Wynne pulled the pipe from his teeth as he offered Badde his hand.

"Good to see you, Rapp," he said. "Sorry to make you come all the way out here."

Badde shook the hand and said, "Miserable damn day to be out driving. But you said it was important."

Wynne nodded as he took two heavy puffs of his pipe. "It'll be better if I show you."

Badde followed him down the sidewalk to the side of the house along Catharine Street. There was a weathered wooden door with another Badde campaign poster on it. Badde knew that this was the separate entrance to the basement; another was inside the house, under the stairwell that led to the upper floor.

Wynne unlocked the door, went inside, and flipped on a light switch. Badde followed-and immediately saw what Wynne wanted him to see firsthand.

The basement, which Kenny had set up as his combination bedroom and office, was completely trashed. The mattress was overturned. The old wooden desk was up on its side. And all three of the rusty and battered metal four-drawer filing cabinets had been ransacked. Some of the drawers still contained papers and folders, but most were empty.

"When the hell did this happen?" Badde asked.

Wynne puffed on his pipe once, then exhaled smoke as he said, "Sometime in the last twenty-four hours. It was okay after lunch yesterday when I was down here."

"You don't know exactly when? This had to have made one helluva racket."

"I told you on the phone that I didn't get back here until after I got your voice mail. That's why there was the delay."

He looked at Badde and saw anger.

Roger Wynne took two hard puffs on his pipe.

Then he got mad, too.

"What the hell, Rapp? Last night was Halloween, and there was a great party at U of P. I live here. I'm not a prisoner. Nor am I a goddamn warden, watching that moron Kareem. I never liked the idea of him being here when you first forced him on me. But you said it was an important political favor and that he'd be fine in the basement. And I reluctantly agreed. Which, of course, I obviously now regret."

Roger Wynne then made a sweeping gesture at the destroyed room. "How the hell was I supposed to know this was going to happen?"

Badde glanced at him, then looked back at the destruction and sighed audibly.

"Okay, Roger, besides the obvious, what's the damage?" He pointed at the filing cabinets. "What was in them?"

"Mostly Kareem's logs, the lists of all the voters he collected. And he also had many of their absentee-voter cards or forms. I was dumbfounded how he could collect so many. He wouldn't tell me. He just showed them to me and said it was because he was a hard worker and you were going to reward him for that."

Badde raised his eyebrows at the word "reward."

I do have a reward in mind for you, Kenny.

Just not the one you're probably expecting.

Wynne continued: "So, I, uh, came down here one day while he was out 'canvassing' for the so-called Forgotten Voters Initiative. I had a little look around and found all the records. In addition to going door to door, he'd gone to retirement homes and signed up voters en masse. Then he'd moved on to nursing homes."

Badde already knew this, of course, but replied, "Really? Well, you have to give him credit for thinking outside of the box."

Badde walked over and pulled an official-looking governmental form from one of the metal file drawers. The letterhead had the familiar crest of the City of Philadelphia and:

CITY COMMISSIONERS

The first line of the sheet read: "Absentee Ballot Application amp; Requirements."

He read farther down and saw the requirements for "Alternative Ballots": If you are a registered voter who is disabled or age sixty-five or older AND who is assigned to an inaccessible polling place, you are qualified to vote using an Alternative Ballot.

Badde looked up at Wynne and said, "And I do give the bastard credit. He found groups of voters who probably really had been forgotten by the system. Well… some, anyway."

Wynne shrugged and went on: "Then, some weeks back, Harvey Wilson across the street-"

Badde shook his head at first, but then he recognized the name: "The mortician?"

Wynne nodded. "He came banging on the front door. Said he'd caught Kenny in his office at the funeral home."

"What the hell was he stealing? Drugs? Do they even have drugs?"

Wynne shook his head. "No drugs. And Wilson said he wasn't really stealing anything, per se. At least nothing of real value to Wilson, as they were just records. But Wilson didn't like the idea of Kenny just making himself at home in his office, and told me to keep him the hell away."

"So, what was Kenny doing?"

"He got caught going through their files."

"Why?"

"He was methodically copying all the names and addresses of Wilson's recent clients."

"Identity theft of the dead?"

Wynne nodded. "Not that any of them were about to complain. If he could apply for the absentee-voter cards before the city got notice that these people were dead-and you know how muddled and long that kind of bureaucratic process can be-then he'd have even more quiet voters."

Badde grinned. "Smart. Never would've expected that from the dimwit."

Wynne nodded. "Yeah. And for all his faults-and there were many-Kareem was a stickler for detail. Maybe it was because he had so much time on his hands. He logged and filed everything."

Badde nodded toward the upturned filing cabinets.

"And took it all with him," he said.

"Stating the obvious, as long as those records were in there, and you already had been elected to office-"

Badde, affecting a bit of a French accent, authoritatively said, "It would have been faint plea, of course."

Wynne cocked his head as he puffed his pipe.

"A what?" Wynne said.

"You know, a faint plea-the French saying for 'the cow is out of the barn,' or even 'you can't get the toothpaste back in the tube.' It's a done deal, and you can't go back."

"You mean fait accompli," Wynne said. "An accomplished fact."

"That's it," Badde said.

Wynne noticed that Badde was wholly unembarrassed by the correction.

"Anyway," Wynne said, "if someone pulls those forms down at City Hall, or wherever the hell they're warehoused, they're going to see a lot of the same signatures at the same mailing addresses."

They exchanged a long glance.

"And then," Wynne went on, "it's not fait accompli, because if there's voter fraud, the courts get involved. And then…"

Badde nodded slowly at the implication.

He said: "And you think Kenny, Kareem, whatever the fuck you want to call him, has the forms?"

"As your political advisor, I think it's important that we proceed as if he does. Him, or someone more dangerous…"

City Councilman H. Rapp Badde, Jr., inhaled deeply, then let it out slowly.

Then a cell phone rang in his pants pocket, and Badde quickly grabbed his Go To Hell phone. But when he looked at the screen, there was nothing.

And the ringing was still coming from his pants pocket.

Other damned phone.

About time it's not the Go To Hell phone.

He exchanged phones, then looked at the caller ID.

What does Jan want?

"Whut up, honey?" he said into the phone.

"Damn it, Rapp, I thought I told you not to do things with PEGI without my knowledge," she said with absolutely no pleasantries.