Kurtz shrugged. She could have had the photos in her purse when she was shot. "We done here?"

When Arlene nodded, he relocked everything and checked the infrared digital photos on the LCD screen to make sure everything looked the same. He went back to the desk and adjusted a pencil. They opened the door a crack, made sure the hallway was empty, and stepped out.

Seven minutes twelve seconds.

Kurtz unlocked Ms. Feldman's office and clicked off the lights. Locked the door.

They passed the other guard, Leroy, coming out of the elevator. "Phil told me you folks were here. Done already?"

Arlene held up the thick file of old SweetheartSearch-dot-com papers she'd taken from her briefcase. "We have what the D.A. needs," she said.

Leroy nodded and moved down the hall to check the doors.

Outside, Arlene didn't wait until they got to her Buick. She handed Kurtz the bag and lit a Marlboro. When they got in the car, Kurtz said, "You enjoy that?"

"You bet I did. It's been more than a dozen years since I helped in the fieldwork."

Kurtz thought about that. He didn't remember ever using Arlene in the field.

"Sam," said Arlene. Kurtz was surprised that Samantha had taken Arlene out for fieldwork and never told him. Evidently, a lot had gone on at the agency that he'd been oblivious to.

"Back to the office?" asked Arlene.

"Back to the office," said Kurtz. "But go through a Burger King or something on the way." It had been more than thirty hours since he'd eaten anything.

CHAPTER TWELVE

They kept the lights low in their office—just two shielded old metal desk lamps—but the neon blaze from the Chippewa Street clubs and restaurants filled the big window and spilled onto Arlene's desk.

Arlene loaded O'Toole's hard drive data into her computer, and then added the digitized scanned material. Kurtz understood just enough to know that essentially she was creating a virtual computer—O'Toole's—inside her own machine, but separated from Arlene's own programs and files by various partitions. The parole officer's computer memory didn't even know it had been hijacked.

"Oh," said Arlene, "I finished the research into Big John O'Toole, his brother the Major, and the amusement park search. I think you'll be pleased with some of the connections. You can read it while I open this stuff."

Kurtz looked on his desk for new files, but there weren't any.

"I e-mailed it to your computer. The files are waiting there," said Arlene. Her cigarette glowed.

"My desk is five feet from yours, and you e-mailed it to me?" Kurtz was finishing the big burger they'd picked up during the drive over.

"It's a new century, Joe," said Arlene.

Kurtz's head hurt too much for him to start expressing his opinion on that happy revelation. He fired up his computer, downloaded the files, and opened them while he ate and sipped a Coke.

Big John O'Toole had been a street cop in Buffalo for almost twenty years and had remained a uniformed cop the entire time. He was a sergeant and three months away from retirement when he'd been shot and killed four years ago, during a drug-bust gone wrong according to the Buffalo News. O'Toole had been acting alone—strange for a sergeant with that seniority—investigating a series of car burnings over on Hertel, in a neighborhood famous for torching their cars for insurance, when he'd seen a heroin deal going down and tried to make the arrest by himself. One of the three suspects—all had escaped despite a huge manhunt—had got the drop on O'Toole and shot him in the head.

Weird, thought Kurtz. An experienced cop, even a uniform, trying to bust several drug dealers without calling for backup? It didn't make sense.

There were several related stories, including one covering Sergeant John O'Toole's huge funeral—every cop in Western New York seems to have turned out for it—and Kurtz recognized a slightly younger and somewhat thinner Officer Margaret O'Toole standing in the rain by the crowded graveside. He remembered learning once that she had been a real cop, working Vice at that time.

Kurtz skimmed through the rest of the Big John O'Toole stuff—mostly citations, occasional community related stuff going back more than a decade, and follow-up stories on the fruitless search for his shooters—and then went on to the hero-cop's older brother, Major Michael Francis O'Toole.

Separate photos—the two didn't seem to have been photographed together—showed that the brothers looked vaguely alike in that blunt Irish way, but the Major's face was broader, tougher, and meaner than the cop's. Arlene had somehow gotten into military records—Kurtz never asked her how she did such things—and he printed these pages so as to read them more easily.

Michael Francis O'Toole, born 1936, enlisted in the Army in 1956, a series of American and European base assignments, then his first tour in Vietnam in 1966. This O'Toole had worked his way up through the ranks, been sent to OCS in the early sixties, and was a captain during his first combat tour. There were various citations, medals, and details of heroism under fire—one time running from a landed command helicopter, under fire, to rescue one of his wounded men who had been left behind during a confused evacuation. His specialty had been working with ARVN—Army of the Republic of Vietnam—Kit Carson Scouts, the high-morale, American-trained Vietnamese troops who did scouting, interrogation, and translation for the army and CIA in-country. O'Toole had been shipped Stateside after a minor injury, promoted to Major, promptly volunteered to return to Vietnam, landed at a forward area in the Dan Lat Valley, stepped on an anti-personnel mine, and had lost the use of his legs.

That was the end of Major O'Toole's active military career. After a stint in a Virginia V.A. hospital, O'Toole retired from the Army and returned to his family's hometown of Chappaqua, New York. Then there were some 1972 virtual newspaper clippings about Major O'Toole in Neola, New York, a little town of about twenty thousand people about seventy miles south of Buffalo, along the Pennsylvania border. The Major had opened a major southeast Asian import-export business there along with his Vietnamese partner, Colonel Vin Trinh. They called the little business the South-East Asia Trading Company, SEATCO, which sounded like just another stupid military acronym to Kurtz, who'd had his share of them during his stint as an M.P.

All right, thought Kurtz. The headache was worse and he rubbed his temples. What the hell does all this mean other than poor, dying Peg O'Toole had had a hero (if not too bright) cop for a father and a Vietnam-hero for an uncle?

As if reading Kurtz's mind, Arlene stubbed out her cigarette and said, "Read that last file before you go any further with the O'Toole brothers."

"The file marked 'Cloud Nine'?"

"Yeah."

Kurtz dropped the other stuff offscreen and opened 'Cloud Nine. It was a puff article from The Neola Sentinel, dated August 10, 1974, about the wonderful amusement park being opened in the mountains above Neola. It was expected that this new, state-of-the-art amusement park would attract patrons from all over Western New York, Northern Pennsylvania, and North-Central Ohio. The park included a one-third-scale train that would hold up to sixty youngsters and which would follow tracks almost a mile and a half across and around the mountaintop. The park also boasted a huge Ferris wheel, a roller coaster "second only to the Comet at Canada's Crystal Beach," bumper cars, and a host of other amusements.

The park had been built "as a gift to the youth of Neola" by Major Michael Francis O'Toole, president of South-East Asia Trading Company of Neola, New York.

"Ahah," said Kurtz.