The plan was to meet at different motels over the next several weeks. They were entering the critical stage of stabilization, Chris explained. And timing was everything. Soon only a one-day window would be allowed before reversal patterns set in. This meant, of course, that Wally could not leave town nor be late for treatments.

On his headphones the Beach Boys were celebrating the special charms of California girls which took him back but without the old sad longing. He turned up the volume.

A few minutes later Wonder Woman got off her treadmill. "Have a good run?" he asked pleasantly. She mopped her brow with a towel and guzzled some chi-chi water from her bottle. "Always do," she said smartly, and walked away to join her Alphas.

Wally smiled to himself as he admired her chrome-plated buns in the mirror. When you're old and gray, he thought, and covered with liver spots and hanging on a walker, I'll still be doing eight-point sprints, my child.

"I'd say he's lying."

Mike Zazzaro had seen the tape twice already in the last few minutes, but Eric Brown punched the play button again. It was his first day back from the conference.

"Look at his face and hands. His eyes."

"I'm looking," Zazzaro said. "What about them?"

"The big innocent Orphan Annies," Brown said. "And the way his voice picks up. He's too loud, and his hands keep moving too much. He's all exaggeration. He protesteth too much." He switched to slow motion. "There: See how he wipes his mouth when he says it's only a resemblance?"

"Yeah?"

"An unconscious gesture, like trying to rub off a lie."

"A one-week conference on cult psychology, and you come back Sigmund Freud. Maybe he spit on his chin."

"He's faking."

"Eric, the guy's nervous and feeling like a horse's ass for fingering an innocent man. That's what's going on."

"Maybe, but I've got a hunch there's another agenda behind that guy's face."

"Like what?"

"Like fear. Like he's scared something will happen, or he's been threatened."

Zazzaro pushed his face to a foot from the monitor again. "He's embarrassed, not scared," Zazzaro said. "Besides, you saw his video of Glover. He's twenty-five years too young-plain and simple. The wrong man."

But that's what didn't make sense to Brown. He paused the tape on Wally Olafsson with his hands floating in front of him, his face full of remorse. When Brown had interviewed him, there was nothing ingenuous in his manners or expression. He looked convinced that Glover and Bacon were one and the same. In fact, he was belligerent about it. Now he's a bundle of nerves, insisting they call off the investigation.

"I know that face, the hairline, body movements, the gestures."

Zazzaro and Bill Pike had gone into the shop two days later. Pike drove the surveillance car. In his report Zazzaro had noted the birthday photo of Glover with the Life magazine that would make him thirty-eight, not fifty-six.

"What color were his eyes?"

"Brown."

"Both of them?"

"Yeah."

"He said one was brown, the other green."

Eric nodded, thinking that he could have been wearing colored contacts. But without due cause, they couldn't bring him in because no judge would grant a warrant on the possibility of tinted lenses.

Mike crossed the room and poured himself some coffee from the Braun machine.

"We get a good print on the guy?" Brown asked.

"Yeah. He had on the gloves when I went in, but Billy walked by earlier and saw him handling the fern pot bare-handed. Prints were all over it."

But there was nothing in the Bureau's database for either Roger Glover or Christopher Bacon.

"I have no opinion of this Roger Glover," Brown said. "But it's possible our friend Wally is a flake. He looks good on paper-marketing VP of Midland Investments, active in civic circles, on the hospital board, blah blah blah. But he could also be running around in his mother's undies and insisting the Midas Muffler guy down the street killed JFK."

"So, it's case closed."

"Not yet. I want you and Billy to stay on him a little longer."

"Come on, man. We've got a Net memo to check out the Fiskers. This is going to eat up our time."

Yesterday a directive from central headquarters in Clarksburg alerted all offices to keep watch over followers of a Maryland based group called Witnesses of the Holy Apocalypse. Ever since the millennium, they had gotten such alerts a few times a month. Most were just fire-and-brimstone preachings. But people in this group had ties with paramilitary organizations. The danger was that its leader, a Colonel Lamar Fisk, had a warlord mentality and exhorted his followers to take an active part in the battle of Armageddon. What concerned the Agency was that Fisk knew guns and preached violence.

"That can wait a day," Brown said, staring at the freeze frame of Olafsson in a broad gesture. "Just to get the bug out of my ear."

Because the case was thirteen years old, nobody was actively working on it. The Boston agent in charge had retired from service, which meant that it was Brown's case now.

"So, what do you have in mind?" Mike asked.

"Have the prints sent to Clarksburg for a hand check on the Bacon file. It's possible there might be some unidentified latents they can cross-ref with what you got."

"That could take months."

Because the Bureau did not database unidentified prints, the likelihood was small that any latent prints lifted from the Bacon's home, car, and office were in any evidence file. And if any were, it meant somebody in the West Virginia headquarters had to go ferreting through boxes and evidence bags in the warehouse, removing unidentified strays, recording and classifying them, then comparing what they had with those of Roger Glover on the fern pot. Mike was right. It would tie up lab people for weeks and cost thousands of taxpayer dollars, most likely for naught. Eric knew all that.

"All because of a hunch," Zazzaro said.

Brown made a what-are-you-going-to-do shrug.

Zazzaro shook his head. Then he mouthed the words: "THE WRONG MAN."

"Probably."

"TOO YOUNG."

"Probably."

"YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE."

"Probably."

26

"Happy birthday, Dad." Roger opened his eyes to a large ice cream cake blazing with candles and inscribed in pink sugar script: Happy 38 Roger.

It was March 15, and, according to his birth certificate, Roger Glover's birthday.

He made a big happy face. "What a nice surprise!"

Their house, a modern two-floored structure, was built with a side-attached garage that led into the kitchen. The moment Roger had returned from work, Brett met him and made him close his eyes as he led him into the dining room with the cake in the middle of the table and streamers draped across the ceiling.

Brett and Laura broke into "Happy Birthday to You." When they were finished, Brett insisted that Roger make a wish and blow out the candles. He was enjoying himself, and Roger surprised well.

"I don't know what to wish for," he said.

"A million dollars would help," Laura joked.

"I tried for the last two dozen birthdays-it doesn't work."

"You could wish to live to a hundred," Brett said.

"Yeah, that's a good one."

Laura felt a small ripple of discomfort, but let it pass.

"In a few more years," Brett said, "there won't be any more room on the cake."

"Ho, ho, funny man." Roger blew out the candles. Birthdays always made them uncomfortable, but they played along because they had taught Brett that family occasions were important. There would be gifts after which they would go out to celebrate at Gino's on Altoona Avenue. Roger's name was on the cake, but the party was really for Brett.