"Does that help?" she asked.

"No."

"Don't have to be snippy about it."

MALONE HAD BEEN in and out all afternoon. She was driving the local cops to find Rinker's car, while Mallard had disappeared entirely. When Lucas asked, Sally told him that Mallard was teleconferencing with Washington.

"All of it?"

"Just the FBI part," she said.

A FEW MINUTES LATER, an agent named Leen stopped by and said that the explosive that had killed Levy had been tagged, and the tags indicated that it was a commercial-grade explosive generally used in quarries, and most of it was sold in New England.

That rang no bells with anyone, and Lucas went back to the paper.

MALONE CAME BACK and asked, "Why are you reading all that paper again?"

"I'm trying to figure out what's going on in Rinker's head, and I can't. She's got all this carefully planned, right? The Dichter thing, then the cell phone. Is there some reason for the order that she's taking them in? Why didn't she take Ross first? Even Ross thinks he'd probably be the toughest nut to crack, but if she'd done him first, she could have gotten him."

Malone shook her head. "It is possible to plan a thing and then ride the breaks. Maybe that's what she's doing."

"I'll tell you what, though," Lucas said. "Ross ain't panicking. He's got a plan. My feeling is that she's gonna go after one of the other guys before she tries for him-I think Ferignetti may be right, that she's got no interest in him. Give him that. Giancati is taking himself out of it, maybe beyond her reach. So-I think we ought to look really hard at Paul Dallaglio."

"Dallaglio may take himself out of it, too, if he goes back to the Old Country, wherever that may be."

"Then we watch Ross, and hope she doesn't take a sabbatical and come back for them next year."

AT SIX O 'CLOCK, he left the FBI building and met Andreno, Loftus, Bender, and Carter at Andy's Bar. They ate cheeseburgers and curly fries and onion rings and batter-dipped mushrooms, and Lucas said, "Guys, we almost got her, but we didn't. Does anybody have any idea of a move we could make? We gotta make some kind of move."

"I keep thinking about the car," Carter said. "If the car was on the street, locally, we'd have her by now. I know for a fact that guys are driving up and down every street in the whole metro area looking for the car, and they're coming up dry. The thing is… maybe she took off."

"The feds have put the make and tag number out all over the Midwest and South, and she can't have outrun that," Lucas said. "If she did, there's nothing we can do about it. But I don't think she's gone. I just don't know how to put my hands on her."

"Comes back to her friends," Andreno said. "Somebody's hiding her. Somebody's helping her. If we can put our hands on that guy…"

LUCAS TALKED TO Mallard on the phone at eight o'clock. "I might run home tomorrow, if you don't come up with something. Catch a plane out tomorrow afternoon, spend a couple of days at home. I'm out of ideas right now."

"Lucas, goddamnit, you're the only one who's had any ideas that actually panned out. You can't leave."

"For a day or two," Lucas said. "I could be back here in four hours, if something breaks."

BUT SOMETHING BROKE sooner than that. Mallard called back at 11 o'clock, excited, words tumbling over words. "We spotted her. The guys on Dallaglio's house are watching her right now. We're pulling people in all the way around her, tightening up on her. We're looking at her with night glasses, and we can see her watching the Dallaglio place. She's in a Volvo, they say."

"Meet you in the lobby," Lucas said.

He'd been reading, still dressed, and he slipped on his shoes and got his car keys and ran for the elevator. After a short, impatient wait, the elevator door opened and Malone was there, trying to shove a gun back into her purse.

"Gonna shoot her, huh?" Lucas asked.

Malone grunted. "I've been waiting for this."

"Weird. She's been so careful, and now she's sitting in a car on the street, watching Dallaglio. She pulled Richter out of his shell, she got weird with Levy, something we never even suspected, and now…" He shook his head. But it happened sometimes.

DALLAGLIO 'S PLACE WAS twenty minutes out, and they all went together in one of the Suburbans, a flasher working on the front, cutting through traffic like an avalanche, a heavy-footed red-haired FBI man at the wheel, one of the Washington crew. Lucas didn't like him much, but had to admit that he knew how to run the truck.

Mallard was on the radio the full time. He'd been on it when he ran out of the hotel a minute after Lucas and Malone, stopped using it just long enough to explain that he'd been getting ready to take a shower when the call came from the field, and then got back on it, with brief breaks to pass along what he was hearing.

"I've told them to move on her whether or not we're there. As soon as they're ready, they go."

"They gonna rush her?"

"They're gonna block her, front and back, with trucks. We've got people moving up through a yard that she's parked near, but there's a dog, and they're talking to the owner about getting the dog out of there quietly before they go through. When she's blocked, there'll be a guy pointing a shotgun through her window before she has time to move. They think they can close up to fifteen feet."

They kept getting closer, and nothing had happened. The dog was hanging them up, and then Mallard reported that the dog was now locked in the basement of the nearest house, and that the tac squad was moving in, cutting through the dark yards. The red-haired agent took them off the freeway and down a couple of major streets, the tires screeching on the warm asphalt, all of them leaning into the turn, and then suddenly, on a narrow street, surrounded by woods, he slowed, and reached out and killed the flasher.

"Six blocks," he said. Twenty seconds later: "Four blocks."

Then up in front of them, a block away, they saw another suburban pull away from the curb, go down another block, and turn a corner. "That's our guys," said the redhead.

"Going down," Mallard said. He couldn't keep the stress out of his voice. "I'm about to wet my pants."

"This is a rental," the redhead said. "Try not to."

They idled along for a block, paused before the corner, drifting toward the curb. Then Mallard said, "They're doing it, they're doing it, let's GO."

The red-haired man mashed on the accelerator and the Suburban grunted away from the curb and turned the corner, and, two blocks away, they could see a car in a brilliant slash of light and trucks all around it, and men with long guns and helmets…

"Got her," Mallard shouted. "We got her."

AND A HALF hour later, he said, harshly, angrily, to Lucas, "What the fuck is this about, Lucas? What the fuck is this about?"

They had Nina Bennett pressed against a six-year-old Volvo station wagon, frightened, crying, hands cuffed behind her back. And obviously not Clara Rinker.

After some preliminary shouting, the next thought was that Rinker was using Bennett as a diversion to approach Dallaglio's house, and there was a rush to get a larger squad around the house. But Dallaglio was okay, and there was no sign of Rinker, or of fleeing cars, or anything else.

Which brought up Mallard's question, "What the fuck is this about, Lucas?"

"I don't know." He looked around. "Maybe she's watching from somewhere, to see what would happen."

"She had to know that Dallaglio was protected. What would she gain?"

"I don't know."

"We don't even know it was Rinker," Malone said. "The woman who hired her-if this even happened-didn't sound like Rinker."

"Didn't sound like Mrs. Dallaglio, either," Lucas said dryly.

"Maybe she's just pulling our chain," said the red-haired agent.