The guy ran off a list of pop drinks and bubbling waters. Boldt requested a ginger ale. The Asian girl spun out of the chair. Impossibly tight pants wrapped around a firm body. She headed in Boldt’s direction. He felt ancient in this company. He wondered if she were a messenger, a spy, a twenty-something prostitute. She walked right at him, her young nipples showing darkly through the T-shirt, the not-so-gentle sway of her hips emphasized by the low cut of the corduroy pants, the straight-cut black bangs so classic and timeless.

“Lieutenant Boldt?” she asked.

He felt a spike of heat, deciding someone had sent her, perhaps believing Boldt in need of a computer coach. He doubted immediately they’d ever trace the twenty or fifty he believed he’d find in her pocket to a suspect. At every turn the person behind this proved himself clever, and that pointed increasingly away from Svengrad and toward Hayes in Boldt’s mind. No way he had died in that cabin horror.

She said, “I’m Ming Lee, a junior at the U. Your lecture series: The application of the physical sciences to the detection of crime… I made criminalistics my major.”

Boldt felt catapulted into another realm. This bursting package of primal youth, a person he felt sure connected to the case, nothing but a secret admirer.

“What are you doing at Web’s?” she inquired. Then she blushed, glanced around, and said in a forced whisper that proved just as loud as her normal voice, “Are you undercover or something? Oh, my God! How totally cool is that?” She stepped closer and again he looked away, for as short as she was, his aerial view left little to the imagination. “Did I just blow this, or what?”

“Nothing so dramatic as that,” Boldt lied. “I live near here and our home computer went down. That’s all. Missing some e-mail.”

“You gonna have a drink?” she asked, and he expected that the next thing out of her mouth was going to be her coming on to him and he didn’t know what to make of that. So-called badgers came in every age, every ethnicity, but usually went for the young, hard, and handsome men in uniform.

“Nonalcoholic,” he said. “I’m on duty.” Immediately regretting the pat response.

“I thought you said your home computer went down… ” Then she blushed again. “Oh, my God,” she repeated, covering her mouth. “I’m so sorry.” Now more convinced than ever she’d interrupted an undercover op. “Can I sit with you?”

“I think not,” Boldt said.

“I won’t say a word.”

“Better not,” Boldt said. “We can discuss this at the next lecture.”

“After the next lecture?” she pressed, and there was no mistaking that look in any woman’s eyes, even a woman this young. He felt his face flush and his groin stir.

“Another time,” he said. “Good to meet you, Ming.” He stepped past her, leaving a whole other world behind him and wondering why a collision like this would present itself just now. Other than during his occasional teasing with Matthews, no woman had openly flirted with him in at least a decade, certainly not a child. The repartee with Matthews had ground to a halt once she’d attached herself to LaMoia. The implied interest of this girl nearly derailed his thought long enough for him to forget himself. But he moved to the computer terminal in the corner, sat down on the warm stool, reminded once again of his eager student, and leaned to slip the disk into the machine.

Within seconds the disk drive began to whir. With it, in Boldt’s mind, a resurrection. Yes, David Hayes was very much alive.

Driving home twenty minutes later, the disk coming out of the machine blank, as Riz had anticipated, and Boldt momentarily blank along with it, Boldt crossed I- 5 in the Crown Vic, catching sight of the painted triangle where he’d been pulled over and waiting for a call only an hour before. He yanked the wheel, hit the emergency flashers, and pulled over in traffic on westbound NE 45th.

“Command,” Riz answered the phone.

“The Forty-fifth Street exit off I-5 north,” Boldt said, without further introduction. “Is there a traffic cam that watches that location as well?” As Riz checked, Boldt ended the call and crossed the busy street and peered over a low rail at the interchange in question, his mind whirring. He had briefly held suspicions that Riz, or another SPD officer, was involved in this. It was certainly not beyond the realm of Yasmani Svengrad to “turn” a cop through extortion or threat, or to entice a cop with the smell of that kind of big money. Now, watching the highway traffic stream past, Boldt’s phone rang and it was Riz.

“Affirmative,” Riz said. “They had you in plain sight for both stops.”

They discussed the possibility that Hayes might have been able to access Web-Stir’s video security cameras, and Riz confirmed this possibility, “depending on the firmware they’re using.”

Working on the notion that the obvious is always the solution to a certain level of crime, and rarely the solution to sophisticated crime, Boldt placed a call to his department’s traffic division. He felt like a spider carefully laying out his web while knowing all along his predatory victory amounted to little more than haphazard chance. The fly had to be in the room for the web to be effective.

Boldt requested any and all reports of breakdowns or accidents for late afternoon into the early evening hours of Wednesday on highway 520-the day Hayes had apparently been tortured-and Foreman had allegedly been stuck in traffic on state highway 520. A few minutes later he received the report. He disconnected the call and hurried back to the Crown Vic.

His phone purred as he climbed back inside behind the wheel.

“It’s me.” Liz.

“Hey.”

“Everything okay?”

“In a manner of speaking. He… or someone else, has the software now. He did it smart, and we’re not going to trace it.”

“He?”

“We believe it’s Hayes. There’s only one thing left they need now.”

“Access,” she said. Her.

“Yes.”

“That’s why I’m calling,” she said. She detailed Foreman’s visit, leaving out nothing, including the Palm Pilot. “They made it look like torture and then they hid him. Danny’s convinced they can bring in whoever’s money it is, and then that’s that. He suspected I’d tell you, but needs it kept confidential. Says Geiser will deny knowledge of any of it.”

“SID found tooth chips, an excessive amount of blood, and pieces of two fingernails at that crime scene,” Boldt told her. “That doesn’t fit with what you’re telling me.”

“They wanted it to look right?”

“Maybe,” Boldt allowed. Foreman and Geiser would both know the details of the other tortures. It suddenly explained to Boldt why he’d felt so uneasy about the Hayes crime scene-the lack of cigarette ash and shoeprints among the missing pieces.

“The thing is,” Liz said, “if I am involved, if I do make this wire transfer for someone, and I send the money to an account Danny specifies, where’s that leave us if Danny doesn’t catch Svengrad? The tape? The kids? You said these people are not to be toyed with.”

“That’s right,” Boldt said, his head throbbing as he tried to set this straight in his thought. Once the tape went public, their lives-quite possibly their children’s lives-would never be the same.

“I’ll think of something.”

“Danny was off, Lou. Wasn’t himself.”

“Pressuring you couldn’t have been easy. It was right of you to tell me.” Boldt figured Geiser had put him up to it. Paul Geiser was pulling the strings now. “Thank you for that.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“You’re going to get the call,” he said. “We have to prepare for that.”

“There’s not much to prepare for. I wait and see what it is they ask me to do.”

“There’s a call I need you to make,” Boldt said. “It’ll have to be from your cell phone.”

“What’s going on, Lou?”