“Oh. Why not?”

“I heard the woman was married, although it surprises me Dan would get involved in a situation like that.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’m interested in him, so I ask around.”

Melanie knew she should stop, but she just couldn’t. “So did Dan act interested in you?”

“He was playing it cool, but I’m pretty sure he was. And then I had my cards read by this old hippie chick who hangs out in the pub, and right in front of Dan she goes, my future husband is someone I’d been drinking with that night. Is that amazing or what? I think it’s a sign.”

“Maybe she meant Ray-Ray.”

“Ick! No way would I ever marry a Chinese guy.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not racist or anything. I mean, Bruce Lee was hot. Even Jackie Chan is hot. Well, sort of. I’m into the martial-arts thing. But Ray-Ray? He’s way too short.”

“He’s taller than you.”

“Nope, I’m sticking with my own kind and marrying a big Irish hunk. Dan’s the one for me. Whether he knows it yet or not. But listen, I better get back to my seat and catch the stewardess before she passes me by. The coffee smells good.”

“Okay.”

After Bridget left, Melanie stared out the plastic window at the bright, empty sky. Mere minutes earlier she’d been fairly confident her relationship with Dan was over, and all for the best. So why did she feel this devastated at the thought of him with someone else?

Amazing what a little competition’ll do for your perspective.

42

A WHILE LATER Melanie was still absorbed in staring out the airplane window when someone once again sat down in the empty seat. When she turned and saw Dan-looking spectacular, smelling clean and yummy, staring back at her with clear blue eyes-she felt such a wrenching sense of loss that for a moment she couldn’t even speak.

Seeing her face, Dan held up his hand. “Don’t get upset.”

“I’m not upset,” she said quickly.

“You look upset.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You shouldn’t be. I’m only bothering you because Bridget said you wanted to see the line sheet from that intercept last night. Otherwise I would never’ve come over here.”

“Can’t we put this fight behind us?”

“Sure, I get it. We’re grown-ups. We keep our distance, keep it professional. When the case is done, we go our separate ways.”

She hadn’t meant it like that, and she was disappointed he’d taken it that way. Maybe Dan wasn’t, as Melanie secretly hoped, waiting for an overture from her. Maybe he’d be better off with Bridget. The two of them had so much in common, after all, whereas Melanie and Dan might as well have grown up on different planets.

“Right. Professional,” Melanie said, then drew a deep breath. “So show me that line sheet.”

“Here.”

He handed her a copy of a handwritten page taken from the wiretap log. The federal wiretap statute required that a real live human being listen in on every tapped phone call as it was being recorded to make sure the bad guys were talking about crime; if they weren’t, the tape recorder had to be shut off. To prove they were monitoring properly, the agents took contemporaneous handwritten notes summarizing the conversations. The piece of paper she held in her hand contained the monitor’s notes of a phone call intercepted the previous night at 9:48 P.M., between subject Jay Esposito and subject Bud LNU, aka George Eliot.

“Where do you get this aka?” Melanie asked.

“It’s the subscriber name on the cell number Expo placed the call to.”

“It’s a fake.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, come on, George Eliot? Wrote Middlemarch?”

“What, you spend all your time in the library in high school?” Dan grinned.

Man, he had a movie-star smile. Her chest hurt, thinking of him out last night with Bridget.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. I like libraries. The quiet. The smell of old books. Very Zen.”

“They give me the heebie-jeebies,” Dan said. “Anyway, no low-life drug dealer is gonna know about George Eliot. I mean, I don’t know about him.”

“Her. Eliot was a woman.”

“See? What’d I tell ya?”

She smiled. “Still, you make a good point. Maybe the name is real. Did you run it?”

“Yeah. We got nothin’. Too common. We managed to ID the black bodyguard, though.”

“How’d you do that?” she asked.

“Had a coupla uniforms traffic-stop him last night and ask for ID. One Lamar Gates. He’s got a pretty good rap sheet. Assaults, a few criminal sales, that sorta thing. Did a stretch in Rikers a few years back. This is who Expo has working security for him.” He shook his head in disgust.

“What about the Russian?”

“Pavel LNU. We got shit on him.”

“Hmm, okay. Let me read this.” Melanie scanned the line sheet. “Jesus, and Bridget told me they didn’t say anything about Carmen!”

“Are you kidding me? She’s got her head up her butt, that kid.”

“Yeah, it reads clear as a bell.”

“With how nervous they sound, they gotta be behind it, don’t you think?”

“Sounds like it,” Melanie agreed.

“But nothing concrete. No locations,” he pointed out.

“God, I’m getting nervous about Carmen, Dan. Especially now that they’re recruiting Trevor to mule the shipment. Granted, that could just be because they’re afraid we’re on the lookout for her. But part of me worries it’s because they don’t have her in pocket anymore.”

“Settle down, now, I got a theory about that. I think there might be two separate deals in the works, so maybe they still are planning to use her. Here, take a look at this, right here,” he said, leaning across her and pointing, giving her a thrill that she had to work hard to ignore. “Expo sends Pavel to do something at Bud’s request last night. It must be some kind of separate drug shipment.”

“It’s not,” she said, shaking her head as she read the portion he’d indicated.

“Why not? Bud asks about ‘that other thing we talked about before.’ Expo says he sent Pavel to take care of it, then he says, ‘It might not go because of the weather.’ What’s that, if not a drug deal?”

A crystal-clear vision of the Escalade barreling down on her flashed into Melanie’s head, making her shiver.

“It was me. Pavel tried to run me down with the Escalade when I left work last night.”

Dan stared at her in shocked silence. After a moment he said, very quietly, “You better be bullshittin’ me, or I’m gonna be incredibly pissed at you.”

“Why at me? I wasn’t the one behind the wheel!”

“You think this is a joke? You don’t call to tell me this happened, so I could watch out for you? What if they tried again?”

“They didn’t.”

“Not yet, maybe, but I guarantee you they will. Serves you goddamn right, missy, because now I’m gonna stick to you like glue, whether you hate me or not.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll just have to tolerate that,” she said, her lips curving involuntarily into a smile.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“Whaddaya, busting my chops?”

“No. I appreciate your concern. Really.”

“Somebody better watch your back, with the crazy risks you take. So why the hell didn’t you call me last night when this happened?”

“Because I was in such a rush to follow up on that information you gave me about James Seward. And it was very interesting. Luis Reyes came clean right away. Seward leaned on him to hold back on us, not only about Charlotte Seward’s being home when the girls died but about the fact that Reyes actually reached Seward on his cell at least two hours before anybody called the police. You know what that means? We have Seward on obstruction!”

“Why the hell would Seward do that and leave those poor girls lying there? It almost makes you think he was involved somehow, that he needed the time to pretty up the crime scene. Which reminds me, I talked to Butch Brennan from the Crime Scene Team, jeez, it’s gotta be a couple days ago now. Things’ve been so crazy, I forgot to tell you.”