Текст книги "Death Match"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Lincoln Child
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TWENTY-FOUR

It shouldn’t take long to clear Handerling,” Mauchly said. “Our background checks and psych batteries for prospective employees are even more exhaustive than for clients. I’m a little surprised Liza even flagged him.” The air of disappointment in the office was almost palpable.

“What’s the procedure?” Lash asked. He sipped his espresso, found it cold, drained it anyway.

“We have passive monitoring devices in every workstation and cubicle. Keystroke loggers, so forth. It’s no secret, they’re more a preventive measure than anything.” Mauchly opened a different file: a thin manila folder containing only a few sheets. “Gary Joseph Handerling. Thirty-three years old. Formerly employed as data technician for a Poughkeepsie bank. Currently resides in Yonkers. Divorced, no children. Background check turned up nothing except some visits to his high school guidance counselor after breaking up with his first girlfriend.”

Tara chuckled.

“Passed his psych evaluation within the nominal benchmarks. Scored high on his leadership and opportunistic scales. Hired by Eden in June of 2001 and put on a revolving internship. Worked six months in Systems Support. Transferred to Data Gathering in January 2002. Finished his internship by moving to Data Scrubbing in August. Given good marks on all performance reviews. Singled out for his high level of motivation and his interest in learning more about the company.”

A damn Eagle Scout, thought Lash.

“Became head of his scrub crew last February. Eligible for promotion out of Data Scrubbing, but seems happy in his position.” Mauchly raised his eyes toward Lash. “Fit any profile you know of?” His voice was tinged with a whisper of irony.

Lash felt defeated. “Not really. Some sociopaths are remarkably good at hiding in plain sight. Look at Ted Bundy. The guy’s age, race, marital status jibe with an organized serial killer. But the consistent employment history goes against the profile. Then again, nothing about these deaths is standard.” He thought a moment. “Is he up to date on his car payments and credit cards? Organized serial killers can be obsessive about not missing payments, not sticking out.”

Mauchly looked back at the folder. “Tara, can you check the credit agencies, cross-check with the DMV records?”

“Sure. What’s his SSN?”

“200-66-2984.”

“Just a moment.” Tara tapped at the keys. “Everything spic-and-span. No late charges on any cards, going back eighteen months. Car payments up to date.”

Mauchly nodded.

“Pretty decent driving record, too. Only two points on his license.”

“How’d he get those?” Lash asked, more out of habit than any real curiosity.

“Speeding ticket, probably. Let me check WICAPS.”

The room fell silent save for the patter of keystrokes.

“Yup,” Tara said after a moment. “Excessive speed in a residential zone. Recent, too: September 24.”

“September 24,” Lash repeated. “That was the day—”

But Tara interrupted. “The location was Larchmont.”

Larchmont.

“That was the day the Wilners died,” Lash finished.

For a second, the office was still as the three exchanged glances. Then Mauchly spoke.

“Tara,” he said in a very quiet voice. “Can you secure this terminal? I don’t want anybody looking over our shoulder.”

Tara turned back to the keyboard, typed a series of commands. “You’ve got it.”

“Let’s start with his credit card records,” Mauchly said. “See if he’s been anywhere interesting in the last month.” His voice remained slow, almost sleepy.

“Interfacing with Instifax now.” More typing. “He’s been a busy little boy. Lots of restaurant bills, mostly in the city and lower Westchester. Strange: a couple of motel charges, too. One in Pelham, another in New Rochelle.” She looked up. “Why would he be paying for motel rooms fifteen minutes from his apartment?”

“Keep going,” Mauchly said.

“Here’s a recent plane ticket: Air Northern. Car rental of just over a hundred bucks. Another lodging charge for one Dew Drop Inne. And here’s an Amtrak charge, too. And what looks like an advance hotel reservation for this coming weekend.”

“Where?”

“Just a minute. Burlingame, Massachusetts.”

“Get onto EasyTrak. Let’s check out those tickets.”

“On it.” Tara paused, waiting for her screen to refresh. “The plane ticket was a round trip to Phoenix. Leaving La Guardia September 15, returning September 17.”

“The Thorpes died on September 17,” Mauchly said. “You mentioned a Dew Drop Inne. Where’s that located?”

The staccato hammer of keys. “Flagstaff, Arizona.”

Lash felt an electric tingle.

Slowly, almost casually, Mauchly stood up and came around the table. “Can you bring up the keystroke logs for Handerling’s terminal over, say, the past three weeks?”

Lash found himself standing and, like Mauchly, approaching the screen.

“Here we are,” Tara said. Lash saw a torrent of data scroll up the screen: every keystroke Handerling’s typed over the last fifteen business days.

“Run it through the sniffer.” Mauchly glanced at Lash. “We’ll pass it through an intelligent filter, look for anything he typed that seems suspicious.”

“The way the government combs email and phone calls, looking for terrorists?”

“They license the technology from us.”

“Nothing out of place,” Tara said after a moment. “Sniffer comes up clean.”

“What job did you say this guy has?” Lash asked.

“Data Scrub handles the secure archiving of client data, post-processing.”

“Post-processing. You mean, once a match is made.”

“That’s correct.”

“And you said he has a leadership position. Could that give him access to sensitive, personal data?”

“We slice client data across several scrub teams to minimize such access. It’s theoretically possible. But if he’d been snooping around, it would have shown up in his keystroke logs.”

“Could he have accessed the data from a different terminal?”

“Terminals are coded by identity bracelet. If he’d used a different terminal, we’d know about it.”

The room fell silent. Mauchly stared at the screen, arms folded across his chest.

“Tara,” he said. “Run frequency analysis against the keystrokes. See if he deviated from his normal work at any time.”

“Give me a minute.” The screen refreshed, and a series of parallel columns appeared: dates, times, obscure acronyms meaningless to Lash.

“Nothing stands out,” Tara said after a moment. “It all seems routine.”

Lash found himself holding his breath. Was it going to happen again: would they find themselves at the threshold of a breakthrough, only to reach another dead end?

“If anything, tooroutine,” Tara added.

“How so?” Mauchly asked.

“Well, look at this. Each day, from precisely 2:30 to 2:45, the exact same commands are repeated.”

“What’s unusual about that? It could be some daily activity, like freshening an archive.”

“Even those vary a little: new datasets, different backup locations. But here, even the volume names are the same.”

Mauchly peered at the screen for a long moment. “You’re right. For fifteen minutes each day, the keystrokes are precisely identical.”

“ Andthey’re typed at precisely the same time each day.” Tara pointed at the screen. “Down to the second. How likely is that?”

“So what’s it mean?” Lash asked.

Mauchly glanced at him. “Our employees know their work is monitored. Handerling knows that if he tried anything obvious – like disabling the keystroke logger, for instance – he’d come under immediate attention. Looks like he’s found a way to throw up a smokescreen, perhaps run a macro of innocuous commands while he’s actually doing something else.”

“He may have found a vulnerability in the system,” said Tara. “Some loophole or flaw he’s exploiting.”

“So is there some way we can see what he was really up to during those fifteen minutes?” Lash asked.

“No,” said Mauchly.

“Yes,” said Tara.

They looked at her.

“Maybe. We also use video cameras to take screen captures of all management terminals, right? They’re infrequent, and random. But maybe we’ll get lucky.”

She typed a fresh flurry of commands, then paused. “Looks like there’s been only one recent screen capture from Handerling’s terminal during that fifteen-minute block. On September 13.”

“Can you print it out, please?” Mauchly asked.

She moused a few commands and the printer on the desk began to hum. Mauchly grabbed the sheet as it fed out and they looked at the blurred image:

EDEN – PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL

RESULTS OF SQL QUERY AGAINST DATASET A$4719

OPERATOR: UNKNOWN

TIME: 14:38:02.98 SEPT 13 04

CPU CYCLES: 23054

END QUERY

“Oh, Jesus,” Tara breathed.

“Those other names,” Lash said. “Supercouples?”

Mauchly nodded. “All six to date.”

But Lash barely heard him. His mind was racing now. Serial killers are creatures of habit…

Staring at the list, he remembered something – something chilling.

“You mentioned an Amtrak ticket,” he said to Tara. “And an advance motel reservation?”

Tara’s eyes suddenly widened. She turned back to the keyboard.

“A reservation on the Acela to Boston. This coming Friday morning.”

“And the motel location?”

“Burlingame, Massachusetts.”

Mauchly stepped away from the terminal. The dispassionate demeanor was gone. “Tara, I want you to get a record of Handerling’s phone calls. Both from his desk and his apartment. Will you do that?”

Tara nodded, picked up the phone.

“Thank you.” Mauchly started for the door, turned back. “Now, Dr. Lash, you’ll have to excuse me. There are several things I need to do.”

TWENTY-FIVE

In many ways, the scene was like the others: the room in disarray, the mirrors broken, the bedroom curtains swept back as if inviting the night to witness the outrage. And yet in others it was very, very different. The woman lay in an embarrassment of blood, flowing from the ruined body in a terrible corona. And in the merciless glare of the crime lights the walls shone white, naked, devoid of any scrawled messages.

Captain Masterton glanced up from the corpse. His face had the pinched look of a cop under pressure from all directions.

“I was wondering when you’d get here, Lash. Say hello to victim number three. Helen Martin, aged thirty-two.”

Masterton kept staring at him. He seemed about to make another biting comment on the thinness of Lash’s profile. But he merely shook his head in disgust.

“Christ, Lash, you’re like a zombie. Every time I see you, you look a little worse.”

“We’ll go into that some other time. How long has she been dead?”

“Less than an hour.”

“Any indication of rape? Vaginal penetration?”

“The ME’s on his way, but there doesn’t appear to be any. No signs of a burglary gone wrong, either. Just like the others. But we caught a bit of a break this time. A neighbor called in the commotion. No description of a vehicle, but we’ve already got cars stationed at major intersections, freeway on-ramps. Maybe we’ll catch a break.”

The crime scene was still so fresh the local cops were just beginning to work it: snapping photos, dusting for prints, chalking the body. He stood there, staring down at the body. There it was again: that maddening sense that everything was out of place. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pictures pasted onto the pieces. It didn’t fit, and even when it did it didn’t look right. He knew, because he’d been putting it together and taking it apart in his mind, over and over and over, for days. It was like a fire burning in his head, consuming all his thoughts, devouring his sleep.

The body was brutalized in what was clearly a blitz attack. That was the hallmark of a socially defective killer. And yet the house was secluded, backing up on woods, private: this was no crime of opportunity, no blitz attack. And then there were the broken mirrors, which normally indicated a killer’s discomfort with creating such a scene. But such killers also covered their victims, hid their faces: this woman was naked, her limbs arranged with a ghastly provocativeness. And yet again this crime was not about sex. It was not about robbery. And this time, there was not even the ritual halo of severed toes and fingertips to lend a compulsive taint to the murder.

To build a profile, you had to get into the head of the murderer, ask questions. What had happened in this room? Why did it happen this particular way? Even mass-murderers had their twisted logic. But there was no logic here, no foundation on which to build an understanding.

His eyes traveled over the walls of the bedroom. In the previous two murders, they had been covered with rambling, half-coherent rants: a bloody mélange of contradiction.

This time, the walls were blank.

Why?

His eyes stopped on the big picture window facing the woods behind the house. As before, the blinds were thrown wide, revealing a pane of black that reflected the sodium lights back at him. It was hard to be sure in the painful glare, but he thought he could make out faint smudges on the glass, black upon black.

“Masterton. Can you direct those lights away from the window?”

The ME had just arrived, and the captain had moved across the room to confer with him. He looked over.

“What was that, Lash?”

“Those lights there, by the window. Turn them this way.”

Masterton shrugged, spoke to Ahearn, his second in command.

As the glare of the light hit him, the window fell into shadow. He stepped forward, Masterton following now. High up on the glass, a few large words were scrawled in bloody finger-paint:

I’ve got what I need now. Thank you.

“Oh, shit,” he murmured.

“He’s done,” Masterton said, coming up, Detective Ahearn at his shoulder. “Thank God, Lash. It’s finished.”

“No,” he replied. “No, it’s not. It’s just beginning…”

Lash sat up in bed, wide awake, waiting for the memories to fade. He glanced at the clock: half past one. He stood up, then hesitated, sinking back to the side of the bed.

Four nights in a row, with perhaps as many hours of sleep to show for all of them. He couldn’t afford to show up at Eden semiconscious; not tomorrow, he couldn’t.

He rose again and – without giving himself a chance to reconsider – went to the bathroom, pulled out the box of Seconal, grabbed a small handful, and washed them down with a mouthful of water. Then he returned to bed, arranged the covers carefully, and gradually slipped into dark dreams.

* * *

It was the sound of church bells that woke him; the bells of his wedding, pealing from the dust-bleached mission of Carmel-by-the-Sea. And yet the bells were too loud somehow, and they went on and on, refusing to stop.

Lash forced his eyes open, realized it was the telephone. When he sat up, the room reeled. Closing his eyes, he lay back once again, feeling blindly for the phone.

“Yes,” he said, voice thick.

“Dr. Christopher Lash?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Ken Trotwood from New Olympia Savings and Loan.”

Lash forced his eyes open again, glanced at the clock. “Do you know what time—”

“I know it’s early, Dr. Lash. I’m very sorry. But we haven’t been able to reach you any other way. You haven’t responded to our letters or calls.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s about the mortgage on your house, which we hold. You’re behind in your payments, Dr. Lash, and we must insist on immediate payment, with penalty interest.”

Lash fought to think clearly. “You’ve made some kind of mistake.”

“It doesn’t appear so. The residence in question is number 17 Ship Bottom Road, Westport, Connecticut.”

“That’s my address, but—”

“According to my screen, sir, we’ve sent three letters and tried to call you half a dozen times. Without success.”

“This is crazy. I haven’t gotten any notices. Besides, my mortgage payment is automatically deducted from my bank account.”

“Then perhaps there’s been some kind of problem at your bank. Because our records show you’re more than five months delinquent. And it’s my job to inform you that if payment is not made immediately, we’ll be forced to—”

“No need for threats. I’ll look into it immediately.”

“Thank you, sir. Good morning.”

And the line went dead.

Good morning. As Lash sank back wearily, his eyes strayed toward the window, where the faintest glimmers of pre-dawn glow had begun to temper the unequivocal blackness of night.

TWENTY-SIX

What’s this guy supposed to have done?” asked the federal agent sitting behind the wheel.

“Under investigation for four possible homicides,” Lash replied.

Rain drummed on the roof and ran down the windows in heavy streams. He drained his coffee cup, considered ducking into the nearby deli for another, looked at his watch and decided against it. Ten after five already, and human relations records indicated Gary Handerling almost always left work promptly.

He looked down at the glossy photograph of Handerling on the seat beside him, taken that morning by a closed-circuit camera at Checkpoint I. Then he gazed across Madison Avenue toward the Eden tower. Handerling wouldn’t be hard to spot: tall and lanky, save for a softening around the belly, with thinning blond hair and a yellow windbreaker that stood out in a crowd. Even if Lash missed him, one of the other teams was sure to spot him.

Lash’s gaze returned to the photo. Handerling didn’t look like a serial killer. But then again, so few of them did.

The front passenger door opened and a heavyset man in a dripping blue suit climbed in. When he turned to glance into the rear of the car, the scent of Old Spice reached Lash ahead of the face. He’d known another Fed was going to ride with them, but he was surprised to recognize John Coven, a fellow agent he’d worked with on a few early cases.

“Lash?” Coven said, looking equally surprised. “That you?”

Lash nodded. “How you keeping, John?”

“Can’t complain, I guess. Still treading water as a GS-13. Another five years and I’ll be down in Marathon, fishing for tarpon instead of scumbags.”

“Nice.” Like many other agents, Coven was obsessed with the countdown to retirement and a government pension.

Coven looked at Lash curiously. “I heard you were off the Job. In the private sector, making a mint for yourself.”

Coven knew Lash had left the FBI, of course; and he would also know the reason. He was just showing tact.

“I am,” Lash replied. “This is a temporary thing. Moonlighting for some serious change.”

Coven nodded.

“Isn’t this kind of an unusual TDY for you?” Lash asked, politely reversing the line of inquiry.

Coven shrugged. “Not anymore. These days, it’s alphabet soup. What with all the shakeups and reorganizations, everybody’s in bed with everybody else. You never know who you’ll be working with: DEA, CIA, Homeland Security, local law enforcement, Girl Scouts.”

Yes, but not a private corporation, Lash thought. Using the FBI for hired muscle was something new in his experience.

“Only thing strange was that this came down from the chief’s office,” Coven said. “Didn’t go through the normal channels.”

Lash nodded. He remembered Mauchly’s words: We share our information with selected government agencies. Apparently, the cooperation went both ways.

He had seen very little of either Mauchly or Tara Stapleton all day. He’d arrived late, being forced to spend the better part of the morning untangling a hugely complex web of red tape, bank forms, credit agency reports, and bureaucratic mix-ups to correct his mortgage statement and restore various credit cards. Mauchly had stopped by his office just before lunch with a large packet under his arm. Handerling, he said, had picked up his train ticket for the following evening. A phone call he’d made from his desk that morning indicated he was meeting a woman after work. Surveillance was being arranged, and Mauchly wanted Lash to take part. The night before, he’d gently rebuffed Lash’s urgings that they contact the police without delay. “He’s not an immediate danger,” Mauchly had said. “We need to gather more evidence. Don’t worry, he’s being carefully watched.”

He’d dropped the packet – Handerling’s job application, employee evaluation, prior history – on Lash’s desk. “See if this fits your profile,” he said. “If it does, please put together a brief character analysis for us. That could prove very useful.”

And so Lash had spent the afternoon going over Handerling’s records. The man was clever: with hindsight, Lash could see subtle evidence he’d carefully coached himself on psych tests. Questions meant to raise red flags had all been answered neutrally. The validity scales were acceptably low across all tests, in fact equallylow, implying Handerling recognized which questions were testing for fakery and answered them all the same way.

Such intelligence and planning were earmarks of the organized killer. And in fact Handerling would be nothing else if he was posing as a model Eden employee. The disorganized elements in the killings, Lash decided, were explained by the unique nature of the victims. It was clear the six supercouples to date were almost cult figures within Eden. But in somebody with feelings of inadequacy or anger – somebody who’d had an abusive mother, say, or bad luck in personal relationships – they might become touchstones for jealousy, even the acting-out of misdirected rage.

It wasn’t that Handerling knew the Thorpes and the Wilners, so much as that he knew ofthem, through his position at Eden. And that was very interesting indeed. It meant a new subdivision of serial killer, not previously identified: a byproduct of the information age, a killer who trolled databases to find ideal victims. It would make a hell of an article in the American Journal of Neuropsychiatry: an article that would curl the toes of his old friend Roger Goodkind.

The squawk of a radio came from the front seat. “Unit 709. In position.”

Coven picked up the radio, holding it low so it would not be visible outside the car. “Roger.” He turned toward Lash. “We didn’t get much of a briefing. What’s the setup, exactly?”

“This guy Handerling’s supposed to meet a woman after work. Beyond that, we don’t know much.”

“How’s he traveling?”

“Unknown. Could be foot, subway, bus, whatever. And—” Lash stopped suddenly. “There he is. Coming out the revolving door now.”

Coven switched on the radio. “This is 707. All units, be advised suspect is exiting the building. White male, about six foot two, wearing a yellow windbreaker. Stand by.”

Handerling stopped to gaze up and down Madison Avenue. His windbreaker flexed as he raised a large umbrella over his head. Lash resisted the urge to stare at his face. It had been years since he’d last been on a surveillance, and he found his heart beating uncomfortably fast.

“That’s our man, there,” said Coven, nodding his head in the direction of a corner newsstand.

“The one with the red umbrella and the cell phone?”

“Yup. You wouldn’t believe how much easier cell phones have made surveillance. These days, it’s normal to see someone on the street talking into their hand. And these Nextel devices have walkie-talkie features built in, so we can broadcast to the entire group.”

“Other foot surveillance resources?”

“At the subway entrance and that bus stop, over there.”

“This is 709,” came a voice over the radio. “Suspect in motion. Looks like he’s going to hail a cab.”

Lash allowed himself a sidelong glance out the window. Handerling had moved toward the street with a long, loping gait. The man darted out an arm, index finger extended, and a cab nosed obediently to the curb.

Coven grabbed his radio. “This is 707. I’ve got the eye; 702, 705, we’re rolling.”

“Roger,” came a chorus of voices.

The driver swung the brown sedan out into traffic, a few vehicles behind the taxi.

“Suspect turning eastbound onto Fifty-seventh,” Coven said, still holding the radio in his lap.

“How many takeaway vehicles?” Lash asked.

“Two others. We’ll sit on him a while, take it a block at a time.”

The taxi moved slowly, fighting the rain and the crosstown traffic. One wheel splashed through a deep pothole, sending a brown spray over the sidewalk. At Lexington Avenue, it turned again, brusquely cutting off a minivan.

“Turning south on Lex,” Coven said. “Maintaining twenty-five miles per hour. I’m going to relinquish. Anybody?”

“This is 705,” came the voice. “I’ve got the eye.”

Lash glanced out the rear window and noticed a green SUV pulling up in the adjoining lane. Through the rain, he could make out Mauchly sitting in the front passenger seat.

Coven’s driver pressed on the gas, accelerating smoothly past the taxi and down Lexington Avenue. It was standard surveillance practice, Lash knew: have as many vehicles as possible involved so the suspect won’t think he’s being followed. In a few blocks, they’d make a turn, circle back, and join the rear of the line.

“Seven-oh-five, roger,” Coven glanced back. “So, Lash, what’s it like in the private sector?”

“I can’t get speeding tickets fixed anymore.”

Coven grinned, told the driver to turn onto Third Avenue. “Ever miss the Bureau?”

“Don’t miss the pay.”

“I hear that.”

“Unit 705,” the radio squawked. “Suspect turning east onto Forty-fourth. Vehicle stopping. I’m going to pass him, who’s picking up the eye?”

“This is 702. We’ve pulled over at the far corner. Maintaining visual contact.”

Coven’s driver pushed the sedan forward now, bullying his way through first one intersection, then another.

“Seven-oh-two,” came the voice. “Suspect has exited the vehicle. He’s entering a bar called Stringer’s.”

“Seven-oh-seven,” Coven replied. “Roger that. Keep a visual on the entrance. Seven-fourteen, we need you at Stringer’s. Forty-fourth between Lex and Third.”

“Roger.”

Minutes later, their sedan nosed into a no-parking zone on Forty-fourth. Lash glanced out the window. Judging by the garish awning and knots of twenty-somethings outside, Stringer’s was a pickup bar for young professionals.

“Here they come now,” Coven said.

Lash looked at an unfamiliar young couple coming down the street, holding hands and sharing an umbrella. “Is that foot surveillance?”

Coven nodded.

The couple disappeared inside the bar. A minute later, Coven’s cell phone rang.

“Seven-oh-seven,” he said.

Lash could hear distinctly the voice that came through the tiny speaker. “We’re at the bar. Suspect is at a rear table. He’s with a white female, heavyset, five foot six, wearing a white sweater and black jeans.”

“Roger. Stay in touch.” Coven put the phone aside, then looked into the rear of the sedan. His eye landed on Lash’s empty coffee cup.

“Another?” he asked. “I’m buying.”

* * *

Within half an hour, Lash was completely caught up on Bureau gossip: the Lothario who was playing around with the section chief’s wife; the annoying new red tape out of Washington; the weak leadership in the upper echelons; how unbelievably green the latest batch of new jacks were. Infrequently, reports came in from the agents watching Handerling from the bar.

Then came a moment when talk faltered, and Coven glanced at his driver. “Hey, Pete. How about getting us a couple more coffees?”

Lash watched the agent get out of the car and trot toward a deli down the block.

“Caught a break with this rain,” Coven said.

Lash nodded. He looked in the rearview mirror: on the far side of the street and half a block back, he could just make out the dim form of Mauchly’s SUV.

Coven was shifting restlessly in the front seat. “So tell me, Chris,” he said after a moment. “This place you’re moonlighting, Eden. What’s it like?”

“Pretty remarkable,” Lash replied guardedly. If Coven was getting curious about the tail, fishing for more information, he’d need to be careful what he said.

“I mean, can they really doit? Are they as good as everybody says?”

“They’ve got a great track record.”

Coven nodded slowly. “There’s this guy in my golf foursome, an orthodontist. Something of a Gloomy Gus, never married. You know the type. We were always trying to fix him up with somebody, but he hated the singles scene. It became a running joke on the links. Anyway, he went to Eden about a year ago. You wouldn’t know him now, he’s a different person. Married to a really nice woman. Great body, too. He doesn’t talk about it much, but any idiot can see how happy he is. Even the bastard’s golf game has improved.”

Lash listened without comment.

“Then there’s this chief I know, over in Operations. Harry Creamer, remember him? Anyway, his wife died in a car accident couple of years back. Good guy. Well, he’s remarried now. Never seen anybody happier. Rumor is, he went to Eden, too.”

Coven turned around again, and Lash could see a kind of desperate eagerness in his eyes. “I’ll be honest with you, Chris. Things aren’t so hot between me and Annette. We’ve been drifting apart ever since we learned she can’t have kids. So I look at my golf buddy, I look at Harry Creamer, and I start thinking twenty-five thousand bucks isn’t all that much money. Not in the long run, it isn’t. I mean, why live a half-assed life? It’s not like you get a second chance if you fuck it up the first time.” He paused a second. “I was wondering if you knew whether—”

The cell phone chirped. “Seven-oh-seven, this is unit 714, you read?”

Instantly, the professional veneer settled back over Coven. He reached for the phone. “This is 707, go ahead, 714.”

“Suspect’s having some kind of argument with the woman. They’re on their way out.”

“Roger, 707 out.”

At that moment, the door of Stringer’s opened and a woman emerged, walking quickly, shrugging into a raincoat as she went. Then Handerling pushed his way through the doors and went after her.

“All units, suspect on foot,” Coven said into his radio, cracking open the car window as he did so. The woman was shouting at Handerling over her shoulder: Lash made out the words “fucking low-life snoop” before the rest was drowned in the passing traffic.

Handerling put out a hand to stop her and she brushed it away. When he reached out again she turned, raising her arm to slap him. Handerling dodged the blow and pushed her roughly toward a shop front.

“Let’s take him,” Coven said.

Lash quickly ducked out the back and followed Coven across the street. From the corner of his eye he saw the agent named Pete come out of the deli, a cup in each hand. When he saw Coven on the move, he dropped the coffees in a trash can and joined the pursuit.

Within seconds, Handerling was surrounded. “Federal agents,” Coven barked, showing his shield. “Back off, mister. Hands at your sides.”