"You seem to think that there's some reason she'd be after me, but I don't think so," he said. He was a round, bald man, but his fat was tough fat, the kind of fat that you'd wear yourself out hitting on. He looked like he should smell of stubby cigars, but instead smelled of vanilla. "All my business is on the up-and-up, and always has been. I mean, over the years, I suppose, I'm gonna bump into some of these supposed hoodlums in my business…"

Blah blah blah, Lucas thought, listening to him. A wall of bland unresponsiveness. But the kicker was, Giancati was getting out of town with his wife, and nobody else knew, he said, and nobody would know unless the FBI called up Rinker and told her.

"If she wants me, and can find me over there, then God bless her, because half the time, I can't even find myself when I'm there."

"You go there often?" Malone asked.

"All the time. My wife's parents came from Newcastle, and my mother came from Dover and went to school in Calais. The east country is my favorite place in the world…"

Blah blah blah…

DALLAGLIO LOOKED LIKE a book editor or an accountant-tall, thin, harried, quizzical, with a caterpillarlike mustache on his upper lip. He did not look like a man who may have contracted a dozen hits. His wife, on the other hand, was short, rounded, and loud, and looked capable of doing any amount of killing. They had three armed bodyguards in the house: One of them, a former FBI agent, had known of Mallard, and said so. Mallard asked him, "You think you can cover him?"

"Nobody will get inside of twenty feet, but if Rinker has rifles… what can we do? We've told Mr. Dallaglio that."

DALLAGLIO 'S HOUSE WAS a neo-Baroque prairie-style gothic, Charles Addams out of Frank Lloyd Wright, with decoration chosen equally from the Renaissance and Miami Beach. He led them through the carved walnut double front doors, through a highly rugged interior to an indoor patio around a lap pool, offered them Cokes from a pool-side refrigerator, and sat everybody down on plastic gliders. "I have no idea why she killed Nanny. He was a good man-looked after his family," Dallaglio said. "If he was involved in any wrongdoing, I wouldn't know about it-our relationship was strictly business."

But under the blah-blah-blah he was panicked, and so was his wife. His wife, Jesse, said, "We only met her because Nanny was involved in a couple of business relationships with John Ross, and she worked for John. And she was a friend of John's wife, going back a while, when they both worked at his liquor warehouse. She was like a bookkeeper, but she was really outgoing, and that's how we knew her. We were in Wichita once, after she quit working for John, and we went to her bar. It really wasn't our style, but she seemed nice. That's all we knew about her."

"Are you friends with John Ross?" Mallard asked.

"Well, yeah. Sure. We do business with him all the time. He's in trucking-we need his trucks, and we need stuff delivered on time. That's no big secret. He's a good guy. We go out with them, out to dinner, or maybe he has tickets to a concert or some shit like that, and they invite us. He was really better friends with Nanny, but we know him."

The Dallaglios and Mallard and Malone went back and forth, and when they were finished, and Mallard had hinted that any help wouldn't lead to further questions-that is, if Dallaglio had some kind of intelligence connection with the local underground, and if they found her and turned her in, there'd be no questions asked-they got up to leave. As they moved toward the door, Lucas said, "Could I talk to you guys for a minute? I mean…" He looked at Mallard and Malone, and grinned, as they'd agreed. "… without the FBI?"

"Lucas…," Mallard said, as though reluctant. They'd worked it through on the way to the house. To Dallaglio: "Lucas has his own ways of working. We're not bound by anything he says."

"Just a minute to talk," Lucas said.

The Dallaglios agreed, and Mallard and Malone went outside, Mallard shaking his head. When the door closed behind them, Lucas said, "Listen: I'm just a fuckin' cop, okay? I've got no jurisdiction here, my boss just loaned me to the FBI because I got lucky once before, breaking Clara loose. If you talk to me, there's no way anybody could take it to court." He looked directly at Dallaglio. "And I'm telling you, no bullshit, I talked to a friend of Clara, and she's gonna kill your ass. She's gonna kill you, if we don't get her. And get her now. If we scare her off, she'll just go sit down in South America somewhere, and wait six months, until everybody relaxes, and then she's gonna come kill you. She knows you set her up down in Mexico, that you agreed to try to kill her-"

Dallaglio put up a finger. "That's not true."

Lucas continued. "But she knows you did. What she knows might not be the truth, but she thinks it is. The reality of it doesn't matter, because she's gonna kill you because of it. Can't stop her, can't talk her out of it. She lost her baby. This is a woman who hardly had any friends that we can find, who was abused from the time she was a child, and then got turned into some kind of crazy robot killer, and you, she knows, killed the only man who ever loved her for herself, who was gonna marry her, and her baby."

"Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do about it?" Jesse Dallaglio asked angrily. "You can't stop her-we've got all these expensive bodyguards, and you can see they're worried. I've got daughters. So you tell me, Mr. Chief, what the fuck are we supposed to do?"

"You can hide, is one thing," Lucas said. "Mr. Giancati's on her list, and he and his wife are leaving town. But if we don't get her… she can always wait longer than we can."

Jesse Dallaglio said, "So we can't hide forever, you're saying. Is this leading up to something, or is it all just bullshit?"

"What I'm saying is, if you know anything, tell me. I'm not gonna play games with you like the FBI. They want to get Clara, but they also see this as a chance to fuck up a whole bunch of you guys. That's not my problem: I got my own assholes up in Minneapolis to worry about. I just want to get Clara. That's all I want. Give me a name, somebody I can talk to. Give me an old hangout. Give me anything."

Dallaglio walked away, slumped into a chair. "I'll tell you, everybody acts like I'm some hoodlum or criminal, but I'm just trying to run a chain store. Just business. But Rinker…" He paused, cocked his head, thought for a moment, and then said, "Let me put it this way. If somebody was a hoodlum and wanted to hire Clara to do whatever, he wouldn't hang around with her. He wouldn't want anybody to even know that they'd talked. Maybe they wouldn't talk, so the cops couldn't draw any lines. So that if Rinker was picked up, she couldn't say, 'Well, I met with Nanny Dichter at the Balloon Ballroom on October 31, during the Halloween dance, and we made the deal.' So she couldn't say shit about who, what, where, and when. You see what I mean?"

"Maybe," Lucas said.

"What I mean," Dallaglio said, "is that this guy might not know shit about Clara Rinker. Not really."

"Too bad for that guy," Lucas said.

Jesse Dallaglio asked, "Where is Giancati going? Back to England?"

Lucas shrugged. "He just said he was leaving."

She chewed her lip. "Maybe that's the thing to do." She looked at her husband. "You like the Old Country. We could go for a couple of months."

"But if they don't catch her," Dallaglio said, "it's like he says… she can wait."

"But maybe they do catch her," Jesse Dallaglio said. "I'd hate for you or me or the girls to be the last ones killed before they got her."

ON THAT NOTE, with nothing more developing, Lucas said goodbye. Outside, Mallard said, "What?"

"Not much. Treena Ross may have known Clara. Might have been a friend."

Malone said, "Huh."