attempt for a package sent from a FedEx center in Alexandria, Virginia. Just inside the Beltway, the city was rife with influence peddlers and power brokers. The package's origin struck me as ominous.

The blinds of the office window were imperfectly closed. I went up on tiptoe to get an angle through the slats. The front room was as plain as could be. Computer, copier, paper shredder. There were no plants, no paintings, no Sears family portrait taped to the monitor. Not even a second chair for a visitor to sit in. A windowless door led back, I assumed, to a hall and more rooms.

I jogged downstairs and through the dingy alley behind the complex to check out the rear of 1138. A rickety fire escape rose to a thick metal door. The dead bolt was shiny, and traces of sawdust on the landing said it had been recently installed.

I huffed back around and confronted that front door again, in case it had decided to unlock itself. It hadn't.

Now what?

I thought about that FedEx driver, shouldering past me on the stairwell.

I dialed the 1-800 number on the tag, keyed in the tracking code, and waited through a xylophone rendition of "Arthur's Theme." When the customer-service rep picked up, I said, "I'm calling from Ridgeline. I just missed a drop-off, and I think your driver's still in the area. Will you please have him swing back around?"

I walked a ways up the outdoor corridor, not wanting to hang around 1138 in case someone with Danner boots reported back to work. Twenty minutes passed in a crawl. My rising anxiety and discouragement had just reached a tipping point when I saw the big white box of the FedEx truck making its way through traffic. Positioning myself at the office door, I touched the tip of one of my keys to the dead-bolt lock and waited for what seemed an eternity. Finally I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and I pivoted, key in view, as he approached.

"Oh," I said, "you just caught me locking up."

"Missed you the last few times." He handed me a thin express envelope and the electronic clipboard. "You guys are tricky."

I scrawled J. Edgar Hoover illegibly and handed the clipboard back. "Yeah," I said, "we kind of are."

I had to force myself not to sprint downstairs and across to the valet. Waiting for my car, I glanced nervously along the length of the building toward the Ridgeline office. Only then did I see the silver security camera mounted on top of the overhang right above 1138, out of sight from the corridor itself. It didn't match the others.

And it was pointing at me.

On the FedEx label, under Contents, was written, Insurance.

Sitting at our kitchen table in the quiet of the house, I tore open the envelope. A piece of corrugated cardboard, folded once and taped to protect its contents. A Post-it read, Going dark. Do not contact. I broke the tape with a thumb. Inside lay a computer disc. I took a deep breath. Rubbed my eyes. Frisbeed the cardboard into the heap of trash on the floor.

Insurance? For whom? Against what?

"Going dark" implied it was sent from an inside operative of sorts. A spy?

I took the disc upstairs to my office and, feverish with anticipation, slotted it into Ariana's laptop.

Blank.

I swore, banging the desk with the heel of my hand so hard that the laptop jumped. Couldn't one damn clue pan out? After all I'd risked to get it. The security footage of me left behind for the crew at Ridgeline. The wrath that could bring down on us.

Ariana was at work, looking into our financial options. Worried, I tried her as I had several times earlier, and again got voice mail all around. She was keeping her cell phone turned off, as we'd agreed, so she couldn't be tracked by its signal. I'd taken back and was using--right now--the disposable cell phone I'd gotten for her to carry so we could be in touch throughout the day. Smart.

In Ari's address book downstairs, I found her assistant's cell number and waited as it rang, my knee hammering up and down. A wash of relief when she answered.

"Patrick? You okay? What's going on?"

"Why aren't you guys picking up?"

"We're still getting bullshit calls about . . . you know, so it's easier to just let everything go to voice mail."

"Where is she?"

"At another meeting--she hasn't stopped scrambling all day. I can't reach her because she's keeping her cell phone off for some reason."

"Okay, I just wanted to know that she's . . ."

"No shit, huh? But don't worry. She's being super careful. She took, like, our two biggest delivery guys with her."

That made me feel incrementally better.

"When she checks in, can you have her call me at home?" I asked.

"Sure, but the meeting should be wrapping up, and she said she's heading home after, so you'll probably talk to her before I do."

I hung up, pressed the phone to my closed mouth. Given that it was the middle of the day, the drawn curtains were oppressive, confining. I'd sneaked in over the back fence again, and it struck me that I hadn't been in my own front yard since getting home from jail. Bracing myself, I stepped out onto the porch. Who could have imagined that something so simple would feel like a bold act? A few shouts, and then a throng appeared at the end of the walk, calling questions, snapping pictures. Closing my eyes, I tilted my face to the sun. But I couldn't relax out there, exposed. In the pressure of darkness behind my eyelids, I relived Elisabeta's bathroom window shoving against me as I'd tried to slither through to safety.

Back in the kitchen, I pounded a glass of water and rooted around for food, adding torn boxes and moldy bread to the trash heap on the floor. Chewing a stale energy bar, I returned to my office and stared some more at the blank disc on the screen. Maybe a hidden document? But the memory showed as zero. It seemed unlikely that data could have been embedded in a way that took up no memory, but with these guys anything was possible. I hid the disc in the middle of my blank DVDs impaled on the spindle and dropped the FedEx packaging into a desk drawer.

The phone rang. I snatched it up. "Ari?"

"I'm under a rock." Joe Vente. "Memorize this number." He rattled it off. "I'm bedded down. Safe. No one has this number, so if they come kill me, I'll be really pissed off at you."

"I won't breathe a word."

"I called in the body of Elisabeta or whoever the fuck she is. Get ready for the shit to hit."

"I will."

"Oh, and now I've earned that exclusive twice over."

"Does that mean . . . ?"

"You bet your ass. I found her."

Chapter 44

I caught Trista outside the Santa Monica bungalow, dumping an armload of empty Dasani bottles in the recycle bin. I said, "Bottled water? Isn't that environmentally irresponsible?"

She turned, shielding her eyes against the setting sun, and gave a sad grin when she recognized me. Which quickly turned coy. "Your shirt's made of cotton," she said, "which requires a hundred and ten pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre to grow. Your car there"--a flick of her lovely head--"if you upgraded to a hybrid, you'd pick up about a dozen miles to the gallon, which would keep ten tons of carbon dioxide out of the air a year." As I approached, she leaned toward me, blond hair drifting, and eyed my trousers. "That a cell phone in your pocket, big boy? It's got a capacitor strip made of tantalum, extracted from coltan, eighty percent of which is torn out of streambeds in eastern Congo where gorillas live. Or used to."

I said, "Uncle."

"We're all hypocrites. We all do damage. Just by living. And yes, by drinking bottled water, too." She paused. "You're smiling at me. You're not gonna get flirty and patronizing?"

"No. It's just been a long couple days, and you're a breath of fresh air."

"You like me."

"But not like that."

"No? Then why?"

"Because you think differently than I do."

"It's good to see you, Patrick."

"I didn't kill him."

"I know that."

"How?"

"Your anger's all on the surface. It's really just hurt you don't want to acknowledge. Come inside."

Moving boxes littered the tile floor--evidently the production company had wasted little time in dismissing her from the movie once it was no longer necessary for her to look after Keith. I glanced around the bungalow. A choice location, four blocks from the ocean, eight hundred square feet that probably rented for a couple grand. A slab of floating counter barely accommodated a kitchen sink, a microwave, and a coffeepot. Aside from a tiny bathroom next to the closet, the place was one room.

Whale posters adorned the walls. She caught me looking and said, "I know, it's the decor of a sixth-grade girl. I can't help it, though. They're so magnificent. It kills me." She swiped a bottle of Bombay Sapphire off the floor and refilled her glass, adding a splash of tonic. "Apologies. You probably think I'm . . ."

I said, "No, please. You can trust a woman who drinks gin."

"I'd offer you some, but I'm running low and I'm gonna need it to get through this." She placed her nightstand lamp into a metal trash bin along with a handful of socks and then looked around, overwhelmed.

"I'm moving back to Boulder," she said. "It'll be fine. I'll get going on another project and . . . and . . ." Her back was to me, and her hand rose to her face and then her shoulders bunched, and I realized she was crying, or trying not to. She made a high-pitched gasp, and when she turned, her face was red, but she looked otherwise normal, if a touch pissed off.

She took a slug from the glass, sat on the bed, patted the spot next to her. I went. Glossy photos of beached and autopsied whales had spilled across the comforter. They were crime-scene graphic, impossible to ignore. I felt a sense of despair at seeing those magnificent animals reduced to driftwood. A helplessness that turned to revulsion at the back of my throat.

She picked one picture up and gazed at it almost fondly, as if it were a remembrance from some other life. "It's all fucked up, Patrick. You know that. The dream is never the dream. It's a bunch of compromises and, if you're lucky, a few decent people now and then." She rested her head on my shoulder, and I could smell the gin.

She wiped her nose with her sleeve, sat back upright. "It was my job to baby-sit him. Keep him from dying in a drunken car crash, from fucking a seventeen-year-old, whatever. Keep him alive and out of jail and we get our movie. How hard can that be?"

"Pretty hard."

"I know you hated him." Her words were slurred, ever so slightly.

I said, "Maybe he wasn't so bad."

"No," she said. "No, he wasn't. He was kind of a dumb Labrador, but he tuned in enough that we could get him on board. Stars, movies, opportunism--Christ, it sounds so cynical." She looked down at one of the eight-by-tens--blubber and pink meat. "But I actually believe in this shit."

"And Keith?"

"He was a movie star. So who the fuck knows? He got used for all kinds of agendas." The irony sat with us. She said, "They get bored, you know. Look for hobbies, for causes. But he didn't have to pick this one. He didn't have to pick anything. But he did. Remember when the gray whales were washing up in the San Francisco Bay?"

"No, sorry."

"Right at the foot of the Golden Gate. I took him up there. You know, in the field with marine biologists. Get your shoes dirty. They love that shit. He was all excited, bought a new Patagonia windbreaker. When everyone finally left, I couldn't find him. He was back by the water, his hand on the whale. He had one tear going down his cheek. You know, the Keep America Beautiful crying-Indian tear? Like that. But no one was looking. He wiped it--he was all fine, sure, no problem. But I forgave him a lot for that tear." She stood abruptly. "I gotta finish packing. I'll walk you out."

But she just stood there, glaring at those sagging posters. "What the hell am I doing?" she said. "I don't know anything about movies. Or financing. I'm just a bleeding-heart idiot with half a master's degree who loves whales." She looked around the cramped bungalow as if these four walls held all her shortcomings and disappointments . When she snapped out of it, she caught me watching her and flushed at the glimpse she'd given up. "I said I have to finish packing."

"Listen, just give me a minute. Please. You were with Keith a lot at the end--"

"You have to remind me?"

"Can I ask you a couple questions?"

"Like?"

"Did he ever mention a company called Ridgeline?"

"Ridgeline? No, never heard of it."

"Did he ever go to the Starbright Plaza? A strip mall with office buildings off Riverside in Studio City?"

"He never went to the Valley." She sank back onto the bed. "Is that all?"

"I've got limited time, Trista. I'm the lead suspect. I have to figure out who framed me, and I have to do it before the cops come and put me in jail. Because once that happens, no one will be left to figure it out."

"What am I supposed to do about it? Haven't I helped you enough already?"

"What does that mean?"

"I got him and Summit to drop the lawsuit against you. At least they were going to."

I gaped in disbelief. "That was you?"

"Yes, that was me. After you vandalized Keith's house--"

"That wasn't me."

"Whatever--I convinced him that all this legal mess was a distraction and a pain in the ass for him, and I practically wrote the cue cards so he could convince the studio they didn't need a stink hanging around They're Watching when the movie was riding such good buzz. I know you didn't hit him anyway--like I said, you're too harmless--and if the truth were to come out, he'd lose all credibility to be a caring environmental spokesperson for us." She flicked at a chipped nail, then stared at me from beneath her curled eyelashes, an incredible package of style and substance. "Now, is there anything else or can I get back to my solitude and misery?"

I struggled to regain my mental footing. "Can you tell me anything Keith did or anyone he met with that seemed out of the ordinary?"

"Out of the ordinary? For all the excitement at his fingertips, he was one of the dullest, most predictable people I've ever been around. It was all stupid childish shit--clubs and bars and midnight limo rides with underwear models. There were a lot of pranks and drunkenness, sure, but nothing serious. I doubt he ever met anyone interesting enough to want to kill him. And that includes you."

Assuming that her last words were a dismissal, I got up quietly. She was right; it was difficult to imagine Keith doing anything serious enough to elicit the attention of people with top-shelf intelligence gear at their disposal. He breezed around from one thing to the next. Parties, movies, projects. He'd fallen into Trista's cause like anything else, then worked himself up into a state of conviction over it.

I paused in the doorway and turned back to face her. "I lost my job, too," I said. "Teaching. I never realized how much it meant to me until it was gone. And you know what's funny? It was always just a backup job to me, a consolation prize, but it feels worse losing it than it did getting booted off my own movie." I realized I was rambling, and I cut myself off. "I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm really sorry you got fired from something that meant that much to you."

"Fired?" she said. "I didn't get fired. The whole production shut down." She sank into herself, her shoulders bowing. "The first day of shooting was gonna be Monday. Three days away. So fucking close."

The wind blew through my shirt, but my skin had already gone taut. "The financing fell apart?"

"Of course," she said. "Environmental documentaries can't get a real release unless there's an Al Gore or a Keith Conner driving them."

My mouth was suddenly dry. My gaze pulled back to those glossy photos on Trista's bed. Beached whales. Exploded eardrums. Ruptured brains.

Sonar.

Keith had talked about high-intensity sonar wreaking havoc with whales, blowing out their organs, giving them emboli, driving them onto shores.

All those bits and pieces, sliding into alignment.

I felt a quickening of the blood, a predatory thrill at breaking through to the heart of the matter.

She was talking. "If anything goes wrong--a recession, a Senate vote, a new development--the environment is always first to suffer." A wry chuckle. "Well, I guess Keith was the first this time."

I heard myself ask, "You can't find another star and get funding again?"

"It won't matter." She tucked a fall of hair back behind an ear. "We had a limited window to make this thing happen. The money's gone."

I pictured him the last time I'd seen him alive, reclining on that teak deck chair, smoking his cloves and trying on earnestness. It's a race against time, man.

What had Jerry said? The idiot's doing some bullshit environmental documentary next. Mickelson tried to get him to wait until he had another hit under his belt, but it had to be now.

"What window?" My voice sounded far away.

At my tone she glanced up. "Excuse me?"

"You said you had a limited window to make the movie happen. Some big rush. Why?"

"Because we needed it to hit theaters before the Senate vote."

My heartbeat, a vibration in my ears. "Wait a minute," I said weakly. "Senate?"

"Yeah. The proposal to lower limits on the decibel levels of naval sonar. To protect the whales. It's calendared for October. Which means we needed to be in production, like, now." She frowned, checked her empty glass. "Why are you being so weird?"

"If The Deep End comes out before October, saving the whales from sonar becomes a popular cause. Certain senators who vote a certain way wind up with egg on their face. It's an election year."

"That is how the game is played," she said. "What are you, fresh out of Cub Scouts?"

"They'd feel pressure to vote to impose limits on sonar."

"Yes, Patrick. That was the hope."

"Unless the movie doesn't get made."

"Right."

"And the only thing that can shut down a production once you get a green light is . . ."

She set down her glass. "Oh, come on, Patrick."

". . . the death of the star."

For the first time, her face held fear. She got it. I'd found a new ally, someone already in the battle on a different front. A resource.

But her gaze ticked to the rear door, then back to me, and I realized with crushing chagrin that she was afraid not because she believed me and saw what I--what we were up against but because she was afraid of me. In my eagerness I'd made a mistake in rushing in, in not debriefing her. She had a limited vantage into the whole sordid mess, and so, given my wild claims, she could only think I was as paranoid and unhinged as I'd been billed in the media.

I held up a hand, desperate, pressured, trying to circumvent the argument she'd started with herself. "You said you knew I wasn't a killer."

"I want you to leave now."

"It's not as crazy as it sounds. Please, just let me lay out for you what--" I took a step in from the doorway, and she lunged to her feet, breathing hard. For a loaded moment, we faced each other across the room, terror coming off her like a heat signature.

Showing her my palms, I backed away and closed the door quietly behind me.

Chapter 45

"All this time I've been asking the wrong question." I was so agitated I was nearly shouting into the phone. "I was asking myself who stands to benefit from Keith Conner's death."

"Okay . . ." Julianne said. I'd reached her at the office, and she'd been appropriately oblique as I'd filled her in on my talk with Trista. "And the right question would be?"

Accelerating up the hill, I veered into the opposing lane to dodge a cable-repair van. "Who stands to benefit from the movie's being killed."

"I'm with a student right now, so maybe you could . . ."

"Talk. Sure."

But of course she didn't let me. "Did the ingenue have any answers? To that question?"

"Trista? No. But the list is obvious. Any advocates of that sonar system. Select senators. The Department of Defense. NSA. Defense contractors."

"Well, that narrows it down nicely. But given her role, can't she specify--"

"She thinks I'm fucking crazy--"

"Mm-hmm."

"--threw me out."

"Which leaves . . . ?"

"Can you look into the naval sonar and this Senate proposal?"

"I thought that might be where you were--"

"I mean specifics," I said. "Names, programs, how the funding works. Whoever this is, they're obviously powerful. I mean, if this is the Department of Defense or NSA? Think of their resources. The gear, the reach. People everywhere. Clearly they flipped someone in LAPD. How do you go up against a monolith like that?"

"You don't," she said. "And let's not get dramatic. Something like this? It's not a sanctioned deal across, you know, a whole . . ."

"Agency?"

"Exactly. You have to figure out which corrupt piece of the whole is relevant to your . . . situation."

"Can you help me with this? Or is it too far out of your field?"

A sigh. "The Wash Post. And The Journal. Former classmates, you know. Investigative. Plus, I'm no slouch."

I wasn't sure whether her choppy sentences and inverted answers were any more veiled than normal speech, but I was too grateful to take issue. I gave her the Studio City address for Ridgeline, Inc., and asked her to dig up whatever she could on them and how they might hook into all this. She uh-huhed a few times and signed off without uttering my name. I pounded the steering wheel in triumph. Finally, traction.

I debated trying Ariana once more--I'd run through her numbers yet again before calling Julianne--but I was almost home. On our block, news vans waited at the curb, so I pulled a sharp right and parked behind our back fence. The minute I climbed over, I knew there was a problem. Setting one foot on the greenhouse roof, I looked down through the pane to see the shelves yanked off the walls, the pots shattered, the tulips loose in scatterings of dirt. My foot slid out from under me, and I hit the slope, hard, and was deposited on my back in the dirt.

From this angle the greenhouse looked worse. Everything had been not just broken but overturned.

Searched.

It was past four o'clock. Ariana could well have been here when they'd come. I rolled my aching head toward the house.

The back door had been left ajar.

I was on my feet instantly, running. The house looked no more ransacked than I'd left it; we'd never put it back together all the way after the cops had gotten through with it. The living room--also empty. Our framed wedding picture, leaning against the wall, peered back at me, the crack zigging the glass across our beaming faces. Calling Ari's name, I ran upstairs. She wasn't in the bedroom. I flew into my office, yanked open the desk drawer.

The FedEx envelope I'd stolen from Ridgeline was gone.

The spindle of blank DVDs remained on the shelf. I ran over, tore off the cap, and dumped the discs on the floor. All matching. They'd taken the CD, too.

I fumbled the phone out of my pocket and called Ariana. Voice mail and voice mail. Running downstairs, I threw open the door to the garage--no white pickup. That was good. Maybe she hadn't made it home yet. Maybe she'd just gotten hung up at the meeting and--

Panic rose, sweeping away the fantasy. She should've been home a half hour ago. I ripped through Ariana's address book, called her assistant.

"Patrick, what? As far as I know, her meeting wrapped up a while ag--"

Hanging up, I jogged out into the street. A few photographers had resumed their stakeouts. They half emerged from their cars and vans, puzzled and amused.

"Hi, listen, did you see . . . Did you see anyone breaking into this house? Leaving this house? My wife?"

They were snapping pictures of me.

"You've been camped out here how long? How long?" Nothing. My temper rose, broke like a wave. "Did you fucking see anything?"

I spun around. The neighbors in the apartments across the street were at their sliding doors, a face or two on every floor. Next door, Martinique shivered on her doorstep, Don draping an arm across her shoulders. "Were you home?" I shouted to them. "Have you been home? Have you seen Ari? Did she--"

Don turned, steering his wife inside.

I wheeled back. Cameras covering faces, clicking.

"I don't know, I don't fucking know where she is," I pleaded with them. Two snickered, and the third nodded apologetically, backing away.

Through the open front door, I heard the telephone ring.

Thank God.

I ran inside, snatched it up. "Ari?"

"I had hoped that the last time we spoke would be our last."

That electronic voice, stiffening the hair at the back of my neck.

"But you're a bit more resilient than we'd anticipated."

I couldn't breathe.

"We can't kill you. Too suspicious." A measured silence. "But," he said, "your wife . . ."

My mouth was open, but no sound was coming out.

"You're a pretty troubled guy. Maybe you'd hurt her, too."

"No," I managed. "Listen--"

"The disc."

"No, I . . . no. I don't have it. I don't have any disc."

"Bring us the CD. Or we will send your wife's heart to you in a FedEx package not unlike the one you stole from us."

I put a hand on the kitchen counter to keep from collapsing. "I swear to God, someone took it from me."

"Drive to Keith Conner's house. Enter through the service gate. The code is 1509. Park within two feet of the cactus planter next to the guest house. Stay seated. Keep your windows rolled up. Do not change position when we approach. If you talk to the cops, she dies. If you fail to deliver the disc, she dies. If you're not here at five o'clock sharp, she dies."

"No, wait! Listen, I can't--"

He'd hung up.

My thoughts spun without orientation. If that was Ridgeline, clearly they hadn't broken in and reclaimed the disc. Then who had? The cops, for evidence? Dirty cops, for blackmail? NSA, the Defense Department, a senator's henchmen? Where was I in this thing? Clearly the CD wasn't blank as I'd thought, so what the hell did it have hidden on it?

Five o'clock--that was in thirty-seven minutes. Barely enough time to drive over, let alone figure anything out.

How could I track down a disc if I had no idea who had it?

Thirty-six minutes.

I grabbed the phone to call Detective Gable to see if he'd seized it. But the time. Even if he had, there was no way I could resolve anything with him and get over to Keith's in the next thirty-five minutes. I smashed the receiver against the base, hitting, missing, crushing my knuckles.

Was she okay? Had they hurt her? Yet?

I pulled at my hair, shoved tears off my cheeks.

A disc! I could pass off one of my unused blank CDs. I'd tell them I tried to copy it and everything had autoerased, just like with the DVDs. A flawed plan, sure, but it was something, and maybe it would buy me a few more minutes to figure out where Ariana was and make another play. I ran upstairs, grabbed a generic CD from one of my drawers, and rammed it into Ari's laptop to double-check that it was in fact blank.

Thirty-three minutes.

Downstairs again, running, halfway to the fence, sweating through my shirt. I stopped abruptly in the middle of our lawn. Then I came back and grabbed the biggest blade from the block on the kitchen counter.

Navigating a hairpin turn, I gripped the steering wheel hard and did my best not to slide in the driver's seat. If the butcher knife tucked beneath the back of my thigh shifted, it would open up my leg. The blade was angled in, the handle sticking out toward the console, within easy reach. The acrid smell of burning rubber leaked in through the dashboard vents. I resisted the urge to flatten the gas pedal again; I couldn't risk getting pulled over, not given the deadline.

I flew up the narrow street, my hands slick on the wheel, my heart pumping so much fear and adrenaline through me that I couldn't catch my breath. I checked the clock, checked the road, checked the clock again. When I was only a few blocks away, I pulled the car to the curb, tires screeching. I shoved open my door just in time. As I retched into the gutter, a gardener watched me from behind a throttling lawn mower, his face unreadable.

I rocked back into place, wiped my mouth, and continued more slowly up the steep grade. I turned down the service road as directed, and within seconds the stone wall came into sight, then the iron gates that matched the familiar ones in front. I hopped out and punched in the code. The gates shuddered and sucked inward. Hemmed in by jacaranda, the paved drive led straight back along the rear of the property. At last the guest quarters came into view. White stucco walls, low-pitched clay-tile roof, elevated porch--the guest house was bigger than most regular houses on our street.

I pulled up beside the cactus planter at the base of the stairs, tight to the building. Setting my hands on the steering wheel, I did my best to breathe. There were no signs of life. Way across the property, barely visible through a netting of branches, the main house sat dark and silent. Sweat stung my eyes. The stairs just outside the driver's-side window were steep enough that I couldn't see up onto the porch. I couldn't see much of anything but the risers. I supposed that was the point.

I waited. And listened.

Finally I heard the creak of a door opening above. A footstep. Then another. Then a man's boot set down on the uppermost step in my range of vision. The right foot followed. His knees came visible, then his thighs, then waist. He was wearing scuffed worker jeans, a nondescript black belt, maybe a gray T-shirt.

I slid my right hand down to the hilt of the butcher knife and squeezed it so hard that my palm tingled. Warmth leaked into my mouth; I'd bitten my cheek.

He stopped on the bottom step, a foot from my window, the line of my car roof severing him at the midsection. I wanted to duck down so I could see his face, but I'd been warned not to. He was too close anyway.

His knuckle rose, tapped the glass once.

I pushed the button with my left hand. The window started to whir down. The knife blade felt cool hidden beneath my thigh. I picked out a spot on his chest, just below his ribs. But first I had to find out what I needed to know.

His other hand came swiftly into view and popped something fist-sized in through the open gap of the still-lowering window. Hitting my lap, it was surprisingly heavy.

I looked down.

A hand grenade.

I choked on my breath. I reached to grab it.

Before my splayed fingers could get there, it detonated.

Chapter 46

My eyelids were made of concrete. They lifted slightly, then clanked shut against the burn of the overhead lights. My ribs ached. My ears rang. My right cheek and the edge of my lips felt like they were missing skin. I went to raise a hand to my throbbing head, but for some reason it couldn't get there.

It was a slow process, but I finally pried my eyes open. The fluorescents seemed to bleach my surroundings, but after a few more blinks I realized that the room was plenty bright in its own right--white tile, white walls, large mirror doubling the glare. Empty, aside from a chair pushed into the far corner. For a moment I entertained the notion that I was in a divine waiting room, but then, through a sliver of open door across from me, I spotted the LAPD poster tacked up behind a desk.

An interrogation room.

I'd wound up in custody?

I was lying on a metal bench, a handcuff connecting my right wrist to a security bar bolted to the wall. I'd been too groggy to figure out that's why I couldn't raise my arm.

The thought of Ariana jerked me to a sitting position, and my head nearly exploded. My right arm was pins and needles. I tugged up my T-shirt and held it with my chin. The skin on my chest was raw. Standing, I tried to stretch far enough from the bench to look in the two-way mirror and assess the damage to my face, but the cuff kept me inches shy of the mark.

My throat was too dry to allow words through, but I rasped for help. No one came.

I took stock of the room. Thick metal door with a dead bolt just out of reach on the same wall to which I was shackled. The white noise wasn't only in my head; the air conditioner was working double-time, recycling room-temperature air. In the adjoining room, a clock by the LAPD poster showed seven o'clock--A.M.? P.M.?--and a clear plastic tub next to an overstuffed in-box held my wallet, keys, and disposable phone. One of my pockets was inside out.

A scalding thought cut through the haze--She's dead--but my mind recoiled, fled toward other possibilities.

They could've released her. Or maybe the cops had rescued her when they found me. I was desperate to believe anything.

I was able to move four paces parallel with the wall, the cuff sliding along the rail until it caught. I could reach nothing. Swallowing a few times finally got my voice working. I stared at the two-way mirror. "Where am I?" Hoarser than Brando.

An unseen door opened and closed, and a moment later a detective entered from the adjoining room, badge hanging around his neck. He was so broad that I almost missed his colleague slipping in behind him.

The big guy ran a hand over his blond, grown-out flattop and gave a businesslike wave at the mirror. "Okay, we got him, thanks. You recording?" His wide face, big-featured and handsome, fixed on me. He looked quintessentially American, a Norman Rockwell football player. "I'm Lieutenant DeWitt, and this is Lieutenant Verrone."

Lieutenants. I'd been upgraded.

Verrone had a cigarettes-and-booze complexion--tinged yellow, rugged and sickly all at once--and he looked like he could fit in DeWitt's pant leg. His mustache turned the corners of his mouth, aiming at a handlebar but cut short, no doubt, in keeping with department regs.

"My wife," I croaked.

"What about her?" DeWitt asked.

Verrone dropped into the chair in the far corner. His button-up shirt pulled tight against his torso, revealing a surprisingly sinewy build. He only looked insubstantial next to DeWitt.

"Is she okay?" I said.

"I don't know," DeWitt answered carefully. "Did you hurt her?"

"No, I--no." There was a ring of shiny red skin at my wrist. My head wasn't back online yet; everything seemed so uncivilized, so bewildering. "You . . . you didn't see her?"

DeWitt squatted in the middle of the white tile, facing me. Such a big guy and yet his movements were precise, graceful. "Why should we see your wife?"

From his chair, Verrone continued to stare at me. Not a glower per se, but dispassionate eye contact, menacing only in its reptilian endurance. Since sitting, he hadn't broken eye contact or moved any part of his body, at least not that I could gather from the glances I'd allocated myself.

I shook my head to clear it, but that only compounded the pain. "How am I . . . ?" The rest couldn't make it from brain to mouth.

DeWitt obliged the obvious question anyway. "Stun grenade, military issue. You add the overpressure of being in a car, you're looking at a pressure wave of thirty thousand pounds per square inch. You're lucky you're not more seriously injured."

Had it been my attacker's plan to knock me out all along? Or had he spotted the butcher knife at my side and decided to drop the grenade? They'd let me live. Which meant they still had use for me. Clearly they'd realized that the blank CD I'd brought was a sham. Maybe they thought I could still lead them to the real one. Hope flared in my chest; if that were the case, they'd keep Ari alive to ensure my cooperation.

If you talk to the cops, she dies.

Shivering off the remembered threat, I did my best to focus. I had to get out of here without revealing anything, and make myself available to Ariana's kidnappers. No step of which would be easy. First thing would be to get myself to a lower-security building. Like a hospital. "Am I . . . Can I see a doctor?"

"Medics cleared you at the scene. You were conscious--remember?"

"I don't."

"We brought you here, then you dozed off."

"Where's here?"

"Parker Center."

LAPD headquarters. Great.

"I should be at a hospital. I was unconscious. I don't remember anything."

DeWitt cocked an eyebrow at Verrone. "We'd better re-Mirandize him, then."

"Nah, we got him on tape. And he signed." Verrone's mouth had barely moved, and for a moment I wondered if he'd spoken at all. He remained eerily still.

I tried to stand, but the cuff jerked me back onto the bench. "You can't arrest me. I can't . . . be in jail right now."

DeWitt said, "I'm afraid it's a little late for that."

"Can I talk to Detective Richards?"

"She's no longer involved with this case."

"Where's Gable?"

DeWitt said, more firmly, "We're above Gable."

"Sixth floor," Verrone said.

My brain revved and revved but couldn't find traction. With Ariana's life on the line, was I finally out of plays?

"A neighbor called in the blast a few hours ago." DeWitt eyeballed my handcuff, unconsciously jostling the dive watch on his own right wrist. "Keith Conner's house, you know?" He whistled. "So we got on our horse. Then you, there. Look at it from our perspective. I gotta be a hard-ass here and get some answers out of you."

I could feel Verrone's impassive face pointed at me, those steady eyes posing some unspoken challenge. I realized he scared me.

"I don't know that I have any answers," I said.

"Who assaulted you?" DeWitt asked.

"I didn't see. And I don't know names."

"But they didn't kill you. Which means you must have something they want."

"No, they don't want me dead. I'm the fall guy for Keith Conner's murder. If I die, it looks suspicious."

"And this doesn't?"

"Sure it does. It makes me look suspicious. That's why I'm the one under arrest."

"Listen closely, assfuck," Verrone said. This time there was little uncertainty that he was talking. There was also little uncertainty about who would be playing bad cop. A crime-scene bag appeared from inside his jacket. The butcher knife. Swaying. "We want an explanation for this. And we want an explanation for what you were doing at Keith fucking Conner's house."

I said, "Assfuck?"

"You know how to boil a frog, Davis?"

"I know the story," I said. "You can't throw it in hot water or it'll just hop out. So you put it in a pot of cold water on a stove, then you turn up the temperature, a degree at a time. It's so gradual, the frog doesn't notice. It sits there until it's cooked. And just in case I haven't noticed--to coin a phrase--how fucked I am"--I gestured to my cramped surroundings, my cuff rattling--"this is where you tell me I'm the frog."

I could have sworn DeWitt looked mildly amused.

Verrone stood up swiftly, the chair rolling back. After his perfect stillness, the gesture was intimidating. DeWitt rose and turned to face him. Verrone studied me, his jaw corded with muscle. He pointed at my face. "You get one of those for free."

DeWitt walked over and breathed down on me. "This is the end of the road. You can't wriggle off this time. The pieces are lined up from the DA to the chief to the investigative file. You've gotta come clean. Why were you at Keith's?"

Even when I bowed my head, that broad shadow pressed in on me. I could feel the heat off his body. The CD was out there somewhere. Ariana was out there somewhere, too, terrified. I was behind bars, powerless to help her. And if I talked, they'd kill her.

I said, "I want to see a lawyer."

DeWitt sighed. Took a step back.

Verrone said, "Wow. He wants to play it that way." He turned to leave, disgusted. "I'm gonna take a leak." He walked out.

Me and DeWitt, alone. I glanced nervously at the two-way mirror, but it just looked back at me.

I said, "You have to give me access to counsel."

"Sure." DeWitt took another step back. His big, pleasant face looked disappointed, as if he'd caught me in the backseat with his girlfriend. "Sure thing. Lemme just tell the chief."

Leaving the door partially ajar, he walked out, moved a stack of crisp manila folders, and sat on the edge of the desk. The desk didn't sound too happy about it. His fist encompassed the phone. "Yeah, Chief? I'm in Interrogation Five with Davis. He wants to lawyer up. . . . Yes, I stopped asking him questions immediately. . . . I know, I know." He made a clicking sound. "Bad traffic now? He'll have to wait while his lawyer drives over. But the holding tank's filled with those Familia bangers that Metro just rolled up." Those soft blue eyes swiveled to take me in. "Look, he's a white-collar guy. I don't think he'd want to mix with--" He nodded. And again. "Okay. I know. I can't inform him how much we can help him if he's just willing to have a conversation with us. . . . What? . . . No, I don't think he's aware that you think Detective Gable is incompetent and shortsighted. . . . Right, the whole forest-for-the-trees thing. If Davis would walk us through this mess, we might be able to get somewhere, but he feels we're past that point. It's a shame, since I get the vibe that he's a decent guy who's in over his head. But he's not giving us any options. . . . Okay. . . . Okay." He hung up.

"Nice performance," I said.

He sat down at the desk, ruffled through some files. I stared at him through the sliver of open door, but he didn't look up.

"I can't talk to you," I said.

He turned and called to someone out of sight. "Murray, we're gonna need a transfer form on Davis."

I said, "My wife . . . My wife could be in . . ."

He looked through the slender gap in the door. "I'm sorry, were you talking to me?"

"Come on."

"You're willing to continue talking to me about the events of earlier today, even in the absence of counsel?"

I looked over at the two-way so they could get it on tape. "Yes."

He came back inside, crossed his arms.

I said, "I can't tell you anything helpful." He started out again. "Hang on, just wait a second. I'm not dicking you around. My wife is in danger."

"Tell us whatever you know, and we will get on it. If your wife is at risk, we can protect her."

"You don't understand. They want . . ."

"What do they want?"

"They think I have something."

"What do you have? We can't help you if you don't let us."

"They will kill my wife. Do you understand? They will kill her if I tell you anything."

"No one has to find out what you tell us." Frustrated at my silence, he tried a different tack. "Who is 'they'?"

"I don't know."

His blue eyes glowed with intensity. "Where is your wife?"

"They have her."

"Okay," he said calmingly. "Okay. First things first. You can't tell us anything without putting your wife at risk. So we're gonna locate her ourselves."

"You won't find her."

"Finding people is what we do. And when we find her, then you'll come clean?" His gaze was level, unblinking. "I want your word."

"Okay," I said. "If you find her. And I talk to her, to know she's okay."

He looked up at the two-way and nodded briskly, a call to action. "I'm going to have you wait here. Do you have to use the restroom?"

"No. Just keep her safe."

"Don't go anywhere." A soft smile. He closed the door behind him.

I stretched out on the bench and tried to slow the pounding in my head. I must have drifted off, because when the door opened again, the wall clock over Verrone's shoulder showed 8:15.

DeWitt was sitting behind the desk in the other room, the phone wedged into the shelf of his deltoid, his head tipped forward into a hand. Stressed.

Verrone grabbed the chair from the corner, dragged it over so he was sitting right across from me. I shoved myself up, rubbing my eyes. "What? Did you find her?"

In the other room, DeWitt leaned back in his chair, hoisting his feet onto the desk. He was holding eight-by-ten photos, but I could see only the backs of them. He raged into the phone, "I know that, but we need to get a shrink here now." Verrone shot him a look, and DeWitt raised a hand apologetically and quieted.

Verrone turned back to me. His whole demeanor had shifted. He leaned forward, as if to take my hand. His lips pursed, and a line appeared between his eyes--a line of empathy, concern. My fear skyrocketed.

"What?" I said. "Tell me."

"A hiker found your wife--"

"No." My voice was thick, unrecognizable. "No."

"--in a gully in Fryman Canyon."

I stared at him without sensation, without thought. I said, "No."

"I'm sorry," Verrone said. "She's dead."

Chapter 47

The crime-scene photo, a close-up of Ariana's face, quivered in my hand. I couldn't handle the sight, and yet I couldn't look away either. Her eyes were closed, her skin an unnatural gray. Her dark curls straggled across dead weeds. I'd refused to believe it, and so Verrone had produced proof. My wife, dead in a gully.

My voice was tiny, far away. "How."

Verrone shook his head.

"How."

"Stabbed in the neck." He licked his lips uncomfortably. "You're a suspect, obviously, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt until the time of death and evidence come in." He tugged at the photograph, and finally I let it go. "My wife was . . . uh, I lost her to a drunk driver. There's never . . ." Leaning back, he picked at the leg of his jeans, his mustache twitching. "There's never anything anyone can say." He looked at me directly and tilted his head in a show of respect. "I'm sorry."

I could barely comprehend his words. "But we were just starting . . ." I was choking on my own breath. "To get it right again."

I couldn't get any further. I turned to the wall. My fists were against my face, and I was trying to compress my chest, my body, trying to harden myself into an insensate rock. If I didn't crack, if I didn't sob, it wouldn't be true. But then I did. Which meant it was.

I tilted forward, one wrist cuffed ridiculously behind me. His hand was warm on my shoulder. "Breathe," he was saying. "Just one breath. Then another. That's all you have to do right now."

"I'll find them. I'll fucking find them. You gotta get me out of here."

"We will. We'll figure this out."

But I already knew how that evidence would come back: The electronic voice had broadcast the plan. You're a pretty troubled guy. Maybe you'd hurt her, too.

"It was all because of a CD I took from them," I said. "A fucking CD cost her life. Why did I think I could . . . ?"

"We can use that to get to them. Do you know what's on it?"

"No, I have no idea."

"Do you still have it?"

Tears fell, tapping the floor and Verrone's boots. I blinked hard, blinked again, trying to see through the warped veil, trying to determine if what I was seeing was real.

The little cursive logo by Verrone's laces.

Danner.

I stopped breathing.

Through the doorway, DeWitt was still on the phone, his enormous boots, no doubt size eleven and a half, propped up on the desk. My eyes went to the white pebble wedged in the tread of the heel. Then to that Timex on his right wrist. My left-handed intruder, in front of me all this time.

My shock registered almost like panic, and it was all I could do to keep from shouting out. And then I came through it and landed in a nest of cold rage.

I sucked air until my heart stopped hiccupping and the tingling in my face diminished. I did my best to order my thoughts, to reconstruct how everything must have gone down. These men had kidnapped Ariana and dropped a stun grenade in my lap. When they'd found only a replacement CD in my car, they'd hauled me here--wherever here was--to get me to tell them where the real one was or whom I'd given it to. And once they figured out I wouldn't talk because I was worried that might put Ariana at further risk, they'd disposed of her as they'd planned all along. When they stabbed her in the neck, they had me locked in this room. Which made them the only people who could ever alibi me.

Had they plucked a few hairs from my unconscious head and planted them on Ariana's body? Who had punched the blade through her throat? Who had held her down?

Verrone was leaning forward, his cheek close to mine. His hand stayed on my shoulder, rubbing in tight little circles. Concerned friend, fellow widower. "Do you still have this CD?" he asked again.

It was all I could do not to turn my head and rip a hole in his face with my teeth.

"You said you'd talk to us," he prodded gently. "You've got nothing left to lose now anyway. Let's nail these fuckers."

His dialogue was right out of central casting. As my eyes darted frantically around, I realized that the interrogation room itself seemed like a stage set. It felt legitimate because it looked like every TV and movie police station I'd ever seen. The big two-way mirror, the white lights, the desk crowded with case files--they were running a movie on me. Which meant, with my life on the line, I had to play my role without letting on that I'd figured out I was inside a script.

Verrone tilted closer. "Now, do you still have that CD?"

I tamped down my rage, worked up the lie. "Yes," I said.

"Where is it?"

I looked up at him. I could smell lunch on his breath. I could feel the pulse beating at my temple. I was having trouble keeping fury from my face, but he couldn't know that it was anything more than grief or shock.

I had to get free. Which meant I had to get both of them to leave.

I struggled to come up with dialogue to fit the scenario. "There's an alley by campus where I work," I said. "Where the guys who killed my wife parked a Honda with a duffel of cash in the trunk. You have that location from the investigation report?"

"Yes."

Another lie--I'd never given the cops the precise location.

"The northern wall is brick," I said. "About midway down the alley, ten or so feet from the ground, there's a loose brick. The CD is hidden behind it."

He rose swiftly. "I'll get it."

"It's a long alley. And you have to use a chair or something, which'll slow you down. You might want me to go with you to show you where."

He hesitated. "No way the chief'll let us take you out into the field. Especially in light of the news you just received."

"Okay, but it could take a long time. You'd better find it fast so we can use it to snare the motherfuckers who killed my wife."

We were close, my gaze unwavering. He bunched his mouth, that almost handlebar mustache bristling as he assessed my face. His eyes were murky brown, as unyielding as flint. Did he know I knew?

He rose. "Okay," he said to the two-way mirror, addressing whoever was listening behind it. "I'll take DeWitt, too, so we can get this done quicker." He looked over at me. "Hang in there. A shrink's on the way. If there's anything you need, we'll see to it when we get back."

He walked out, closed the door. A moment later I heard another door open and close.

I pressed my ear to the wall. Traffic sounds. Distant, but not six stories away. Overhead, the air conditioner cycled room-temperature air, contributing nothing but white noise to keep me from hearing outside sounds.

I'd read once that a broken elephant can be leashed with a string tied to a stake in the ground; it believes it is trapped and never dares to challenge the perception.

I tugged at my handcuff, testing the bar. The bolts securing it to the wall were substantial, impressive. Crouching on the metal bench, I gripped the bar, squatted, and gracelessly managed to get both feet against the wall on either side of my hands. Leaning back, I shoved until the pressure sustained me above the bench in a strained float. My legs ached, the edge of the bench biting into my hamstrings, and then the bar ripped from the wall with a tired thud, and I flew back, landing hard on the floor. The wind left me in a grunt, my breath screeching, my shoulder blades on fire.

No approaching footsteps. No one barging in from the adjoining room.

I slid my handcuff off the curved end of the security bar and stood. The bolts had gone into the plaster and one wooden stud, but there was no metal or concrete beneath the wall as there should have been. Holding the bar, I approached the giant mirror. So much color on my face. A purple mottling across my right cheek. One eyelid blue and blown wide. The edge of my mouth cracked and red. A bruise on the side of my neck. I leaned closer to the mirror, noting the dark dot at the center of that bruise. A needle mark. How long had they kept me drugged?

I recalled how DeWitt and Verrone had made sure to address their colleagues in the observation room there, behind the two-way mirror: Okay, we got him, thanks. You recording? A nice touch, to leave me believing I was being watched.

I swung the security bar at the mirror. The bar bounced back hard, as I'd expected, and glass rained down around me, winking in the light.

Beneath the mirror was not an observation room but solid wall. The clinging shards broke my reflection into fragments.

A string and a stake in the ground. A security bar and a mirror.

The door to the adjoining room was closed but unlocked. Bracing myself, wielding the bar, I stepped out into darkness and fumbled for a light switch. I clicked on the overheads and dropped the bar in disbelief.

I knew this place.

Aside from the desk, the poster, and the clock--the sliver of room visible from the bench to which I'd been chained--the room had been largely emptied.

The last time I was here, from outside peering in, I'd spied DeWitt's desk. Now it had been moved across the floor to put it in view from the interrogation room. The venetian blinds were closed. To the left of the doorway was nothing but a few discarded computer cords, a capsized paper shredder, and a large copier shoved into the corner.

Torn from a key ring, a glossy valet parking slip lay on the floor:

This June, Be Afraid.

This June, There's Nowhere Left to Hide.

This June . . . THEY'RE WATCHING.

I trudged to the desk. There were my things, neatly collected in the plastic tub. With trembling fingers I pocketed them. Then I dug through the mess around the in-boxes. One of the crisp manila folders fell to the floor, spilling its contents. I stared down at the fan of blank paper. Then I riffled through the other files, my consternation growing as I realized that all the folders on the desk were filled with nothing more than blank copy paper. The top drawer held stacks of unused pads and manila folders. But beneath them I found a handcuff key. With great relief I freed my wrist.

The file drawer held a revolver. I stared down at it like it was a coiled snake.

I was numb, overloaded, moving on autopilot. It was almost as though I was directing myself from outside my body. When I turned away from the drawer, the gun was shoved in my waistband.

Stumbling across the room, I opened the hatch on the paper shredder and tugged out a clear plastic bag filled with crosscut scraps. It was probably useless, but I wanted to leave with something. As the front door swung open under my unsteady hand, that brass placard flashed into view: D O NOT LEAVE ANY PACKAGES WITHOUT SIGNATURE. D O NOT LEAVE ANY PACKAGES WITH NEIGHBORING BUSINESSES.

I staggered out onto the second-floor hallway of the Starbright Plaza.

Nighttime. It seemed impossible, but all was normal in the real world. Down the unlit hallway, I could hear people working late, voices on phones, selling, selling, selling. Flatware clinked in the cafe below. In the parking lot, streetlights dropped glistening mercury onto the roofs of sleek cars. A not-quite-rain left everything dusted with dew.

Halfway down the stairs, clutching the bag of shredded paper, I stopped. Jerry's warning from last week played in my head: Printers, copiers, fax machines--everything's got a hard drive now, and people can get at 'em and know what you've been up to.

I ran back up. When they'd cleared out the place, they'd left the unwieldy copier behind. A beat-up Sharp, some years old. Nothing in the tray, nothing facedown against the glass. I swung open the plastic front and peered among the mechanical insides. There it was, an innocuous-looking beige rectangle. With a straightened paper clip, I poked the release hole and extracted the hard drive. Then I jotted down the copier's model number and fled.

What was waiting for me? Had the arrest warrant for Ariana's murder already been issued? How else had the world changed since that stun grenade had gone off in my lap?

Clearly DeWitt and Verrone and whoever else Ridgeline comprised had planned to hold me long enough to get the CD back and ensure an airtight frame for Ariana's murder. Then they'd turn me loose to whatever remained of my life, and I'd be snatched up by primed Robbery-Homicide detectives and put away for killing Keith and my wife.

No car. My wallet, empty. I'd sent them to that alley in Northridge because it was a good forty-minute drive before they'd arrive and be reminded that there was no brick wall. That left me time to drive home and get cash, a checkbook, and the list of defense attorneys Ariana had compiled for me, then disappear before the real cops closed in on me. I could regroup in a Motel 6. Watch the news, build a case to clear my name, get a lawyer, negotiate turning myself in. The revolver handle pressed into my stomach, cold and reassuring. Maybe there would be other options, too.

With the copier hard drive in my pocket, the bag of shredded documents in hand, I stumbled off the bottom stair onto ground level and out in front of a dry cleaner, the lights out, plastic-wrapped shirts shimmering on the carousel like dormant ghosts. As I hustled past the glass shop next door, the sight inside brought me up short. Lined on wooden racks and hung on the walls were endless mirrors. No doubt the one I'd shattered upstairs had been bought right here, a simple prop carried upstairs by Laurel and Hardy, the workers I'd spotted during my last visit. Ariana's words returned to me yet again, my eyes stinging at the thought of her: A misinterpretation, a white handkerchief, and a few well-placed nudges. How easily they'd knocked me off course, a tap at a time, until the world in my head no longer matched the world outside. My palm was flat against the cool window, my quick breath fogging the glass. Fragmented reflections stared back at me, bruise-faced and stupefied.

Shaken, I staggered on my way, cutting behind the valet stand into the cafe. The patrons regarded me with polite unease, and the waiters made eye contact with one another. I could only imagine what I looked like.

The place was emptying out for the night. The bartender was putting the well bottles to bed. And yet the clock upstairs had shown eight-thirty when I'd left.

"What time is it?" I asked a silver-haired gentleman in a booth.

A glance at his weighty watch. "Eleven-fifteen."

They'd kept me unconscious for hours longer than I'd been led to believe. Had they needed the extra time to put the final touches on the fake interrogation room? To find an opening to transport my unconscious body from the rear alley, up the fire-escape stairs, and through that metal back door with the shiny new dead bolt? Or to drag Ariana to Fryman Canyon? Maybe they'd killed her before I'd even regained consciousness.

Whatever that disc held, it couldn't be worth the price I'd paid for taking it.

My head still felt thick from whatever drugs had been shot into me. I realized I was still standing there, interrupting the couple's dinner. I searched for words, for more grounding: "What . . . what day is it?"

The man's wife rested a hand nervously on his forearm, but he offered me a consoling grin. "Thursday."

"Good," I muttered, backing up, nearly colliding with a busboy. "That's what it's supposed to be."

I ducked from their stares into the bathroom, dumped the throwaway cell phone into the trash, and cleaned up as best I could. Flashing on Ari's gray face, I came apart a little and had to clamp down. I had to hold it together long enough to get out of there.

Walking out, I grabbed a twenty someone had left on a table as a tip. The coatrack by the door had a black windbreaker, which I lifted and pulled on as I approached the valet stand, tucking the bag of shredded paper under my arm. The hood, protection against the wet breeze, obscured my fucked-up face.

The valet hopped up off his director's chair. I gestured at a BMW four spots over and said, "That's me right there." I pointed the twenty at him. "I can get it myself."

He tossed me the keys.

Chapter 48

I screeched up behind our back fence, leaving the Beemer a few feet off the curb. But I didn't hear the tires, didn't feel the fence biting me in the stomach, didn't smell the mulch beneath our sumacs. Suspended in grief, I'd come unmoored from my senses. There were a thousand impressions of her and nothing else.

It's bizarre what sticks in your brain. Ariana sitting on the kitchen floor, digging in a bottom cabinet, a carton of eggs waiting on the counter. Home from a night run, she wore a sports bra and had a sheen of dried sweat across her forehead, four pots pulled into her lap and twice as many spread on the floor around her. Her heel poked through a hole in her sock. She looked up, biting her lip, playing embarrassed, as if I'd caught her at something. Behind her hair band, a thick lock had bunched unevenly, and the light halved her face in shadow. She said, "What?" but I just shook my head and took in the sight of her. They talk about it like it's all jukebox slow dances and sweaty lovemaking and princess-cut diamonds. But sometimes it's just your wife sitting frog style on the kitchen floor after a workout, looking for an omelet pan.

Dazed, I floated through the side gate, keys in hand, heading for the front of our house. The dark sedan creeping into view ahead brought me crashing back into my body. The bag of crosscut documents slapped the concrete at my feet. It couldn't be the real cops yet--it seemed unlikely that they'd have found out about Ariana's body already. It had to be DeWitt and Verrone, coming to take their interrogation to another level.

The driver eased into the darkness beyond our mailbox and killed the engine. The first thing to hit was fear, compounded by everything that had come before. But then, cutting through my paralysis, came something else. Rage.

I headed for the car, my hand diving beneath my shirt, seizing the handle of the revolver. Just as I was about to pull and aim, the door cracked, the interior light illuminating Detective Gable. I jerked to a halt.

"You have one job right now," he said, climbing out. "And that is to stay reachable. Where the hell have you been all--"

We were close enough now that he caught sight of my face. Should I run? But my will had evaporated. Deflated, I wobbled a bit on my feet. My shirt was still bunched up, and I tugged the hem weakly, pulling it smooth over the gun.

"Jesus, what happened to you?"

"Did you break in and take a disc from my office? Because you have no idea what you did."

"Yeah, I broke in without a warrant and stole shit just to jeopardize my top case." He had the game face on, but my aggression had caught him off guard.

"You here to arrest me?"

He stiffened against the anger in my voice. "People involved with you keep dying."

"Arrest me if you're going to, but don't you fuck with me," I said. "Not right now. Not over this. There are limits. Basic human decency."

"I saw the body. Doesn't look like you showed her any decency." He stepped forward, and I shoved him, hard, against the sedan. His shoulder blades clapped loudly against the door, and when he ricocheted back to his feet, his hand had come up with his pistol. He pointed it at the street between us. He was as calm as I'd ever seen him. "Watch yourself."

"Say it. Just you fucking say it. Say I killed my wife."

"Your wife?" He looked astonished. "I'm here because Deborah Vance turned up dead."

Deborah Vance? The name was from a different lifetime. And yet it was only twelve hours ago I'd asked Joe Vente to tip the cops to check her apartment.

I became aware of the half dozen photographers who had crept like mice from the shadows. In light of the drawn gun, they kept their distance, but flashes strobed the uncertain standoff.

"You pointed Detectives Richards and Valentine to that woman," Gable said. "She played the Hungarian grandmother, was it? To get the mythical duffel bag of cash you found in the trunk of the mythical Honda? I want the real story." His breath misted. "And I'll need your alibi."

"I don't have a fucking alibi."

"I haven't told you when she was killed." He looked troubled, unsure of himself.

"You think I care about Keith Conner or Deborah Vance? My wife is dead. And you're running around like this other shit matters. That's all you guys do. You don't save anyone. You're historians--you come in after the fact and write reports and point your fucking fingers."

I took a step to the side, the paparazzi behind me now. Gable's gun hadn't moved. The tip remained perfectly still. "They killed my wife," I said. "They took her and they killed her." Saying it out loud gave it more force. I fought my voice steady. "They tried to hold me in a . . . a fake jail--"

"A fake jail?"

I clutched for a response. The false interrogation room was so audacious and mind-boggling that the mention of it sounded outlandish spilling from my mouth.

Gable couldn't decide between amused and irate. "And let me guess. If we go to find it, the space'll be cleared out."

A bar, a mirror, and a poster. DeWitt and Verrone were probably removing even those at this very moment, leaving the Ridgeline office as blank as a wiped chalkboard. "Yeah," I said. "That's exactly what'll happen. And then you'll find Ariana's body in a gully in Fryman Canyon, with evidence showing I killed her. And you idiots won't believe me because I don't have a single concrete thing to prove that her killers exist, except for this."

Fisting my shirt, I tugged it up, revealing the revolver stuffed in my waistband. But Gable wasn't looking at me. He was looking at our garage door.

It was wobbling open.

My hands fell to my sides, my shirt dropping just before he glanced back at me.

Footsteps sounded on the concrete floor of our garage. Gable's gun finally moved, inching over toward the house.

Ariana stepped into view.

At first I didn't believe. And then I was drifting toward her in a daze, stumbling over the curb, finally meeting her in the garage next to her truck. I clutched her shoulders, felt her flesh and bone in my grip.

"You were dead," I said.

"Your face--"

"You were gone, and they had you, and you were dead."

"No," she said. "You were gone." She was tilting my head this way and that, appraising the damage. "My meeting was delayed, and I stopped after to pick up more prepaid cell phones, since you'd taken the last one. There was no one here when I got home."

"So this whole time, you . . . you . . . ?" Was I sobbing or laughing wildly?

Gable stood in our driveway, backlit by the sparkling flashes, though the photographers themselves blended into the dark, a murmuring chorus. The firm line of his shoulders had taken on a droop, and in the grainy darkness he looked like a figure torn from a noir movie.

He called out, "We should just have you committed and save us all a lot of aggravation."

I was gripping Ariana--her hips, her arms--testing the realness of her. She had a hand against my unbruised cheek and a look of bewildered concern. "What happened to you? Who did this?"

Gable, chafing at being ignored: "You think you can just fuck with us this way? Play games with the investigation? I saw what you did to that woman, the bullet through her mouth. And when I nail your ass to my trophy wall, we'll see how well this insanity routine holds up." He turned toward his car, then spun on his heel, incensed. "Next time I come back, I'm not just gonna ask questions."

Ari's eyes didn't leave mine. She reached over to the wall, hit the glowing button, and the garage door tilted down. Detective Gable stood his ground as the lowering door cut off his glare, his chest, and finally his spotless loafers.

The doors were locked and bolted, the burglar alarm set. The day's bouts of street theater had left the paparazzi reinvigorated, sipping coffee from Thermoses, patrolling the block, and comparing lenses beyond the curb. A news helicopter had returned to circle our roof, waiting for another meltdown. The bag of shredded documents sat on the kitchen counter, beside the hard drive I'd tugged from Ridgeline's copier. The revolver rested at arm's length on the coffee table. Gable and RHD were using all resources to shore up the case against me; they didn't even have to waste manpower keeping surveillance on me, since the press was doing the job for them. The men from Ridgeline--DeWitt and Verrone and whoever else--were out there somewhere in the night, plotting. And Ari and I were sitting on the couch, facing each other, our bent legs intertwined.

I ran my fingertips across her mouth, her neck, each living part of her. I held my knuckles before her trembling lips and felt the rush of her breath. I marveled at her coloring, pressed on her skin and watched pink fill in the white, as if this evidence of her moving blood could wipe from my memory the image of her face against the weeds, the shade of her flesh Photoshopped to an unliving gray.

Leaning forward, she kissed me, tentatively. A nervous whisper--"Still remember how to have sex?" Her mouth was at my ear, her hair brushing my bruised cheek.

"I think so," I said. "You?"

She pulled away, rolling her lips as if still assessing the feel of my mouth. "I don't know."

She rose and walked up the stairs. A moment later I picked up the revolver and followed.

We met in a collection of present-tense flashes, a bedroom mosaic. The sheets, shoved back under her impatient heel. The feather-soft grasp of her hand. Her mouth, wet and exploratory against my collarbone. I insisted on seeing every part of her--the mole at the curve of her hip, the arch of her foot, the V of fine blond hair on her nape beneath the weight of her curls.

After, or in between, we lay exhausted, interwoven, tracing drops of sweat across each other's skin. We hadn't been naked in front of each other in months, and it was all the excitement of the new with the comfort of the familiar. The tendon at the back of her knee was firm and fragile against my lips. The revolver remained beside the jammer on the nightstand, poking into view, never forgotten, but our bedroom had become a sanctuary of sorts, keeping the night and the terrors it held at bay. A trail of clothes led from door to bed. The UCLA hoodie she'd bought at the Student Union and cut thumb-holes in the sleeves for the cold early mornings I'd walk her back to her dorm. The Morro Bay T-shirt we'd gotten when we'd gone up to feed the squirrels and stayed in a flea-bitten place we'd renamed The Horsefly Inn. Pulled inside out, her varnish-stained jeans. And dropped into the nest of a fallen pillow on the floor, her wedding set. If ever a string of objects charted a relationship.

My ear was flat against the back of her thigh, and I could hear the hum of her voice through her flesh. "I missed you," she said.

I soaked in the warmth of her skin. I said, "I feel like I found you again."

Chapter 49

Burned adrenaline kept me up almost to daylight, before my vigilance finally gave out beneath the weight of so many sleepless nights. I slumbered--dreamless, solid, untroubled--as I hadn't since my teenage years. When I awakened, the revolver was missing from the nightstand, but I heard Ariana's familiar footsteps moving around in the kitchen. By the time I finally hauled myself out of bed, popped four Advil, and slumped downstairs, it was nearly two o'clock.

The gun and jammer resting beside her, she sat cross-legged on the family-room carpet, facing away, scrutinizing a mound of shredded paper she'd dumped from the bag I'd stolen from Ridgeline. No scrap was bigger than a thumbnail. As I neared, I saw that she'd made a few preliminary piles, organized by color. Her biggest collection, with maybe ten pieces, was dwarfed by the unsorted heap, but she seemed characteristically undaunted.

"We're pretty much fucked on white," she said as I walked up behind her. "There seems to be slightly less gray. Sparse pink, but I think it's a take-out menu. And a few of these harder ones. Weird." She held a white-silver square over her head, and I took it, bent it between thumb and forefinger. It bowed, regained its shape.

"Magazine cover?" I ventured.

"No writing on the few I've found." She leaned back into my legs and looked up at me. A mariposa tucked behind her ear.

Lavender.

"You haven't--" I stopped.

She raised a hand self-consciously to the flower. "You noticed? That I'd stopped wearing this color?"

"Of course."

She didn't smile, but she looked pleased. She went back to sorting through the mound of scraps.

"Is there any hope of piecing something together out of all that?" I asked.

"Probably not. But it's one of two leads you took from there. They pulled out all the stops to get that missing CD--maybe something here'll lead us to it. Are you going back to Starbright Plaza? To ask about the lease or whatever?"

"I'm not leaving you. You just died."

"Patrick, we're not gonna get out of this if we hole up here. What are we gonna do? Hold each other until Robbery-Homicide kicks down the door?"

I didn't want to confess that after the grueling past twenty-four hours, that was pretty much my plan. The notion of being apart from her right now was excruciating. "There's no point in my going to Starbright Plaza," I said. "We both know how that'll end up. They'll have covered all their bases. If I try to get the cops to check it out, I'll only wind up looking more delusional. Besides, I already took anything useful out of there." I glanced at the hard drive, still on the counter. "Which reminds me, I need to call around and see which shops have that model of Sharp copier."

"There are two at the Kinko's down the hill," she said. "The one on Ventura. You might be familiar with it."

I stared at her, slack-jawed. "You are a whirlwind of competence."

"Yeah, well, I didn't have to sleep off a stun grenade like some people." The phone rang. "That'd be Julianne. She's been calling all day."

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"I tried. But like I said, you were inanimate."

I grabbed the phone.

"Hey." Julianne's voice was rushed, intense. "I need to get those papers you're handing off to the professor taking over your classes. It's urgent."

I started to respond, then caught myself. She already knew that I'd handed those papers over to the department chair on the day before yesterday. So what was she signaling to me?

"Okay," I said carefully. "I would drop them off now, but I--"

"I'm afraid that wouldn't work anyway. I have to go to Marcello's nephew's birthday party in Coldwater Canyon Park at three."

Marcello was an only child. No nephew, no party. Julianne was trying to set a meeting with me?

"Okay," she said. "I'll call you tomorrow, and we'll pick a time then."

Before I could figure out how to tell Julianne that I didn't want to leave the house, she clicked off.

Ariana asked, "What's up?"

"She wants me to meet her at Coldwater Canyon Park." I checked my watch. "Right now. She's been looking into the Ridgeline-sonar connection for me."

"So you're going?"

I hedged.

"Patrick"--the stern tone now--"I know you don't want to leave, and I can't stand the thought of being away from you either right now, but if we're gonna have a shot at saving ourselves, we've got to go on the offensive. We have too much to handle right now. We need to split up and get it done." A nod to the mound of scraps. "I've got plenty of work ahead of me. Sorting this. Hiring you a lawyer. I'll stay here. I have the burglar alarm. And this." She patted the revolver.

"I thought you didn't know how to shoot a gun."

She took in my battered face. "I'll learn."

Hearing her say it gutted me.

I said, "They have guns, too, which they already know how to use. Plus, they know how to bypass the alarm system."

"Right. But they can't bypass this." She beckoned me into the living room and threw open the curtains. The paparazzi and reporters at the curb stumbled into motion. She waved at the flurry of lenses, then tugged the curtains shut. "Now. What's the deal with Julianne?"

"Sounds like she has something," I admitted.

"What are you hoping for?"

"Something undeniable. If I can get my hands on concrete evidence, I bet I can get Sally Richards back into it with me."

"She told you pretty clearly she's done."

"But there's no condition," I quoted, "more motivating to her than curiosity."

"Pot, I'd like you to meet kettle."

"I just need to give her a good enough excuse."

"Your car's still at Keith Conner's, right? You need to take the pickup?" Her expression was fierce, uncompromising.

She was right. We had to attack this on two fronts.

I took a deep breath. "I can't take the pickup," I said. "The paparazzi will be all over me the minute I leave the driveway. I need to drive something more . . . anonymous."

"So borrow my license plates."

"And do what? Screw them onto the stolen BMW?" I laughed, then saw she was serious. "I'm sure the lawyer we haven't hired will be thrilled."

She pointed. "Now, go."

I pocketed the copier's hard drive, headed to the garage, and unscrewed her license plates. Then I came back in, took two of the new prepaid cell phones, and programmed each number into the other so she and I would have a way to talk on a secure line. Hers I left on the counter. Taking a deep breath, I walked over, kissed the top of her head, and started for the rear door.

Without looking up from her sorting, she said, "They're back there, too. The stalkerazzi. Surround-sound protection."

"Can you create a diversion out front? Get them running to you?"

"Okay," she said. "I'll flash them. It'll bring back my sorority days."

"You weren't in a sorority."

"Yeah, but I always feel like I missed out." She stood, dusted paper squares from her hands, and in the gold morning light I could see that her fingers were trembling. Her tone, I realized, was less breezy than defiant; she was as fearful as I was of whatever was hurtling toward us. She caught me looking, shoved her hands into her pockets.

She drew in a breath, held it. "Last night was the beginning for us, not the end," she said. "So you be goddamned careful."

* * *

The playground, on a green plot perched off intersecting canyon roads, had all the earmarks of Beverly Hills. Restaurant-packaged picnic lunches with sparkling French lemonade. Upmarket climbing apparatuses polished to a high gleam. The lone TV star with windshield-size sunglasses and a street-cred Yankees beanie, tailing a toddler and mustering up the occasional blip of feigned interest. Beautiful second wives tending newborns, the babies resembling their ugly fathers who hovered away from the sand and the concrete turtles, aggressively uninvolved, dressed in Rodeo Drive silk, reeking of cologne, poking at iPhones or yammering into earpieces, their hairlines moving one way, their waistlines another. The mothers bunched and chatted, but the husbands stood apart, lords of their own fiefdoms, their sagging eyes betraying more buyer's remorse than could penetrate the nip-and-tuck surface tension of their wives' frozen expressions of contentedness.

Julianne had chosen the park, I guessed, because everyone was famous here, or at least they all fancied themselves so. Introductions were gauche--either they knew who you were or you weren't worth knowing. Patrick Davis, in his newfound infamy and Red Sox cap, might pass unscrutinized here.

Julianne was lingering over by the swings like a spinster aunt left out at the family reunion. I parked my appropriated car, the Beemer with conveniently tinted windows, and started to get out, but my hand froze on the door handle. Gripped by a spasm of justified paranoia, I looked up the street at all the vehicles and passersby, then stayed put. I dialed.

"Where are you?" she asked after I explained.

"I'm at your nine o'clock. Turn, turn. Here."

"The Beemer?"

"That's me."

"Nice rims, Coolio. Care to fill me in?"

"It'd take too long. I owe you a big catch-up at the end of this, if I'm still standing."

"You'll owe me more than that. I spoke with my hook at The Wash Post. One of his colleagues has specialized in uncovering all this stuff since Clinton signed the rendition directive in '95."

"Wait a minute. All what stuff?"

"Ridgeline is based in Bahrain." She paused, reading my silence. "I know. Given that 'Ridgeline' doesn't exactly have an Arabic ring, I'm assuming the company is Western, but they wanted to set up as a nonreporting entity for maximum secrecy. They specialize in international executive protection."

The car interior was suddenly too warm. I tugged at my shirt, fanning it. "What's a corporation like that doing in a strip mall in Studio City?"

"Ridgeline's bodyguard business is a front for a shadow operation. Any money they're paid is untraceable once it hits Bahrain, so no one can untangle how much they get for doing what. Plus, they're hidden behind a mess of holding companies and shell corps. But once you cut through the veils, it becomes clear that Ridgeline was formed mainly to service one client: Festman Gruber."

Julianne paced around the swings, taking up her burgundy hair in the back with a restless hand. A family unloaded from a Porsche Cayenne in front of me, the youngest girl fiddling with a fake plastic cell phone. Her older sister snatched it away. "It's not a toy."

I said weakly, "I'm not familiar with Festman Gruber."

"Oh, they're just a seventy-billion-dollar global defense and technology company. And yes, that's a b. These are the kinds of guys you outsource a war to. I'm guessing they're the only type of operation, aside from one of our agencies or someone else's, that could make the moves against you that've been made. This rings all the right bells."

"Or the wrong ones."

"Whatever."

"What do they specialize in?"

"Surveillance equipment, obviously. And also--"

"Sonar."

She stopped pacing. Beside her, a just-deserted swing bucked on its chains. "Bingo."

I could see her mouth shaping the word, her voice transmitting on a half-second delay. It struck me as ridiculous that I was reduced to hiding here in a car thirty yards away rather than talking to her face-to-face.

Her hand went to her back pocket, and then she was thumbing through her notepad. "Festman's based in Alexandria."

I thought of that package I'd stolen containing the CD, sent from a FedEx center in Alexandria. And the affixed note: Going dark. Do not contact.

"Going dark"? A Ridgeline operative, inside Festman Gruber? Why would they have a spy inside the company that employed them? The motive, I realized, was written right on that FedEx slip: Insurance.

Abruptly it all made sense. Ridgeline was a cutout group hired under legit cover to do Festman Gruber's dirty work--killing Keith, which killed the movie that threatened Festman's financial interests. Ridgeline's main job was to frame me for Keith's murder so all fingers pointed at me and not at Festman Gruber. But once I'd squirmed out of the arrest, Ridgeline had wanted a little insurance of their own, some leverage in case things went south and Festman hung them out. They'd managed to infiltrate Festman or bribe someone inside to FedEx them whatever dirty secrets were hidden on that seemingly blank CD. That's why Ridgeline was desperate to recover the CD--to hold on to their leverage and to keep Festman from discovering the betrayal.

If Ridgeline still hadn't recovered the disc--and assuming Festman Gruber didn't know about it yet--then who the hell had broken in to our house and taken it?

Julianne was still talking. I said, "I'm sorry, what?"

"I said, Festman's based in Alexandria. But they have a satellite office here in Long Beach. Obviously they have operations on both coasts."

"Why obviously?"

"Uh, sonar?"

"Right, the ocean."

"Both of them. They conduct biannual RIMPAC--Rim of the Pacific--exercises, and a lot of the tech development's housed out here, too. But they've got reach everywhere."

"What's that mean?"

"It seems their critics have a higher-than-normal mortality rate. An outspoken environmental activist had a hiking accident two summers ago in Alaska, fell off a cliff. An investigative journalist in Chicago committed questionable suicide. That kind of stuff. Festman was under some pretty intense scrutiny a few years back."

"So they couldn't have another mysterious death on the books. Like, say, that of a celebrity starring in a documentary about the damages caused by their sonar system."

"Thus the need for Patrick Davis, fall guy. I mean, given how things went down, who the hell would connect Keith Conner's murder with a fucking naval-technology company? But if there's not you at the scene wielding your own bloody golf club--"

"I wasn't wielding it."

"Whatever. Without you there panting over the body, then maybe people start raising questions, fitting Keith into a pattern of murders that have proven convenient for Festman." She blew out a long breath, puffing her cheeks. "I think it's safe to say Ridgeline and Festman have enjoyed a fruitful relationship for a while now."

The thought of that FedEx package brought me some solace. That fruitful relationship was growing strained, Ridgeline taking countermeasures against their employer. As fearsome as my enemies were, at least now I knew where the cracks in the alliance were. The CD, wherever it was, was the holy grail for all of us.

I turned over the engine and pulled slowly out.

"I trust this is useful?" Julianne said with mock humility.

"You're amazing."

In the rearview I could see her standing in the bright light of the sandbox, phone to her ear, a hand shielding her eyes. I turned the corner, and she was gone, except for the voice in my ear.

"Take care of yourself," it said. "You're heading into uncharted waters."

Chapter 50

"I'm sorry, sir, you can't do that."

I was crouched in front of the copier, having swung open the panel and removed the hard drive. Even with my back turned, there was no way to insert the Ridgeline hard drive into the vacant slot without his noticing. I shoved the Kinko's hard drive down the front of my jeans before turning around, holding the other in clear view. "Oh, sorry. It just jammed up. I was checking--"

"The hard drive?" The Kinko's cashier, a high-school kid with a thatch of curly blond hair and gauged earrings, chewed listlessly on what smelled like Black Jack gum. "You can't do that. Give it to me." He swiped the Ridgeline hard drive from my hand. I almost grabbed for it, but then he leaned over and plugged it in to the copier. "Listen, if you mess with the equipment--" He did a double take, and his expression changed.

Sally and Valentine had been in here checking the computer-rental logs and probably flashing my picture. Or maybe he recognized me from the news. My bad bruises probably compounded his unease. I raised a hand awkwardly to my cheek.

He backed to the counter. "Sorry," he said. "Take your time." He pretended to bury himself in his reading, a dog-eared trade paperback of Y: The Last Man, but his eyes flicked at me over the tops of the pages.

I quickly key-tapped my way into the copier's memory and clicked the button to print out everything on it. My fingers drummed the counter as the machine spit out one piece of warm paper after another. Looking over my shoulder to make sure the kid wasn't calling the cops, I was too distracted to read anything. It came to about thirty pages. I paid with a spill of crumpled bills and rushed out to the car.

A cold sweat hit when I thought of Ariana at home, unprotected. I made it only a few blocks before I had to pull over and call her on the prepaid cell phone. My heart pounded until she picked up.

"You still alive?" I asked.

"No," she said. "Oh, wait. Yeah, sorry. I am."

"Paparazzi still surrounding the house?"

"Our inadvertent guardian angels? Yes, they're here. Noses to the glass."

"You call me if they leave."

"They leave, we're throwing a party."

I hung up and took a deep breath, the stack of copies heavy in my lap. Rain clouds threatened above, giving dusk a head start, and I had to click on the dome light to see the top sheet clearly.

A surveillance photo of me standing at our front window looking out at the street, the pane blurring my face. The voyeuristic view and my smudged features gave the copied photo an otherworldly feel, which sent a chill burrowing beneath my scalp.

Keith as well was tracked in a number of pictures, the time stamps indicating they were taken in the days before his death. A handwritten log, presumably derived from a wiretap, listed various numbers he'd called from home and cell phone. The next few surveillance photos followed an older gentleman in a suit, stepping out of a limo beneath a glass-and-steel building with a slick logo in the lobby window--the letter N on a tilt within a circle. He wore a silver goatee, and his bearing suggested justified confidence. Beneath was a copy of a cell-phone bill under the name Gordon Kazakov, with various numbers underlined. Another enemy of the board? Other grainy photos followed, featuring various men and women. Someone at a base camp in the snow--the environmental activist who'd "fallen" off a cliff? There were answers here to questions I hadn't even known to ask.

I kept flipping through. Airline tickets, hotel bills, more phone records, a bank ledger with transactions circled. Check stubs and wire confirmations. Matched to certain payments were names: Mikey Peralta, Deborah Vance, Keith Conner. And, sure enough, Patrick Davis. It read like a menu of prices--the cost to stalk, to frame, to kill.

The next page held copies of four money orders for $9,990--each just below the $10,000 bank-reporting threshold. Scrawled at the top of each one was #1117.

What the hell was that? Some kind of internal code? An account number? And why were these payments set apart and given prominence?

With growing astonishment I turned to the last page. A photo showed Keith sprawled dead on the floor of that hotel room. The forehead divot, the pool of ink in the eye socket, the perverted angle of the neck--it brought back the horrid epiphany of that moment with a force that made me forget to breathe. I examined the photo more closely. The wink of the flash was visible in the glass of a framed watercolor on the wall, and the time stamp showed 1:53.

Five minutes before I'd been spotted by the room-service waiter on the ground floor.

Not only could I not have been in the room at that time, but I couldn't have shot the photograph; I'd had no camera, and certainly no film when I'd been taken into custody.

My hands shook with excitement.

My name--cleared. The dots--connected.

Before DeWitt and Verrone had emptied out the office in preparation for my captivity, they'd copied these key incriminating documents, probably so all the members of Ridgeline's team could keep a packet to inoculate themselves against future threats. They'd documented their transactions with Festman Gruber all the way to the bank-account numbers on either end of each wire. If they went down, they could take Festman down, too. Mutually assured destruction. But I wasn't part of that equation. I was out of the circle, and now I had my thumb on the detonator.

I reached Sally Richards on her cell phone. There were voices in the background, what sounded like a get-together, so I said, "Give me ten seconds to talk."

She said, "Go."

"I have definitive proof clearing me of Keith's murder. I have hard evidence of the conspiracy. Like you said--justice, truth, and all that crap. Here's our shot. I can serve it to you and Valentine on a silver platter. Meet me for five minutes."

I held my breath, listened to that background noise--a radio playing, someone's joke going over big, the jangle of a dog collar. The last crescent of sun dipped behind a bank of clouds, and the sky downshifted three shades of gray. She hadn't hung up, but she hadn't replied either.

"Come on," I said. "Show me that motivating curiosity."

Silence. My hopes were dissipating along with the daylight.

Finally she exhaled across the receiver. "I've got a place."

Mulholland Drive rides the ridge of the Santa Monicas, overlooking the world. To the north the Valley stretches out like a sequined tarp, flat and unforgiving, a hothouse of trapped air and bad associations--porn, meth, movie studios. The Los Angeles Basin, cooler in all regards and eager to point that out, dips south, pushing west until ever-pricier real estate terminates in a throw of sand and the polluted Pacific. A glamorous road befitting a glamorous city, temptation and danger at every turn. It lures you to take in the view but never stops twisting. You fix on the pretty lights until you plummet to your death--L.A. in a nutshell.

Finally I turned off on a compacted dirt road, a cloud of red-brown dust rising to escort my car to the secured yellow gate. NO PARKING AFTER DUSK. Outside the gate I slotted the Beemer next to the familiar Crown Vic, grabbed the sheaf of copies, and hoofed it up to the old Nike missile control facility. A quarter mile up the dirt trail, the place waited, a Cold War relic as cracked and desiccated as Kissinger's accent.

The scattered buildings, trimmed in fallen barbed wire, had the feel of abandoned playground equipment. Rusted, forlorn, municipal. They didn't look like much, perhaps because the power of the place was never here. It was buried in missile silos in the tranquil surrounding hills.

My shoes crunched rock. The air was heavy and smelled of rain. A path wound around to the hexagonal observation tower. Following, I entered the overhang. Steep metal steps zigged and zagged with cold military precision. Educational signage sealed the structure's fate--it was now a musty museum, a gutted time capsule, a temple to an obsolete paranoia.

Khrushchev's prediction shouted from a plaque bolted to the base of the tower: WE WILL BURY YOU. Breathing in metal and dirt, I could picture the clean-shaven soldiers who had manned this facility around the clock, smoking their Lucky Strikes, eyes on the horizon, waiting for a shift change or the world to end.

The stairs--all treads, no risers--seemed to ascend into darkness. The view up filled me with dread. I didn't want to be here. I wanted to be home with my wife, the door locked behind us. But I made my way up, the structure rigid against the night wind. Air whistled past the railings, through the mesh-steel steps, but the tower itself didn't creak or groan. It was built in a time when they knew how to build things.

By the time I reached the top, I was slightly winded. Sally was standing near the edge, leaning on a sturdy pay telescope, looking out at the panoramic darkness. Her flat eyes took note of me. "They say on a clear day you can see Catalina."

Pacing tight circles, his dark face shiny with sweat, Valentine could have been on bomber lookout himself. "I told you, Richards, I don't like this Deep Throat shit."

I asked, "Did Robbery-Homicide seize a CD from my house yesterday?"

"No," Sally said. "At least not officially." She grew uneasy under Valentine's outraged glare. "I've been keeping tabs on the case," she told him. "Word in the halls, that's it."

"You're flirting with dismissal here, Richards." He threw up his hands and started for the stairs. "I'm not going down this path with you."

"We're here," she said. "We see what he has. That's all."

I said, "I have a copied photograph of Keith Conner's corpse taken five minutes before I entered the room."

Sally's mouth tensed, but Valentine continued as if I weren't there. "This is way too hot a potato for us. The captain was clear as fuck what would happen to our asses if we went sniffing. I got four boys to take care of, so yes, thank you, keeping my job and pension would be a nice way to go into next week."

I held out the picture of Keith's body, and Sally shoved herself skeptically off the telescope and walked over. After taking a defiant pause to eye my bruised face, she squinted down at the page. For a moment her expression was unchanged, but then she swallowed sharply and color crept into her cheeks. "Even if the time stamp is doctored," she said, "you didn't have a camera." She couldn't lift her eyes from the picture. Her hand reached for the railing, groping the air, and then she caught it and leaned a sturdy hip into the structure, as if grounding herself. "What else?"

I fanned through a few surveillance shots of Keith. "These were taken by a company named Ridgeline. Two of their men kidnapped me."

Sally's eyebrows lifted a few centimeters.

I held up a hand. "I know. I'll explain. But first let me lay out motive. Keith was making a documentary that condemned naval sonar for killing whales."

"The Deep End," Sally said. "Dolphins, too, I've heard."

"There's a vote coming up in the Senate to lower the decibel levels of naval sonar. Keith's documentary was timed to influence that decision. A company named Festman Gruber is a huge contractor specializing in sonar equipment. I'm guessing they've got a lot to lose if that Senate vote doesn't swing their way."

Valentine pleaded with Sally, "Can we please call this before we catch crazy?"

"So they knocked off Keith and framed you?" Sally's lips were pursed in a faint, worried smile. "What do you have to back up that elaborate theory?"

"I have banking, wire, and phone records tying Ridgeline to Festman Gruber. I have the names of murder victims written next to specific payments."

I flipped through the documents to show them off, Sally frowning down at them, biting her lip. Despite himself, Valentine crowded in, peering over her shoulder.

"And," I said, "I have these weird withdrawals they made."

"Weird how?" Valentine said.

"There's some code attached to them. Right here." I turned the page, pointed at the money orders with #1117 written across the top.

Valentine looked down and almost absentmindedly snapped open the thumb break on his holster. His hand jittered once above the pistol grip, a seesaw of indecision. Then, with a single fluid motion, he lifted the Glock from the leather and shot Sally in the chest.

Chapter 51

A plume of blood erupted from Sally's shirt. She took a thundering step back, her weight cocked above a bent leg, and then collapsed. Valentine and I stared on in horror as she shuddered and gasped, and then he lifted the barrel weakly and aimed it at me.

The muzzle sparked again, and I felt the air move by my head, but I was already leaping for the stairs, the documents crumpling around my fist. I landed halfway down the top flight, my shoulder ringing off a rail, my momentum carrying my body up over my head. I hit the landing on a roll and half scrambled, half fell down the switchback, putting all that metal between me and Valentine. Skidding to a painful halt, mesh steel digging into my back, I could hear Valentine up there.

"Oh, Jesus. You're hurt. Why'd you have to go and do this, Richards? You had to push it. I tried to talk you off it, but there you went. Wouldn't let it go. You're hurt, Christ, you're hurt. You left me no choice. You left me no choice."

A moist gurgling. Liquid tapping metal.

A low moan, which I realized wasn't Sally but Valentine. It rose to an almost feminine scream, accompanied by a violent series of blows--him banging his fist against the deck?

He was sobbing. "I couldn't go down for this. I go away, who's gonna take care of my boys?"

But she wasn't saying anything back.

"I'm sorry," he wept. "I'm sorry. C'mon, open your eyes, Richards. Open your eyes. Gimme a pulse now. Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry."

I folded the documents and shoved them into my pocket, wincing at the crinkling. The wind kicked up a bit more, drowning out the shrill serenade of the crickets.

As I edged down another flight, Valentine seemed to perceive my movement and return to his senses. I heard the chirp of his radio, and then he bellowed, "Officer down! I have an officer down on the observation tower of the Nike facility off dirt Mulholland. Send backup and medical now!" His voice wavered, and I realized that even my own mind-numbing shock didn't compare to his. He panted for a moment, catching his breath, then continued, "The perpetrator, Patrick Davis, wrestled away my gun and shot her. I have my partner's weapon and am in pursuit. Over."

Dispatch came back in a burst of concerned static, and the volume eased down, and then it was him and me, breathing in the silence.

Valentine's shoes moved slowly across the platform, then onto the stairs. Two flights below, enveloped in a kind of calm terror, I shadowed his steps, quiet and steady. The thought of that picture on Sally's desk, her holding her toddler, threw me into a moment of denial. It didn't seem possible for me to have witnessed what I'd just witnessed.

He was coming a little faster, the shadows from his legs flickering through the gaps between steps. I sped up. Another flight and I would run out of room. Then it would be a dash in the dark with a loaded gun behind me.

I reached the bottom, and he was still coming strong, shoes clanging. For a suspended moment, I looked ahead at the path that would leave me vulnerable to a bullet in the back.

The options were clear: run and get shot or turn and counterattack.

On heavy legs I ducked back under the stairs. The dirt sloped up hard beneath the first flight. I pressed myself into the darkness beneath the landing, my body starting to register the pain from my tumble. My breath was firing, and I fought to tamp it quietly back into my chest.

My sneaker lost purchase on the angle, and I nearly went down, broadcasting my position, but my hand flew up through the gap where a riser would be and hooked a stair tread, stabilizing me.

Valentine's footsteps quickened, then slowed as soon as his shoes drew into view on the next flight up. He was bracing for an ambush. The toe of his loafer gleamed with blood, so dark it looked black, and the cuff of his slacks was smeared. As he descended, I let go of the step, withdrawing my hand carefully. The treads carved him into horizontal slivers--shoe and ankle, thigh and waist, chest and neck--but when he eased his weight down onto the landing above me, I caught a clear view of the Glock he held firmly before him with both hands on the grip.

He slowed some more. The wind was up and would have covered the sound of my doubling back. But had he spotted me? Or guessed?

His next step carried him out of view, directly overhead, the landing blocking him from sight. I realized I was holding my breath, and I couldn't now exhale. My lungs burned. His shoe padded down onto metal. And then again. Through the gap I saw the gun come into view first, and I nearly gave in to panic and bolted. But it wasn't pointed down at me; it was drifting five feet above the stairs. His hands slid into view, his wrists, his forearms. He was aiming up the path, breathing hard. His loafer set down on the top step, no more than six inches from my eyes. I could smell the bitter tint of blood on the soles. His other foot touched down on the second tread, seemingly in slow motion.

My hands floated in front of my face, half raised, quaking in the darkness. I watched his heel drop flat, a millimeter at a time. For an awful instant, I froze up. But then everything inside me broke free in a burst of terrified fury. Reaching through the steps, I seized his ankles and ripped them toward me as hard as I could.

He bellowed, tumbling violently, and then his torso struck metal with a clang and a gunshot exploded, amplified off the surrounding metal. He lurched down a few more steps on his face and chest before rolling over and jerking to a halt, his hand dangling into view off the side. He grumbled something unintelligible, and then the night gave over to the crickets and an odd sucking sound that came at uneven intervals.

I stayed crouched, frozen, waiting for who knew what, until I saw the dark drops working their way through the steel mesh of the bottom stair and tapping the dirt below. I crept out.

He'd wound up in a leaned-back sitting position at the base of the stairs. His eyes rolled to and fro, straining, the whites pronounced in the dull moonlight, but as I tentatively approached, they tracked over and fixed on me. He had a tiny hole in his side at the base of his ribs, the tear in the white shirt no bigger than a penny. The surrounding fabric had darkened, the blotch the size of a Frisbee. His right hand, bent unnaturally, clutched the Glock. His finger remained threaded through the trigger guard. His chest lurched, and his lung gave off that sucking sound, fluttering the torn cloth at the edge of the bullet hole.

The right lapel of his sport jacket was flung back, a band of moonlight falling through the crisscross stairs to illuminate the revealed badge at his belt, with that all-too-familiar number.

LAPD 1117.

His hand firmed around the Glock, and I tensed, but he couldn't seem to lift his arm from his side to aim it at me. The ledge of his brow lowered with exertion. He jerked his head, and one of his legs stiffened, and the gun fired down into the dirt. And again. And again. The reports rolled off across the hills, across the blanketing trees and hidden missile silos. The recoil from the next shot knocked the gun from his hand. He looked down at it helplessly, tears mixing with his sweat.

The next sucking sound from his lung was fainter. His legs twitched, and then the fabric no longer fluttered at the edges of the hole in his shirt. His stare stayed fixed on me, every bit as alive as it had been moments before.

I had sunk to one knee before him, as if in fearful worship of the act I'd just committed. Through the roar of my thoughts, I could feel nothing.

Bolted to the wall to Valentine's left, Khrushchev's words addressed the bloody aftermath: WE WILL BURY YOU.

A loud hum sounded, breaking my trance, and I jerked back, tripping over my heels. Cautiously, I rose. It came again, vibrating Valentine's shirt pocket.

I approached his body with trepidation; my nerves were sandpapered raw. Keeping my head pulled back, I reached over and tugged a Palm Treo from his pocket.

A text message read:

YOUR CASH AT USUAL DROP POINT.

WE'RE MOVING IN NOW.

THIS MESSAGE CHAIN WILL ERASE IN 17 SECONDS.

16.

15.

Moving in where?

A chill crept across my bruised shoulders. The message was a reply. Furiously, I clicked back to the original note Valentine had sent:

HE'LL BE OUT OF HOUSE AT 8:00.

MULTIPLE UNITS WILL RESPOND TO A FAKE BREAK-IN CALL TWO DOORS UP TO DRAW PAPARAZZI AWAY.

SHE WILL BE ALONE.

Chapter 52

Stunned, I stared at the glowing screen, words disintegrating into letters, my brain lurching to comprehend and shield myself at the same time. The message vanished, a crumpling sound announcing the autoerase, but the letters seemed to remain, floating in the darkness. They became words again, their meaning shattering my paralysis.

I caught up to myself ten feet down the dirt path, sprinting, dialing my wife on a dead man's phone. The Glock was shoved in the back of my jeans, the documents crammed in my pocket, digging into my thigh. The sole reception bar blinked out every time I pressed "send." By the time I hit the dirt road, the screen showed a satellite dish rotating haplessly--nothing.

Without slowing, I dug out the throwaway phone, held it in my other hand, glanced from one screen to the next. No signal from either, not up here in the hills at the fringe of the Topanga State Park.

The cell-phone clock read 7:56 P.M. Four minutes and they'd be clear to breach our house.

The ground was a confusion of ruts and mounds, and I stumbled in the dark, going down and skinning my palms, the phone and Treo skidding from my grip. I groped, found the throwaway, and after a few seconds of searching gave up on the Treo--the incriminating message had autotrashed anyway, and the reception was just as crappy. Clutching the phone, I kept sprinting, holding the damn lit screen in front of my face as I hurtled forward in the blackness, letting my legs figure out the terrain on their own.

SHE WILL BE ALONE.

No signal. No signal. No signal.

A light rain had opened up, softening the ground that kept duplicating itself beneath my feet, a potholed treadmill. The same hillside kept whistling by. Wheezing, drenched in sweat, I was stuck in a horror-movie loop.

Finally the yellow gate cut the dark, and I flew through, clipping the post with a shoulder, the collision spinning me in a half circle and depositing me on the hood of the BMW. I leaped into the car, peeling out, heading toward home, toward cell-phone coverage, the crappy throwaway clenched in my wet hand so I could steer the curves and watch the signal.

At last it gave me a bar. It wavered but came back, and the call went through. It rang and rang, and finally--

"Ari!"

"Patrick?"

"They're coming for you! Get the hell out of the house!"

But she couldn't hear me now. "I just got out of the shower. I moved the pickup around back for you to use from now on, so get rid of the stolen car before you come back here. But listen--you're not gonna believe what I taped together." Sirens wailed faintly in the background. "Hang on. This is weird."

Her breathing shifted as she hustled down the stairs, the noise of the sirens growing louder.

I was shouting, as if volume, not reception, were the problem. "They called in a diversion up the street so the paparazzi will follow and leave our house open. Grab the gun and get out of there. Go to the cops. Ari? Ari!"

Oblivious to my yelling, she continued, "All these cop cars passed our house, but they're not coming here. Looks like they're up at the Weetmans. I wonder if Mike got framed for killing a movie star, too."

The signal cut out. I looked down at the phone in disbelief. A horn blared; I'd drifted into the wrong lane. Screeching over, I veered off the road, kicking up a plume of dirt, then overcompensated again, wobbling back across the center lane and narrowly missing a Maserati. I righted the BMW, skidding around a rain-slick turn and leaving the clutch of the hillside.

Two bars. Now three.

I dialed.

She picked up. "Hi. Lost you. I was saying--"

"Get out of the house. Right now. Run up the street to the cops."

The piercing scream of our alarm. "Shit, Patrick, someone's--"

Thundering footsteps. The phone dropping. Ariana's yell was severed abruptly, and an instant later the alarm shut off.

The Beemer scraped along the hillside, sending a pattering of rocks across the roof and reminding me I was driving. Sweat stung my eyes. I was screaming into the phone, but I didn't know what I was saying.

Some muffled directions: "Have her finish getting dressed. We don't want to drag her around half naked. You, stop resisting or we'll break an arm. Move it."

And then a rustle as the phone was plucked from the floor. A calm voice. Verrone's. "We're done playing now." The calm tenor brought back the memory of his jaundiced complexion, that droopy mustache.

"Don't hurt her."

"We need that disc."

"I don't have it. I swear to fucking God, if I had it I would've given it to you."

"You told us you had it. You just sent us to the wrong hiding place."

It took a moment for me to realize that the sirens were now not on the other end of the phone but approaching me. Coming around the bend, I saw six police cars and an ambulance heading at me, lights flashing, sirens screeching. Instinctively, I shrank away from my window, but they blasted by, heading for Valentine and Richards. I had to shout over the high-pitched wailing. "You kidnapped me! I would have said anything to get away!"

"You have two hours to find it."

The dropping of that ultimatum, a tank in my path, brought the horror of my situation home to roost. I'd scrambled and forged ahead, despite a false imprisonment and a real one, despite being set up and shot at, despite a concussion grenade dropped in my lap, and still it hadn't been enough. The helplessness I'd been fighting to hold at bay and the rage at having my life seized from my own control flooded in, overwhelming me. A hundred and twenty minutes from now, my wife would no longer be alive.

I yelled, "How am I supposed to fucking find something when I don't know where it is?"

"Then you're useless to us. Which means we can shoot her now." Over the phone: "Go ahead."

"Wait! Okay, okay. I have it." I cringed, listening, breathless. But no gunshot followed. "I . . . I . . ." I was falling into terror, grasping at anything, trying to formulate a story, any story that would buy us time. Did I dare to reveal the only cards I held--those incriminating documents I'd retrieved from their copy machine? Right off the bat, in a state of panic, with no guiding strategy? Where did that leave me to go? There had to be something else. It seemed I hadn't spoken in hours, though the delay was probably no more than a few seconds. "I put the disc in our safe-deposit box," I blurted. "I can't get it until the bank opens in the morning."

"You have until nine o'clock."

"Richards is dead," I said. "Valentine is dead." A cold silence as Verrone reassessed the chessboard. But I didn't wait for his next move; I pushed forward while he was off balance. "I'm wanted now. I need some time to get clear and figure out who to send in to grab the disc from the safe-deposit box in the morning." Still no response. I added, "A couple extra hours even."

Stop talking--you're negotiating with yourself.

He pulled the phone away again as he spoke to DeWitt or whoever else. "Take her out back, watch her closely over the fence. Paparazzi should be up the street chasing their tails, but keep an eye out just in case. Listen, sweetheart, if anyone's out there, we're all friends heading out for a drive. That's the better of the two ways to do this. If you struggle or scream, we'll shoot whoever we see and drag you anyway. . . . What? Yes, get it, it'll look more normal. Now, go."

Get what?

Look more normal?

What the hell did that mean?

Verrone had come back to me. "Fine. You have until noon tomorrow. And you'd better stay away from the cops. You're useless to us in custody. Call your wife's cell-phone number--her real cell phone, not that disposable crap you've been playing around with. We'll have it patched through to an untraceable line, so don't bother playing Maxwell Smart. If that phone doesn't ring by noon with good news, we will put a bullet in the base of her skull. And yes, this time it's real."

The phone cut out.

My brain vacillated between high-rev panic and complete blank-out. I remember passing another convoy of police cars. I remember telling myself to slow down, since I couldn't risk getting pulled over, but I also remember not obeying. I remember screeching over the curb, scattering the paparazzi, and leaving the Beemer sunk in our wet front lawn, car door open in the slanting rain, dinging.

And then I was inside the quiet of our entry, dripping. On the floor by the living-room window, a broken teacup. The prepaid cell phone. And a lavender mariposa.

I crouched over the fallen flower, my heart thundering. Instinct brought it to my nose--the smell of her. Across the room, Ariana and I gazed out from our fallen wedding photo. The symbolism was obtrusive, sure, but it cut me to ribbons nonetheless. The arty black-and-white, our stiff formality, and the fragmented glass imbued the image with a haunted, bygone feel. A past age, dated conventions, ghosts of happier days. Looking at her soft-focus face, I made a silent vow: I promise.

The thought of her, trapped between DeWitt and Verrone in the back of some van, nearly brought me to my knees. But I couldn't give in to fear, not now. How much time did I have before the cops found Valentine and Richards and came here?

I tried to collect my frayed thoughts. Was there anything in the house I had to take with me before I fled? When I'd first reached Ari, she'd been excited about something she'd figured out: You're not gonna believe what I taped together. Had they found whatever she'd come up with, or was it still here?

I ran into the family room. Aside from a few scraps, they'd gathered up and taken the mounds of shredded documents.

Taped together, she'd said. Taped.

I rushed into the kitchen. The mess on the floor remained from when the cops had tossed the house--trash dumped, drawers emptied. I couldn't spot any Scotch tape in the mound, and I doubted that Ari would've rooted through in search of it. Which left my office.

I bolted upstairs. Sure enough, on my desk was a plastic tape dispenser and beside it a round piece of paper composed of taped-together bits.

A disc?

I snatched it up. It was made of the white-silver squares she'd noted in the confetti jumble, those scraps that had stood out as firmer than the others. I bent the CD. Stiff but flexible. I'd seen discs like this before, hip-hop promotional singles slipped into Vanity Fair or the occasional DVD in Variety before awards season.

They'd destroyed this CD along with other documents before clearing out the Ridgeline office. The Frankenstein disc was beyond salvaging, but I didn't have to put it into a computer to realize that a CD like this, with a pliable, thinner design, had certain advantages for an operation like theirs. Easier to shred.

And easier to hide.

Rain tattooed the roof, a drumroll score to my quickening thoughts.

I closed my eyes, pictured opening that FedEx envelope addressed to Ridgeline. That blank CD, wrapped protectively in corrugated cardboard.

What if that disc really had been nothing more than what it appeared--a blank CD? If someone like me intercepted the package, I'd think it contained nothing more than that useless disc. But the intended recipient would see the blank CD as a symbol, a key showing what was really being shipped in the same package.

I ran down to the kitchen and dug through the trash. There it was, beneath a half loaf of moldy bread and a PowerBar box. The corrugated cardboard that I'd thought was mere packaging material. Flattening the bent sheet, I wormed my thumbnails into the edge and peeled it apart.

Sunk in a beveled well inside was a white-silver disc.

Chapter 53

A rush of excitement overtook me. Their CD had been here in the house the whole time, lying on the floor, buried in trash--the one place no one would think to look for it. I plucked it out, held it to the light, appraising it like a jeweler.

So it had been Ridgeline who'd broken in to search our house and steal back their FedEx package. Wanting to recover every piece of evidence, they'd taken the envelope, shipping label, and blank CD. But since the cardboard packaging had been missing, they'd assumed I'd figured out what was hidden inside and that I'd moved it to a safe place. So they'd lured me to Keith's, dropped a grenade in my lap, then posed as cops to get me to cough up where I'd secreted the disc. It never occurred to them that I'd taken the packaging for trash and dumped it on the heap on the kitchen floor.

The thrill of discovery was undercut by a thin, warbling siren in the distance. And then another.

I grabbed a wad of cash and the pickup keys from Ariana's purse, then spun in a full circle in the kitchen, sizing up everything, trying to think what else from the house I needed.

What had Ariana asked to take with her before they'd hauled her out? Verrone's odd words chewed at me: What? Yes, get it, it'll look more normal. Now, go.

The sirens, louder.

Ariana's keys in hand, the precious disc padded by the copied documents in my pocket, I ran out the rear door into the inviting darkness. Thank God she'd moved the pickup around back for me. Running across the lawn, rain spitting at my face, I could hear the squeal of tires from the front. Verrone had narrowed the situation to a simple equation: If the cops captured me, she would die.

And so now I fled out the back, along the same route they'd forced her to move. If anyone's out there, we're all friends heading out for a drive, Verrone had told her. He needed her to look as inconspicuous as possible. His reply to whatever she'd said came again: Yes, get it, it'll look more normal.

I halted. Turned my face up to the raindrops, felt the pitter-patter across my cheeks.

Raining, I thought. Jacket.

Play the hand you're dealt.

I spun and sprinted back into the house, my wet sneakers skidding through trash on the sleek kitchen floor. Blue and red lights flashed through the front curtains. Voices, boots stomping up the walk. I ran toward them, to the coat closet by the entry.

Someone shouted, and then a battering ram shuddered the front door. The bottom panels bent in, but the dead bolt held.

I threw open the closet door and peered in. Five hangers, an old bomber jacket, and a jumble of shoes. But no raincoat.

It'll look more normal. More inconspicuous for a woman heading out in a downpour. She'd manipulated them into letting her grab her raincoat. With their transmitter stitched into the lining. A transmitter they didn't know that we knew about.

A transmitter that maybe I could figure out how to track.

Shoes slippery on the floorboards, I careened back into the kitchen out of view just as a sonic boom announced the front door's disintegration. Gable's voice, commanding and husky with adrenaline, "Clear the upstairs. Go-go-go."

The walls shook. Pounding footsteps and shouted directives conveyed not just brisk efficiency but wrath. They were gunning for a cop killer, a murderer who'd shot holes through two of their own.

I flew across the back lawn, leaping up onto the fence and spotting a pair of squad cars slant-parked in front of the grille of Ari's pickup, blocking off the street. Patrolmen climbing out, talking--they'd missed the white flash of my face in the night. I dropped to the silent mulch by the greenhouse, my chest heaving.

One said, "You hear that?"

My knee had struck the slats, a rasp that reverberated like thunder in my memory.

Brush and branches half obscured me. In the windows of both floors, I could see SWAT officers wielding semiautos. Upstairs, a face shielded with tactical goggles tilted toward my office desk, rifled papers fluttering up into view.

Behind me and the fence, the click of a flashlight, and then a beam prowled the branches overhead, ticking back and forth as the cop approached. From the house a voice, heightened against the nighttime quiet, called out, "Sweep the backyard!" and I saw a balaclava-hooded head, moving in concert with the barrel of an MP5, float across the kitchen window toward the back door.

My bloodless fist, cinched around Ariana's useless keys, stood out against the dark ground. Pressed to my kidney, the pistol beckoned. I touched my hand to the grip, then pulled away as if it had burned my palm. What was I going to do? Draw down on a SWAT team?

Crunched against the slats at the base of the fence, my back picked up the vibration of footsteps closing in from beyond. Cobwebs draped across my wet brow. Across the yard the knob of our back door jostled. Directly above me a meaty hand hooked over the top of the fence.