"Well, his way of doing it is really starting to piss me off."

"I'll talk to him. Maybe we can meet later."

"I don't know how much longer I'm going to be down here. Probably won't be done until tomorrow. You just talk to King and make him see the error of holding out on us. I don't want to find out he's got some other evidence I don't know about. If he does, I'm going to slap him in a cell that looks a lot like the ones you two saw today. You understand?"

"Perfectly."

Michelle clicked off and pulled the phone line from her laptop out of the wall, winding it back up and putting it in her case. She stood and went over to the other side of the room to get something from her knapsack. So preoccupied was she that she didn't see it until it was too late. She tripped and fell. Rising back up, she looked at the oar with an angry expression. It was half under the bed, along with all the other junk from her truck. So stuffed was the underside of the bed that her possessions kept falling out, turning her bedroom into an obstacle course. This was the third time she'd tripped over something. She decided to do something about it.

As Michelle waged war against her junk, she didn't know that her entire conversation with Jefferson Parks had been captured by a tiny mass of circuits and wires. Inside the housing for her phone lines lurked another device very recently added and of which the owners of the inn were unaware. It was a state-of-the-art wireless surveillance device, so extraordinarily sensitive that it could capture not only conversations in the room or while Michelle was on the phone but anything spoken by the other party to the phone conversation.

A half mile away from the inn a paneled van was parked along the side of the road. Inside, Buick Man listened to the conversation for the third time and then shut off the tape. He picked up his phone and made the call, talking for some minutes and then ending with, "I can't tell you how disappointed I am."

These words sent a chill down the spine of the person to whom he was speaking.

"Do it," he said. "Do it tonight."

He hung up and looked in the direction of the inn. Michelle Maxwell had finally made it to the top of his list. He quietly congratulated her.