Her restless, association-prone mind leapfrogged back to the motto she had invoked the first time the happy trio had come for her. It was one beloved by her father, a longtime public servant. What’s the most frightening sentence in the English language? he would ask her when his friends came over. Other kids did the itsy-bitsy spider, but this was Tess’s shtick.

She’d lisp back, We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

Her father’s friends, most of them employed by the city and state and feds, would laugh until they were bent double.

Jenkins was so frustrated that he didn’t trust himself to speak. Dalesio was an inept asshole. If Jenkins had controlled the interview from the start…ut he hadn’t wanted to do that. He needed that stubborn bitch to focus on Gabe, wanted her to see him as the enemy. Thing is, good cop-bad cop worked only when the bad cop was good at being the bad cop. He should have left Gabe out of it, worked this exclusively with Bully. But the DEA agent was a little too good at playing bad cop. Plus, verbal wasn’t Bully’s strength. Poor guy. He’d never really found his niche after they had taken him out of the undercover unit.

No, the kid had folded, weak and ineffectual. Jenkins had told him repeatedly that they needed to extract the information now, that it was imperative to get her to give it up without going for the actual charge. They didn’t want to do this in public. Her lawyer would certainly leak details of an official deal, if only to embarrass them. Sure, Schulian would go for charging Monaghan; she was furious about the way the Youssef case had played out in the press. She’d be happy to throw the full weight of her office toward obtaining the lead. Hell, she might even be proud of Gabe Dalesio, which was all he really cared about, his own career and standing. But then there would be too many players, too many people in the loop. This asshole kept ignoring Jenkins’s admonition to keep this close, among the three of them.

“There are some other leads in the paperwork,” Gabe was burbling now, not getting how badly he had screwed up-or else covering for his embarrassment. They had gone for a late lunch at a steak house in the harbor, where the misty weather had held down the usual weekend crowds, and while the place wasn’t bad, it made Jenkins wistful for the joints he’d known in New York. Keane’s, Peter Luger’s. The New York office was considered a bum assignment by most of the agents, but it was the only place Jenkins had wanted to be, and it had outstripped his fantasies. The best way to live in New York was to be rich, of course, but there was a second way to do it-having a job that encouraged people to shower you with perks. Access to restaurants and clubs, forgiving owners who let you slide on checks because you were FBI, you were keeping the city safe.

Even with those hidden bonuses, it had been a stretch, living-and dressing-to the heights he desired on his government salary. And Betty had been expensive, surprisingly so. She’d been a waitress when they met, making jewelry on the side, seemingly down-to-earth and low-maintenance. But once he was disentangled from his wife and family, Betty’s needs grew and grew.

Then it had all gone to shit in a way he could never imagine. A tip had come into the Bureau about a possible terrorism suspect, a dark-skinned man photographing bridges around New York on a curiously regular schedule, almost like clockwork. Who wouldn’t have jumped on the guy, brought him in, hammered away at him? He was a young Egyptian, a college student allegedly, and he claimed he was taking the digital photos for a school project, but Columbia University had never heard of him.

Turned out the kid went to Columbia College, in Chicago. He was in New York on spring break. Oh, and he was a Christian, too, not a Muslim. Jenkins might have ridden out the private embarrassment of it all, but then the media had gotten it. Once it was public, someone had to take the fall. The Bureau couldn’t blame Barry for the investigation itself, which had been totally by the book, but they found a way to discredit him. They started going over his expense reports, questioning every line item. In the end they never found enough to fire him, but they found enough irregularities and missing documentation to send him back to a make-work job in Baltimore. To add insult to injury, his new colleagues treated him like a short-timer, a man of no worth. He was given bullshit duties, things that didn’t use 30 percent of his brain. At his lowest he had thought of putting a gun in his mouth a couple of times, but then he met Bully, who’d been even more thoroughly screwed by his bosses-but wasn’t so defeated by it. Bully’s fury had stoked his own, gotten him to take his tail out from between his legs and reclaim himself.

“There’s the articles of incorporation for her business-”

The dumb shit was still babbling. Figured. Guy had wilted in front of the old cripple, but now he couldn’t shut up. Collins hadn’t said a word since he placed his order. Jenkins loved that about Collins, the way he didn’t talk unless he had something to say.

“Look, we have what we need,” Jenkins said, cutting the kid off. “Don’t get carried away.”

“I’m just saying that there’s still more ways to get at her.”

“We had her,” Jenkins said. “The point was trying to get her to tell us today, to keep this from turning into some huge public deal. That’s why I told you not to go after the reporters, because that would have been all over the newspapers the minute you even questioned them.”

“Well, what about the information that Bully developed?” Collins frowned at Gabe’s use of his nickname, but the kid was too insensitive to notice. “What do we know about the dead kid, Le’andro, his known associates? Why not jack up Bennie Tep, lean on him?”

“Brilliant,” Collins said, and Gabe beamed, not hearing the sarcasm.

“We go to Bennie, we alert him that we know he’s involved,” Jenkins said. He was no longer trying to disguise his exasperation. In fact, he was amping it up, hoping that the kid would finally understand how badly he had screwed up. “He’ll kill half of East Baltimore rather than risk being linked to the murder of a federal prosecutor.”

“But he’s such a small-timer in the scheme of things, and you said he’s always tried to avoid violence-”

“He’s small by design. Like a boutique, you know? He keeps his business close in order to reduce risk. He doesn’t like to kill, but he will if he has to.”

“Oh,” Gabe said, getting it at last, or seeming to. “Well, there’s nothing hard and fast about the timeline. We can wait to bring her back in. If anything, it will probably make her even jumpier. Sword of Damocles and all that.”

“Sword of damn what?” Jenkins asked. He was a college boy, too, but that one got by him.

“He was a man who sat under a sword, hanging by a thread,” Collins said. Gabe, the poor sap, couldn’t hide how impressed he was. Bad form. Bully wouldn’t forgive him that.

“You learn that in college?” Gabe asked.

“High school. Dunbar.”

“Right-you were a Poet.” Fuck, the kid was teasing Bully now, making “poet” sound like “faggot.” But Collins wouldn’t even waste a look on the guy.

Crow’s body was completely disoriented. He had stayed up until 3:00 A.M., which was the new 4:00 A.M., then gotten up at the new 10:00 A.M., which was the old 9:00 A.M. Drinking three PBRs on a practically empty stomach hadn’t helped matters much. He should probably grab a meal before heading back. Or maybe stay here, get a good night’s sleep, rather than risk nodding off at the wheel. Was he honoring his body’s needs or postponing the reunion with Tess, who would be full of questions he couldn’t answer? He felt foolish, running away to protect Lloyd only to lose him in a Salisbury nightclub. Some protector he’d turned out to be.