“Anything in the safe-deposit box?” Ciara asked.

“About a hundred thousand from one of the robberies.”

“Seems likely he saw his story being featured on TV, don’t you think?” she said.

“The show aired February twentieth,” Hamilton said, “so I don’t know-if that was going to make him nervous, wouldn’t he have left on the twenty-first?”

“If the box had been empty, I would have said the show spooked him,” Alex said. “But you say he left a hundred grand, right? So he must have planned to return. How long between the teller’s call to the FBI and the Bureau’s response?”

Hamilton looked uneasy. “About ten days-we received a lot of calls after the show aired, so it took some time to check them all out.”

“Not all that many commercial flights in and out of Lafayette, are there? I mean, nothing like JFK or DFW, right? So let’s look at passenger lists from February twenty-seventh to March-whatever day it was the agents arrived-and pay special attention to anyone ticketed through to LAX, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, or other nearby California airports during that time.”

“Okay. And when we have this list?”

“Find out who paid for the tickets, for starters. Did he have a phone at this house you watched?”

“No phone.”

“How did they contact him?” Alex said, rubbing his forehead. “And out of all the places he might have been, how did they choose Lafayette?”

Hamilton shrugged. “We’ll have to look at all the calls that came into the show, try to learn how they thought it out. Maybe we can look at the calls logged for some of the other shows and get ahead of them.”

“I’ll try to go back there tomorrow, see what I can get from them.” Alex stood looking out at the moonlight on the water for long moments.

Behind him, he heard Ciara say, “Four down, six to go. Unless all ten are already dead.”

Alex considered asking Hamilton to give Ciara a lift back to the office. He had reached his limit for the day, and if he hadn’t been so sure that she would repay the insult by making tomorrow worse for him, he would have foisted her off on the agent.

But as he turned to face them, he heard Ciara say, “Agent Hamilton, could I trouble you for a ride to my car? Alex has had a long day, and his house isn’t far from here. Besides, his nephew is waiting for him.”

“I’d be glad to be of help.”

Alex almost protested out of guilt, but instead said, “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“Come on,” Ciara said to Hamilton. “I’ll buy you dinner. Have you ever eaten at Café Misto? I think we can make it before they close.”

Before they left, he exchanged cards with Hamilton. He watched them walk away, past the deputies who were still keeping the scene secure.

Alex went over the same things he had gone over earlier, only this time, in relative solitude. He tried to picture the killer coming out here with his burden-or a pair of killers doing the same. The crevice in the cliffs would have been chosen beforehand-perhaps from offshore? They probably would have parked as close as possible to the place where they dropped the body. They set the anchoring system first. Then the rope and body were set at the edge, the rope tied, and the body lowered. At some point, the person who tied the knots this time had cut the excess rope, and had probably done so pulling the rope taut with one hand and pressing the rope with the thumb of the other hand, the hand that also held his knife.

And made a small mistake that had given investigators a piece of luck this time, one they hadn’t had before. The knife had been sharper than expected or he had been a little clumsy-he had cut himself and bled on and near the rope. He had tried to wipe it off, but enough had remained on the rope’s surface and on the rocky ground nearby to catch the attention of a crime lab technician.

DNA.

Someone had suggested that it might be the victim’s blood, leaking out. But a frozen body would not drip blood.

Alex wanted to make sure their own lab had what it wanted for processing before mentioning the blood to the FBI. If there was enough for the FBI to run its own tests, fine, but if not, he wouldn’t be placing the sheriff’s department in the position it was in a few months ago.

He began walking back to his car, ignoring the shouts of the press.

He wondered if Ciara was talking to David Hamilton about bloodstains over dinner.

23

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Tuesday, May 20, 9:36 P.M.

As he sat on the steps leading down to the Sandia Tramway parking lot, Frederick Whitfield IV heard his cell phone ring.

“Am I glad I still have my cell phone, or not?” he asked aloud.

He looked at the caller ID display and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the evening’s dropping temperatures. “Not,” he whispered. He didn’t answer the call.

Hands shaking, he put the phone back in his jacket.

Unlike the hive of activity it had been a little earlier, the parking lot was quiet now. The last tram had come down from the mountain, and only the cars of the moonlight hikers remained.

The Bronco he had stolen was gone.

This was not a surprise to him-not now, anyway. He had been more than surprised a few hours earlier, when he had helplessly watched from the descending tram as a police tow truck took the Bronco away.

He had been totally humiliated when Meghan used karate or jujitsu or whatever the fuck it was on him. Where the hell did that bitch learn how to do that? Belatedly, he remembered that in high school, Gabe had talked about the two of them taking lessons of some sort-she had hurt her brother during practice or something.

Big deal. Frederick also knew all kinds of martial arts moves, but it really wasn’t fair if you weren’t expecting someone to pull that kind of shit without warning. So in front of all those people, she thinks it’s funny to try this fancy crap, and she gets lucky.

Then that little freak who was in the bathroom with her-what was that all about?-nailed him in the kidneys. Kid comes at him from behind, when he’s already down. Really unfair. Totally, totally unfair. They didn’t teach that in any dojo-that much he knew. Leave it to a woman to not understand that this is not the way to fight.

He hadn’t been able to get a good look at the driver of the Suburban, and he wondered for a minute if it had been Gabe Taggert. But he had read the dossier that Everett had prepared on Taggert, and he knew that if Taggert had a kid, Everett would have found him by now, and used him to get Taggert to come back to California.

The reservation book-which he had looked at when he came back into the restaurant, intending to complain that he hadn’t thought this was the kind of place where you’d get attacked on your way to use the restroom-said “Taggert-2,” though, so he was confused. He decided that Meghan was maybe meeting the boy for dinner, as a favor to the kid’s father. Kind of like a baby-sitter or something. Maybe the kid was retarded, and she had to help him use the bathroom. He still couldn’t figure out the bathroom part.

But he was just about positive that the kid’s old man was the one driving the Suburban. Another asshole. Frederick didn’t get a chance to catch more than a glimpse of the guy, just enough to know it was a man doing the driving, a white guy. Maybe Meghan was more like her brother than anyone suspected, and they were a gang, preying on rich people who came to ski resorts. As a rich person, Frederick really resented that kind of thing. There should be better laws-after all, wasn’t it a violation of your civil rights if someone robbed you just because you were rich?

He didn’t think it was an accident that the license plate on the Suburban was too muddy to read. He hoped a cop stopped them for it. Then they’d have to explain why they had his wallet and keys and about why there were all these different people’s driver’s licenses in the wallet, and shit like that. He really, really hoped it happened. He might even call in an anonymous tip. That would teach that little butthole to steal wallets.