Konnie Konstantinatis’s first lesson in police work was to watch his father fool the tax men like ‘coons tricking hounds.

The old Greek immigrant was petty, weak, dangerous, a cross between a squirrel and a ferret. He was a born liar and had an instinct for knowing human nature cold. He put stills next to smokehouses, stills next to factories, stills in boats, disguised them like henhouses. Hid his income in a hundred small businesses. Once he smooth-talked a revenuer into arresting Konnie’s father’s own innocent brother-in-law instead of him and swore an oath at the trial that cost the bewildered man two years of his life.

So from the age of five or six Konnie had observed his father and had learned the art of evasion and deception. And therefore he’d learned the art of seeing through deceit.

This was a skill to be practiced slowly and tediously. And this was how he was going to find the man who’d kidnapped Tate Collier’s daughter.

Konnie arranged for a small crane to lift Megan’s car out of its spot, rather than drive it out and risk obliterating the Merce’s tread marks.

He then spent the next two hours taking electrostatic prints of the twelve tire treads that he could isolate and differentiate-ones he determined weren’t from Megan’s car. He then identified the matching left and right tires and measured wheelbases and lengths of the cars they’d come from. He jotted all this, in lyrical handwriting, into a battered leather notebook.

He then went over the entire parking space with a Dust buster and- hunched in the front seat of his car-looked over all the trace evidence picked up in the paper filter. Most of it was nothing more than dust and meaningless without laboratory analysis. But Konnie found one obvious clue: a single fiber that came from cheap rope. He recognized it because in one of the three kidnapping cases he’d worked over the past ten years the victim’s hands had been bound with rope that shed fibers just like this.

Speeding back to the office, the detective sat down at his computer and ran the wheel dimensions through the motor vehicle specification database. One set of numbers perfectly fit the dimensions for a Mercedes sedan.

He examined the electrostatic prints carefully. Flipping through Burne’s Tire Identifier, he concluded that they were a rare model of Michelin and because they showed virtually no wear he guessed the tires were no more than three or four months old. Encouraging, on the one hand, because they were unusual tires and it would be easier to track down the purchaser. But troubling too. Because they were expensive, as was the model of the car the man was driving. It was therefore likely that the perp was intelligent, which suggested he was an organized offender-the hardest to find.

And the sort of criminal that presented the most danger.

Konnie then started canvassing. It was Saturday evening and although most of the tire outlets were still open-General Tire, Sears, Merchants, Mercedes dealerships-the managers had gone home. But nothing as trivial as this stopped Konnie. He blustered and bullied until he had the names and home phone numbers of night staff managers of the stores’ record-keeping and data-processing departments.

He made thirty-eight phone calls and by the time he hung up from speaking with the last parts department manager on his list, faxes of bills of sale were starting to roll into police headquarters.

But the information wasn’t as helpful as he’d hoped. Most of the sales receipts included the manufacturer of the customer’s car and the tag number. Some had the model number but virtually none had the color. The list kept growing. After an hour he had copies of 142 records of the sales of that model of Michelin in the past twelve months to people who owned Mercedeses.

He looked over the discouragingly lengthy list of names.

Standard procedure was to run the names through the outstanding warrants/prior arrests database. But a net like that didn’t seem to be the sort that would catch this perp-he wasn’t a chronic ‘jacker or a shooter with a long history of crime. Still, Konnie was a cop who dotted his i’s and he handed the stack to Genie. “You know what to do, darling.”

“It’s seven forty-two on a Saturday night, boss,” the assistant pointed out.

“You had dinner at least.”

“Lemme tell you something, Konnie,” the huge woman said, nodding at the KFC bags. “Throw those out. They’re starting to stink.”

Dutifully, he did. As he returned to his desk he grabbed his ringing phone.

“Detective Konstantinatis, please?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Special Agent McComb with the FBI. Child Exploitation and Kidnapping Unit.”

“Sure, how you doin’?” Konnie’d worked with the unit occasionally. They were tireless and dedicated and top-notch.

“I’m doing a favor for my boss in Quantico. He asked me to take a look at the Megan McCall case. You’re involved in that, right?”

“Yup.”

“It’s not an active case for us but you know Tate Collier’s the girl’s father, right?”

“Know that.”

“Well, he did some pretty good work for us when he was a commonwealth's attorney so I said I’d look into her disappearance. As a favor.”

“Just what I’m doing, more or less. But I’m gonna present it as an active case to my captain tonight.”

“Are you really?”

“Found some interesting forensics.” Konnie was thinking, Man, if I could turn the tire data over to the Feds… the FBI has a whole staff of people who specialize in tires.

“That’s good to know. We ought to coordinate our approaches. Do some proactive thinking.”

“Sure.” Konnie’s thinking was: They might be the best cops in the world but feebies talk like assholes.

The agent said, “I’m up at Ernie’s, near the parkway. You know it?”

“Sure. It’s a half mile from me.”

“I was about to order dinner and was reading the file when I saw your name. Maybe I could come by in an hour or so. Or maybe-this might appeal to you, Officer-you might want to join me? Let Uncle Sam pick up the dinner tab.”

He paused for a moment. “Why not? Be there in ten minutes.”

“Good. Bring whatever you’ve got.”

“Will do.”

They hung up. Konnie stuck his head in Genie’s office, where she was looking over the warrants and arrests request results. “Everything’s negative, Konnie.”

“Don’t worry. We got the feds on the case now.”

“My.”

He took the stack of faxed receipts from her desk, shoved them into his briefcase and headed out the door.

Konnie was feeling pretty good. Ernie’s served some great mashed potatoes.

22

Aaron Matthews sat at a booth in a dark corner of the restaurant, looking out the window at a tableau of heavy equipment, bright yellow in the dusk, squatting on a dirt hillside nearby.

This was an area that five years ago had been fields and was now rampantly overgrown with town houses and apartments and strip malls. Starbucks, Chesapeake Bagels, Linens ‘n’ Things. Ernie’s restaurant fit in perfectly, an upscale franchise. Looked nice on the surface but beneath the veneer it was all formula. Matthews stirred as the waddling form of Detective Konstantinatis entered the restaurant and maneuvered through the tables.

Watching the man’s eyes, seeing where they slid-furtively, guiltily.

Always the eyes. Matthews waved and Konstantinatis nodded and steered toward him. Matthews had no idea what official FBI identification looked like and wouldn’t have known how to fake some if he had but he’d dressed in a suit and white shirt-what he always wore when seeing patients-and had brought several dog-eared file folders, on which he’d printed FBI PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL with stencils he’d made from office materials bought at Staples. These sat prominently in front of him.