‘She was under pressure, Jake.’

‘What kind of secrets does a personnel deparment have anyway, that are worth getting killed for?’

I didn’t answer. Because I had no idea. In my day HRC had been called PERSCOM. Personnel Command, not Human Resources Command. I had served thirteen years without ever thinking about it. Not even once. Paperwork and records. All the interesting information had been somewhere else.

Jake moved in his seat. He ran his fingers through his unwashed hair and clamped his palms on his ears and moved his head through a complete oval, like he was easing stiffness in his neck, or acting out some kind of inner turmoil that was bringing him full circle, back to his most basic question.

He said, ‘So why? Why did she just up and kill herself before she got where she was going?’

I paused a beat. Café noises went on all around us. The squeak of sneakers on linoleum, the clink and scrape of crockery, the sound of TV news from sets high on the walls, the ding of the short-order bell.

‘She was breaking the law,’ I said. ‘She was in breach of all kinds of trusts and professional obligations. And she must have detected some kind of surveillance. Maybe she had even been warned. So she was tense, right from the moment she got in her car. All the way up she was watching for red lights in her mirror. Every cop at every toll was a potential danger. Every guy she saw in a suit could have been a federal agent. And on the train, any in of us could have been getting ready to bust her.’

Jake didn’t reply.

I said, ‘And then I approached her.’

‘And?’

She flipped. She thought I was about to arrest her. Right then and there, the game was over. She was at the end of the road. She was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t. She couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. She was trapped. Whatever threats they were using against her were going to come to pass, and she was going to jail.’

‘Why would she think you were going to arrest her?’

‘She must have thought I was a cop.’

‘Why would she think you were a cop?’

I’m a cop, I had said. I can help you. We can talk.

‘She was paranoid,’ I said. ‘Understandably.’

‘You don’t look like a cop. You look like a bum. She would more likely have thought you were hustling her for spare change.’

‘Maybe she thought I was undercover.’

‘She was a records clerk, according to you. She would have known what undercover cops look like.’

‘Jake, I’m sorry, but I told her I was a cop.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought she was a bomber. I was just trying to get through the next three seconds without her pushing the button. I was ready to say anything.’

He asked, “What exactly did you say?’ So I told him and he said, ‘Jesus, that even sounds like internal affairs bullshit.’

I think you tipped her over the edge.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

For the next few minutes I was getting it from all sides. Jacob Mark was glaring at me because I had killed his sister. The waitress was angry because she could have sold about eight breakfasts in the time we had lingered over two cups of coffee. I took out a twenty dollar bill and trapped it under my saucer. She saw me do it. Eight breakfasts’ worth of tips, right there. That solved the waitress problem. The Jacob Mark problem was tougher. He was still and silent and bristling. I saw him glance away, twice. Getting ready to disengage. Eventually he said, ‘I got to go. I got things to do. I have to find a way to tell her family.’

I said, ‘Family?’

‘Molina, the ex-husband. And they have a son, Peter. My nephew.’

‘Susan had a son?

‘What’s it to you?’

The IQ of Labradors.

I said, ‘Jake, we’ve been sitting here talking about leverage, and you didn’t think to mention that Susan had a kid?’

He went blank for a second. Said, ‘He’s not a kid. He’s twenty- two years old. He’s a senior at USC. He plays football. He’s bigger than you are. And he’s not close with his mother. He lived with his father after the divorce.’

I said, ‘Call him.’

‘It’s four o’clock in the morning in California.’

‘Call him now.’

‘I’ll wake him up.’

‘I sure hope you will.’

‘He needs to be prepared for this.’

‘First he needs to be answering his phone.’

So Jake took out his cell again and beeped through his address book and hit the green button against a name pretty low down on the list. Alphabetical order, I guessed. P for Peter. Jake held the phone against his ear and looked one kind of worried through the first five rings, and then another kind after the sixth. He kept the phone up a little while longer and then lowered it slowly and said, ‘Voice mail.’

FIFTEEN

I SAID, ‘GO TO WORK. CALL THE LAPD OR THE USC CAMPUS cops and ask for some favours, blue to blue. Get someone to head over and check whether he’s home.’

‘They’ll laugh at me. It’s a college jock not answering his phone at four in the morning.’

I said, ‘Just do it.’

Jake said, ‘Come with me.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m staying here. I want to talk to those private guys again.’

‘You’ll never find them.’

‘They’ll find me. I never answered their question, about whether Susan gave me anything. I think they’ll want to ask it again.’

We arranged to meet in five hours’ time, in the same coffee shop.

I watched him get back in his car and then I walked south on Eighth, slowly, like I had nowhere special to go, which I didn’t. I was tired from not sleeping much but wired from all the coffee, so overall I figured it was a wash in terms of alertness and energy. And I figured the private guys would be in the same boat. We had all been up all night. Which fact got me thinking about time. Just as two in the morning was the wrong time for a suicide bombing, it was also a weird time for Susan Mark to be heading for a rendezvous and delivering information. So I stood for a spell at the newspaper rack outside a deli and leafed through the tabloids. I found what I was half expecting buried deep inside the Daily News. The New Jersey Turnpike had been closed northbound for four hours the previous evening. A tanker wreck, in fog. An acid spill. Multiple fatalities.

I pictured Susan Mark trapped on the road between exits. A four-hour jam. A four-hour delay. Disbelief. Mounting tension. No way forward, no way back. A rock and a hard place. Time, ticking away. A deadline, approaching. A deadline, missed. Threats and sanctions and penalties, now presumed live and operational. The 6 train had seemed fast to me. It must have felt awful slow to her. You tipped her over the edge. Maybe so, but she hadn’t needed a whole lot of tipping.

I butted the newspapers back into saleable condition and set off strolling again. I figured the guy with the torn jacket would have gone home to change, but the other three would be close by. They would have watched me enter the coffee shop, and they would have picked me up when I came out. I couldn’t see them on the street, but I wasn’t really looking for them. No point in looking for something when you know for sure it’s there.

Back in the day Eighth Avenue had been a dangerous thoroughfare. Broken streetlights, vacant lots, shuttered stores, crack, hookers, muggers. I had seen all kinds of things there. I had never been attacked personally. Which was no big surprise. To make me a potential victim, the world’s population would have to be reduced all the way down to two. Me and a mugger, and I would have won. Now Eighth was as safe as anywhere else. It bustled with commercial activity and there were people all over the place. So I didn’t care exactly where the three guys approached me. I made no attempt to channel them to a place of my choosing. I just walked. Their call. The day was on its way from warm to hot and sidewalk smells were rising up all around me, like a crude calendar: garbage stinks in the summer and doesn’t in the winter.