I called his office shortly after I was done with Grantley. I gave my name to Ross’s secretary and waited. When she came back on the line, she told me that Ross wasn’t available, but said she’d pass on the fact that I’d called. I thought about holding my breath while I waited for him to call back, but figured that I’d have blacked out long before that ever happened. From the brief delay in our exchange, though, I gathered that Ross was around but had tightened up since last we spoke. I was anxious to get back to Rachel and Sam, but I wanted to accumulate all the information that I could before I left the city. I felt I had no option but to take an expensive cab ride down to Federal Plaza.

The area was a peculiar clash of cultures: on the east side of Broadway there were the big federal buildings, surrounded by concrete barricades and adorned with weird rusting pieces of modern sculpture. On the other side, directly facing the might of the FBI, were storefronts that advertised cheap watches and caps while doing a profitable sideline in assisting with immigration applications, and discount clothing stores that offered suits for $59.99. I grabbed a coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts, then settled down to wait for Ross. He was, if nothing else, a man of routine. He’d confessed as much to me, the last time we’d met. I knew that he liked to eat most days at Stark’s Veranda, at the corner of Broadway and Thomas, a government hangout that had been around since the end of the nineteenth century, and I just hoped that he hadn’t suddenly taken to lunching at his desk. By the time he eventually emerged from his office I’d been waiting two hours and my coffee was long since finished, but I felt a touch of satisfaction at my investigative skills when he headed for the Veranda, quickly followed by the pain of rejection when I saw the expression on his face as I fell into step beside him.

“No,” he said. “Get lost.”

“You don’t write, you don’t call,” I said. “We’re losing touch. What we have now just isn’t the same as it used to be.”

“I don’t want to be in touch with you. I want you to leave me alone.”

“Buy me lunch?”

“No. No! What part of ‘leave me alone’ don’t you understand?”

He stopped at the crosswalk. It was a mistake. He should have taken his chances with the traffic.

“I’m trying to trace one of your agents,” I said.

“Look, I’m not your personal go-to guy at the Bureau,” said Ross. “I’m a busy man. There are terrorists out there, drug dealers, mobsters. They all require my attention. They take up a lot of my time. The rest, I save for people I like: my family, my friends, and basically anyone who isn’t you.”

He scowled at the oncoming traffic. He might even have been tempted to draw his gun and wave it around threateningly in order to cross.

“Come on, I know you secretly like me,” I said. “You’ve probably got my name written on your pencil case. The agent’s name is Philip Bosworth. The OSM’s office told me he was no longer with the division. I’d just like to get in touch with him.”

I had to give him credit for trying to shake me off. I took my eye off him for just a second, and instantly he was skipping through oncoming traffic like a government-funded Frogger. I caught up with him, though.

“I was hoping you’d be killed,” he said, but secretly I knew he was impressed.

“You pretend you’re such a tough guy,” I said, “but I know you’re all warm and fuzzy inside. Look, I just need to ask Bosworth some questions, that’s all.”

“Why? Why is he important to you?”

“The thing in Williamsburg, the human remains in the warehouse? He may know something about the background of the people involved.”

“People? I heard there was one guy. He got shot. You shot him. You shoot a lot of people. You ought to stop.”

We were at the entrance to the Veranda. If I tried to follow Ross inside, the staff would have my ass on the sidewalk faster than you could say “deadbeat.” I could see him balancing the wisdom of stepping inside and trying to forget about me against the possibility that I might know something useful-that, and the likelihood that I would still be outside when he was done, and the whole thing would just start over again.

“Somebody set him up there, gave him a place to live and work,” I said. “He didn’t do it alone.”

“The cops said you were investigating a missing person case.”

“How’d you know that?”

“We get bulletins. I had someone call the Nine-Six when your name came up.”

“See, I knew you cared.”

“Caring is relative. Who was the girl they found?”

“Alice Temple. Friend of a friend.”

“You don’t have too many friends, and I have my suspicions about some of the ones you do have. You keep bad company.”

“Do I have to listen to the lecture before you help me?”

“You see, that’s why things are always so difficult with you. You don’t know when to stop. I’ve never met a guy who was so keen on mixing it up.”

“Bosworth,” I said. “Philip Bosworth.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Someone will get back to you, maybe. Don’t call me, okay? Just don’t call me.”

The Veranda’s door opened, and we stepped aside to let a gaggle of old women leave. As the last of them departed, Ross slipped inside the restaurant. I was left holding the door.

I counted to five, waiting until just before he got out of sight.

“So,” I shouted, “I’ll call you, right?”

Mark Hall couldn’t stop vomiting. Ever since he’d come home, his stomach had bubbled with acid, until eventually it just rebelled and began spewing out its contents. He had barely slept the night before, and now his head and body ached dully. He was just thankful that his wife was away; otherwise, she’d have been fussing over him, insisting that a doctor should be called. Instead, he was free to slump on the bathroom floor, his cheek flat against the cool of the toilet bowl, waiting for the next spasm to hit. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. All he knew was that whenever he thought of what he’d done to Larry, the smell of Crane’s last breath came back to him, like Larry’s ghost was breathing upon him from the beyond, and a fresh bout of puking would immediately commence.

It was strange. He had hated Crane for so long. Every time Hall saw him, it was as though he were watching an imp grinning at him from beyond the grave, a reminder of the judgment he must inevitably face for his sins. He had long hoped that Crane would simply crawl off and die, but as in wartime, Larry Crane had proved to be a tenacious survivor.

Mark Hall had killed his share of men during the war: some of them from far away, distant figures falling in the echo of a rifle shot, others up close and personal, so that their blood had spattered his skin and stained his uniform. None of those deaths had troubled him after the first, as the naive boy who had taken the bus to basic training was transformed into a man capable of ending the life of another. It was a just war, and had he not killed them, then they would surely have dispatched him. But he had believed his days of killing to be far behind him, and he had never envisioned himself taking a knife to an unarmed old man, even one as odious as Larry Crane. The shock of it, and the disgust that it engendered, had sucked the energy from him, and nothing could ever be the same again.

Hall heard the doorbell ring, but he didn’t get up to answer it. He couldn’t. He was too weak to stand and too ashamed to face anyone even if he could. He stayed on the floor, his eyes closed. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he remembered, the bathroom door was opening, and he was looking at two pairs of feet: a woman’s and a man’s. His eyes followed the woman’s legs over her skirt to her hands. Hall thought that he could see blood on them. He wondered if his own hands looked the same way to her.