“I’ll go,” he said. “There’s no reason why you have to.”

She gave him a look.

“What?”

“We’re both going to Portland, Keller. That goes without saying.”

“You just said—”

“What airline, Keller. And I don’t have to wonder, not since God created Google.”

They spent the night at the Laurel Inn after all, but in separate rooms. It was Dot’s idea, after she’d gone to the United website and booked them on a flight the next morning. “We have to stay someplace,” she said, “and we’ve already got the one room.”

His room was on the ground floor in the front. He checked in and had a shower, then went up to 204. She was drinking a bottle of Snapple from the vending machine and making a face every time she took a sip. She asked if he knew a decent place for dinner, and he said the only place he could think of was the Denny’s across the street, and he didn’t think it would be a good idea to go there.

“It’s probably not the only Denny’s in town,” she said, “but let’s not go to any of the others, either.” She found a steakhouse in the Yellow Pages that billed itself as Iowa’s best, and they agreed it was pretty good.

Back in his room, he watched cop show reruns on A&E. It seemed to him they were episodes he’d seen before, but that didn’t matter. He watched them anyway.

When he got home, he thought, he’d upgrade their TV, spring for a big flat-panel set like the one he’d left behind in New York. Get TiVo, too, and a decent DVD player. No reason not to, not if he had all that money in a bank in the Caymans.

He could think of a batch of reasons not to call Julia, but in the end he went ahead and called anyway. She said hello, and he said “It’s me,” and she said “Nicholas.” Just her voice saying his name, and he felt his chest swell up.

He said, “It worked. The thing was there, and it had what it was supposed to have, and she says you’re a genius.”

“All pronouns and nonspecific nouns. Because we’re on the phone?”

“The night has a thousand ears.”

“I thought it was eyes, but I suppose it could be ears, too. A thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred noses.”

“Because it worked,” he said, “I’ve got more places to go.”

“I know.”

“I won’t call until—”

“Until it’s over. I understand. You’ll be careful.”

“Yes.”

“I know you will. Give her my best.”

“I will. She says you’re a keeper.”

“But you knew that.”

“Yes,” he said. “I knew that.”

In the morning they had breakfast at the airport while they waited for their flight for Denver, where they ate again before the flight to Portland. The rental car there was booked in his name, and he showed his driver’s license and paid with his credit card. He didn’t have to worry about either of them, or any of the pieces of ID he was carrying, including the passport he’d shown at check-in. They were legitimate and authentic, even if the name they carried was not the one he’d been born with.

It was easy to locate Belle Mead Lane on the street map Keller bought, but not so easy to find it when you were driving. The development it was in, on the western edge of Beaverton, seemed to specialize in thoroughfares that twisted this way and that, often winding up more or less back where they’d started. Add in a rich complement of dead-end streets, plus some fantasy roads that existed only in the mind of the cartographer, and the whole business got tricky.

“That’s supposed to be Frontenac,” he said, glowering at a street sign, “but it says Shoshone. How do you suppose Taggert finds his way home at night?”

“He must leave a trail of bread crumbs. What’s that off to the left?”

“I can’t see the sign from here. Whatever it is, maybe it goes somewhere.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“Here we go,” he said a few minutes later. “Belle Mead Lane. Number seventy-one, wasn’t it?”

“Seventy-one.”

“So it’ll be on the left. Okay, that’s it.”

He slowed for a moment across from a red-brick ranch with white trim, set back on a spacious and well-landscaped lot.

“Nice,” Dot said. “Be a showplace when the trees get some size to them. I call it a positive sign, Keller. He’s got to be more than an errand boy to afford a place like this.”

“Unless he married money.”

“There you go. What heiress could resist a small-time crook with hair growing out of his ears?”

“Well,” he said.

“Well, indeed. Now what?”

“Now we find a motel.”

“And wait until tomorrow?”

“At the earliest,” he said. “This may take a while. He doesn’t live here all by himself. But we want to get him when he’s alone, and when he can’t see it coming.”

“It’s like when you work, isn’t it? You go out and have a look around and plan your approach.”

“I don’t know any better way to do it.”

“No, it makes sense. I guess I expected it to be more straightforward, the way it was yesterday in Des Moines. Go there, get what we came for, and leave.”

“We were just picking up a phone,” he pointed out. “Our task here is a little more complicated.”

“Just finding the damn house was more complicated than anything we did in Des Moines. Will you be able to find it again tomorrow?”

It wasn’t hard to find, not once he’d been there and knew when to disregard the map. When he turned onto Belle Mead Lane the next morning, he half-expected to see Marlin Taggert out in front of his house, watering his lawn. But that was Gregory Dowling who’d been watering his lawn, and who might be watering it still, never knowing what a close brush with death he’d had. No one was watering Marlin Taggert’s lawn.

“And no one ever has to,” Dot said, “because we’re in Oregon, where God waters everybody’s lawn. How come the sun’s out, Keller? Isn’t it supposed to rain here all the time? Or is that just a rumor they started to keep Californians from moving in?”

He parked two doors down on the other side of the street. That gave him a good view of Taggert’s house, but put them where he wouldn’t spot them unless he decided to take a good look around.

Still, they couldn’t park here long enough to sink roots. Taggert might not be expecting trouble, but his was a line of work where trouble was never entirely out of the question. Even if there was no one with a reason to wish him ill, he almost had to be a person of interest to law enforcement officers of all descriptions, local and state and federal. He and his boss might have gotten away clean in Des Moines, but Taggert couldn’t have lived this long without getting tied into something somewhere. Keller, who’d met the man, was willing to bet he’d done time, though he couldn’t have said where or for what.

So he’d be cautious out of habit, whether or not he had anything specific to be cautious about. Which made surveillance complicated. You couldn’t park on the block for too long, or come back too often.

That afternoon they returned to the airport, where Dot went to a different rental car counter and rented a car for herself, paying extra for an SUV so that it would be recognizably different from the sedan Keller had rented. With two cars, Keller figured they were that much less likely to be spotted. But even with a whole fleet, they had to be circumspect in their surveillance, or Taggert would simply conclude that he was being watched by a government agency with a whole motor pool at its disposal.

A couple of times a day they took one of the two vehicles and found their way back to Belle Mead Lane. They’d do a couple of drive-bys, park at curbside for five or ten minutes, circle the block a time or two, and then return to the motel. They were staying nearby at the Comfort Inn, and there was a shopping mall with a multiplex theater just half a mile from the motel, and plenty of places to eat. But most of the time they sat in their separate rooms and read the paper or watched television.