“Yep. Hell, he’s good.”

They continued west, passing under Route 28, which was the dividing line between civilization here and the farmland that led eventually to the mountains.

“What’re we going to do?”

But Tate didn’t answer, hardly even heard the question. He was looking at a large sign that said, FUTURE HOME OF LIBERTY PARK…

He laughed out loud.

This was one of those odd things, noticing the sign at the same time the van was following them. A high-grade coincidence, he would have said. Bett-well, the old Bett-would of course have attributed it to the stars or the spirits or past lives or something. Didn’t matter. He’d made the connection and at last he had a solid lead.

“What?” she cried, alarmed, responding both to his outrageous U-turn, skidding 180 degrees over the grassy median and the harsh laugh coming from his throat.

“I just figured something out. We’re going to my place for a minute. I have to get something.”

“Oh. What?”

“A gun.”

Bett’s head turned toward him then away. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yep. Very serious.”

Some years ago, when Tate had been prosecuting the improbable case of the murder of a Jamaican drug dealer at a Wendy’s restaurant in suburban Burke, Konnie Konstantinatis had poked his head into Tate’s office.

“Time you got yourself a piece.”

“Of what?”

“Ha. You’ll want a revolver ‘cause all you do is point ‘n’ shoot. You’re not a boy to mess with clips and safeties and stuff like that.”

“What’s a clip?”

Tate had been joking, of course-every commonwealth’s attorney in Virginia was well versed in the lore of firearms-but the fact was he re -ally didn’t know guns well. The Judge didn’t hold with weapons, didn’t see any need for them and believed the countryside would be much more highly populated without weaponry

But Konnie wouldn’t take no for an answer and within a week Tate found himself the owner of a very unglamorous Smith & Wesson.38 special, sporting six chambers, only five loaded, the one under the hammer being forever empty; as Konnie always preached.

This gun was locked away where it’d been for the past three or four years-in a trunk in Tate’s barn. He now sped up his driveway and leapt out, observing that with his manic driving he’d lost the white van without intending to. He ran into the barn, found the key on his chain and after much jiggling managed to open the trunk. The gun, still coated with oil as he’d left it, was in a Ziploc bag. He took it out, wiped it clean and slipped it into his pocket.

In the car Belt asked him timidly, “You have it?” the way a college girl might ask her boyfriend if he’d brought a condom on a date.

He nodded.

“Is it loaded?”

“Oh.” He’d forgotten to look. He took it out and fiddled with the gun until he remembered how to open it. Five silver eyes of bullets stared back from the cylinder.

He clicked it shut and put the heavy gun in his pocket.

“It’s not going to just go off, is it? I mean by itself.”

“No.” He noticed Belt staring at him. ‘What?” he asked, starting the engine of the Lexus.

“You’re… you look scary.”

He laughed coldly. “I feel scary. Let’s go.”

Manassas, Virginia, is this:

Big-wheeled trucks, sullen pick-a-fight teenagers (the description filling both the boys and the girls), cars on the street and cars on blocks, Confederate stars ‘n’ bars, strip malls, PCP labs tucked away in the woods, concrete postwar bungalows, quiet mothers and skinny fathers struggling, struggling, struggling. It’s domestic fights. It’s women sobbing at Garth’s concerts and teens puking at Aerosmith’s.

And a little of it, very little, is Grant Avenue.

This is Doctors’ and Lawyers’ Row. Little Taras, Civil War mansions complete with columns and detached barns for garages, surrounded by expansive landscaped yards. It was to the biggest of these houses-a rambling white Colonial on four acres-that Tate Collier now drove.

“Who lives here?” Bett asked, cautiously eyeing the house.

“The man who knows where Megan is.”

“Call Konnie,” she said.

“No time,” he muttered and he rolled up the drive, past the two Mercedeses-neither of them gray, he noticed-and skidded to a stop about five feet from the front door, nearly knocking a limestone lion off its perch beside the walk.

“Tate!”

But he ignored her and leapt from the car.

“Wait here.”

The anger swelled inside him even more powerfully, boiling, and he found himself pounding fiercely on the door with his left hand, his right gripped around the handle of the pistol.

A large man opened the door. He was in his thirties, muscular, wearing chinos and an Izod shirt.

“I want to see him,” Tate growled.

‘Who are you?”

“I want to see Sharpe and I want to see him now.”

Pull the gun now? Or wait for a more dramatic moment?

“Mr. Sharpe’s busy right at the-’

Tate lifted the gun out of his pocket. He displayed it, more than brandished it, to the assistant or bodyguard or whatever he was. The man lifted his hands and backed up, alarm on his face, “Jesus Christ!”

“Where is he?”

“Hold on there, mister, I don’t bow who you are or what you’re doing here but-”

“Jimmy, what’s going on?” a voice called from the top of the stairs.

“Cot a problem here, Mr. Sharpe.”

“Tate Collier come a-calling,” Jack Sharpe sang out. He glanced at the gun as if Tate were holding a butterfly net. “Collier, whatcha got yourself there?” He laughed. Cautious, sure. But it was still a laugh.

“Was he driving the white van?” Tate pointed the gun at the man in the chinos, who lifted his hands. “Careful, sir, please!” he implored.

“It’s okay; Jimmy,” Sharpe called. “Just let him be. He’ll calm down. What van, Collier?”

“You know what van,” Tate said, turning back to Sharpe. ‘Was he the asshole driving?”

‘Why’n’t you put that thing away so’s nobody gets hurt. And we’ll talk… No, Jimmy, it’s okay, really.”

“I can shoot him if you want, Mr. Sharpe.”

Tate glanced back and found himself looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, chrome plated, held steadily in Jimmy’s hand. It was an automatic, he noticed-with clips and safeties and all the rest of that stuff

“No, don’t do that,” Sharpe said. “He’s not going to hurt anybody. Collier, put it away Be better for everybody.”

Jimmy kept the gun pointed steadily at Tate’s head.

Tate put his own pistol back into his pocket with a shaking hand.

“Come on upstairs.”

“Should I come too, Mr. Sharpe?”

“No, I don’t think we’ll needya, Jimmy. Will we, Collier?”

“I don’t think so,” Tate said. “No.”

“Come on up.”

Tate, breathless after the adrenaline rush, climbed the stairs. He followed Jack Sharpe into a sunlit den. He glanced back and saw that Jimmy was still holding the shiny pistol pointed vaguely in Tate’s direction.

Sharpe-wearing navy-blue polyester slacks and a red golfing shirt

– was now all business. No longer jokey.

“What the fuck’s this all about, Collier?”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“Your daughter? How should I know?”

“Who’s driving the white van?”

“I assume you’re saying that somebody’s been following you.”

“Yeah, somebody’s been following me.”

When Tate had seen the Liberty Park sign he’d remembered that his clients in that case had complained to him last week that private eyes had been following them. Tate’d told them not to worry-it was standard practice in big cases (though he added that they shouldn’t do anything they wouldn’t want committed to videotape). “Same as somebody's been following my clients. And probably my wife-”

“Thought you were divorced,” Sharpe noted.

“How’d you know that?”

“Seem to remember something.”