He comes over to take a look, shakes his head. “It’s not mine. Lemme see.” He turns several pages. On each one of them the same numbers are there in the same location in the margin, ten digits, spaced out three, three, and four.

“It’s gotta be his writing ’cause nobody else was involved,” says the man. “He did receive a phone call when we were doing the signing. As I recall, he took out a slip of paper, wrote something on it, and put it back in his pocket. Conversation didn’t last long.”

“And he got a copy of these?”

“Yeah. Original and five copies in all. Original goes to the buyer, bottom copy to the selling title holder. We keep everything in between,” he says.

“Thanks,” I tell him.

Joselyn looks at me. “If he put the slip of paper on top of the original form before the copies were separated, he wouldn’t notice that his note bled through onto the NCR copies underneath.”

She’s right.

“Could be a phone number,” I say.

“Took the words right outta my mouth.” Herman’s looking over my shoulder.

“If so, it’s a 787 area code. Where’s that?” I say.

“I don’t know,” says Herman.

“Gimme a sec,” says Joselyn. She fishes her cell phone from her purse and starts to press buttons.

“You’re not going to call the number,” I tell her.

“No. I’m just going to Cha Cha the area code.”

“What the hell is that?” I say.

“Watch and learn, or talk to your daughter. Every kid in America knows Cha Cha,” she says. Joselyn sends a text message to the number 242 242, better known as Cha Cha. She types the question “Where is area code 787?”

A few seconds later the answer comes back: “The 787 area code belongs to Puerto Rico (PR)…”

THIRTY

By the time he arrived home in Chicago, it was after midnight. Bart Snyder was exhausted. He had spent five days in Washington in a fruitless effort to light a fire under the cops and get them to move on Jimmie’s murder investigation. The fact was that after almost two months, he was still unable to get the police to say officially that it was murder. The specter of a drug overdose still hung over Jimmie’s head.

On top of everything else, Snyder held a sparsely attended news conference that made him look like a fool.

Only one of the two daily metro newspapers showed up, along with a single camera from one of the cable news affiliates. When Snyder saw the poor turnout, he started out lecturing the media for their lack of interest in an “important case.” At one point he lost his temper. It was that single ten-second snippet that they ran under the label “Emotional Father” that was recycled on the cable network for two days. They never even mentioned Thorn’s name on TV, only in the newspaper.

Going public with the news conference had backfired. Now the police were not only refusing to share information, they were laughing at him.

Snyder was forced to double down. He hired a public relations firm in D.C. so that his next foray in front of the cameras would go more smoothly, and hopefully garner more coverage.

By the time he dragged himself and his luggage from the car in the garage and into his kitchen, he was angry, tired, and depressed. He dropped his bags and briefcase in the middle of the kitchen floor, stepped back into the garage, and pushed the button to close the garage door.

All he wanted to do was take a shower and go to bed. Instead he hauled his weary body toward the study to check his home voice mail and see if there were any last-minute messages on the computer.

Snyder had been dodging phone calls from Joselyn Cole for four days. She was on the road somewhere with Madriani and was looking for more information. Snyder was beginning to think that he’d made a mistake by trusting her with the lead on the boneyards.

It was starting to look as if Cole and Madriani had known each other for some time, and that he, Snyder, was the odd man out. She was probably already aware of the Liquida-Madriani connection to the attack on the North Island Naval Base. Snyder didn’t trust Madriani. The lawyer from Coronado had too many secrets. He suspected that Madriani knew more about Jimmie’s murder than he was saying, and he wasn’t about to share more information with someone he couldn’t trust. It was easier to simply ignore Cole’s calls than to get into an argument with her over the phone.

Within a few days Snyder would know whether the stuff on the boneyards was a dead end or not. His investigator, Dimmick, should have somebody burning up shoe leather now, checking them out.

Snyder plunked himself down into the webbed Aeron chair in front of his computer and opened his e-mail. There were several messages but nothing new. There was one from Joselyn Cole. According to the note at the bottom, it was sent from her iPhone, and implored him to call her on her cell as soon as possible.

There were four flashing voice-mail messages on his home-office line. Snyder reached over and pushed the Repeat button to play them.

The first was nothing, just a hang-up. Snyder erased it. The second was from the maid who cleaned his house, saying she couldn’t make it next week but would be by early the next morning. Snyder wasn’t happy but he had no choice. She would be waking him up in the morning. He erased the message. Someone at Dimmick’s office called and wanted to know which address to use for billing statements, Snyder’s home or his law office. Snyder remembered that he’d given Dimmick one of his firm’s business cards when they’d first met. He made a note to call him back in the morning. The last message was from Joselyn Cole asking that he call her. They needed some more information. Snyder erased it.

If he was going to cut her off, it was better to do it in writing, and to keep it brief. He turned to the e-mail from her cell phone and hit the Reply button at the bottom just as the loop of hemp went over his head and flashed in front of his eyes.

Before Snyder knew what was happening, it dropped around his throat and tightened like a steel band. He reached up with both hands and tried to pry his fingers between the rope and the skin on his neck. But he couldn’t. The three-eighths-inch hemp line was cutting a deep groove in the flesh around his throat, and was being pulled up high at the back of his neck.

Snyder felt something solid, a knee in his back, as he was jerked up straight in the chair, his back arched like a bow. The abrasive fibers of the hemp cut into his flesh like wire. He fought to get a breath, reached up with his hands, and tried to grab whoever was behind him. He felt a tight cotton slipover shirt but couldn’t get a grasp on the fabric.

He struggled to get out of the chair. If he could stand, he could turn and perhaps twist free. Feet planted on the floor, he pushed on the arms of the chair with all of his strength. He started to rise, then suddenly the knee was again driven into his back. The sharp bone could be felt through the thin web that formed the back of the chair. Snyder was jerked down hard into the chair as it tilted backward, and his feet came off the floor.

Reflex drove his hands back to the futility of the rope around his throat. Snyder could feel the veins in his face bulge as panic flooded his brain. In one violent heave he threw his head back against his assailant’s chest, cast his gaze toward the ceiling, and saw the pockmarked cheek and the dark malevolent eyes.

Snyder’s sight began to dim as his heart pounded in his chest, pumping for air. He reached forward with his hands, grasped the board on the stand in front of him and felt for the positioning of the keys, and touched four quick letters.

His right hand left the keyboard and grasped the mouse. The assailant saw the gesture. He jerked the rolling chair away from the computer, but not before Snyder had clicked the button.