“I-I don’t know,” she replies, still clearly overwhelmed. “We weren’t that close, but… but I still thought I knew him better than that.”

“Do you still have any of his stuff in the house?” he asks.

“Some of it… yeah.”

“And have you ever gone through it?”

“Just a little,” she says, her voice slowly starting to highstep. “But wouldn’t the Service have-”

“Maybe they overlooked it,” he tells her. “Maybe there’s something they missed.”

“Why don’t we take a look together?” I add. It’s the perfect offer. Safety in numbers.

Nice, Charlie grins.

I turn away from the compliment, already feeling guilty. Regardless of how much it helps us, it’s still her dead father’s house. I saw it in her eyes before. The pain doesn’t go away.

With Gillian’s hesitant nod, Charlie hops out of his seat, and I follow him to the door. Behind us, Gillian lingers on the countertop.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Just tell me one thing,” she interrupts. “Do you really think they killed my dad?”

“Honestly, I don’t know what to think,” I say. “But twenty-four hours ago, I watched these guys murder one of our friends. I saw them pull the trigger, and I saw them turn their guns on us – all because we found an account with your dad’s name on it.”

“That doesn’t mean…”

“You’re right – it doesn’t mean they killed him,” Charlie agrees. “But if they didn’t, then why aren’t they here, trying to find him?”

Sometimes I forget how aggressively sharp Charlie is. She doesn’t have an answer for that one.

She takes a final look around the apartment and studies every detail. The lack of furniture, the papered windows, even the machete. If we were the bad guys, she’d already be dead.

Gillian tentatively slides off the counter, smacks the linoleum with her bare feet, and pauses a moment just as she’s about to open the door. She’s trying not to look distressed, but as her hand holds the doorknob, she still needs to take it all in. Without turning around, she says six words: “This better not be a trick.”

Charlie and I scramble forward. She steps outside. The sun’s not shining, but it’s close.

“Gillian, you’re not gonna regret this,” Charlie says.

Clutching the sides of the computer screen in his callused hands, Gallo glared down at the laptop that he balanced between his gut and the base of the steering wheel. For two hours, he watched Maggie Caruso make her lunch, clean her dishes, readjust the hems on two pairs of pants, and hang three silk shirts on the clothesline outside her window. In that time, she got two phone calls: one from a client, and one wrong number. Can you have it ready by Thursday? and I’m sorry, there’s no one here by that name. That’s it. Nothing more.

Gallo cranked the volume up and opened the feeds from all four digital cameras. Thanks to their most recent interrogation, as well as her recent contact with her sons, they were able to expand the warrant and add one to her bedroom, one to Charlie’s room, and another in the kitchen. Onscreen, Gallo had views of every major room in the apartment. But the only person there was Maggie – hunched over the sewing machine on the dining room table. In the corner, an old TV blared midday talk shows. Up close, the sewing machine pounded like a jackhammer. For a full two hours. That’s it.

“Ready for some relief?” DeSanctis asked as the passenger door popped open.

“What the hell took so long?” Gallo asked, never taking his eyes off the laptop.

“Patience – haven’t you ever heard of patience?”

“Just tell me what you got. Anything useful?”

“Of course it’s useful…” Still standing outside, DeSanctis swung two silver aluminum attaché cases into the front seat, stacking them one on top of the other. Sliding in next to them, he pulled the top one onto his lap.

“They give you a hard time?” Gallo asked.

DeSanctis answered with a sarcastic smirk and a flip of the attaché locks. “You know how it is with a Delta Dash – tell ’em what you need, tell ’em it’s an emergency, and bing-bang-bing, the James Bond gadgets are on the next shuttle. All you have to do is pick ’em up at baggage claim.”

Inside the silver case, set into a black foam mold, DeSanctis found what looked like a pudgy, round camcorder with a wide oversized lens. A sticker on the bottom read “DEA Property.” Typical, DeSanctis nodded. When it came to high-tech surveillance, Drug Enforcement and the Border Patrol always got the top toys.

“What is it?” Gallo asked.

“Germanium lens… indium antimonide detector-”

“English!”

“Handheld infrared videocamera with complete thermal imaging,” DeSanctis explained as he peered through the viewfinder. “If she’s sneaking out late at night, it’ll home in on her body heat and spot her down the darkest alley.”

Gallo looked up at the bright winter sky. “What else did you get?”

“Don’t give me that look,” DeSanctis warned. Resting the infrared camera on his lap, he tossed the first case into the backseat and flipped open the second. Inside was a high-tech radar gun with a long barrel that looked like a police flashlight. “This one’s just a prototype,” DeSanctis explained. “It measures motion – from running water, to the blood flowing through your veins.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means it lets you see straight through nonmoving objects. Like walls.”

Gallo crossed his arms skeptically. “No friggin’…”

“It works. I saw it myself,” DeSanctis insisted. “The computer inside lets you know if it’s a ceiling fan or a kid spinning around in circles. So if she’s meeting someone in the hallway, or stepping out of camera range…”

“We’ll catch her,” Gallo said, grabbing the radar gun and pointing it up toward Maggie’s apartment. “All we have to do is wait.”

“So where do you want to start?” Gillian asks as we step into her dad’s faded pink house.

“Wherever you want,” Charlie says as I survey my way through the overcrowded living room. Set up like an indoor garage sale, the room is filled with… well… a little bit of everything. Overstuffed bookshelves that’re crammed with engineering and science fiction books cover two of the four white stuccoed walls, stacks of papers bury an old wicker chair, and at least seven different throw pillows – including one shaped like a pink flamingo and another shaped like a laptop – are tossed haphazardly across the stained leather couch.

In the center of the room, a mod Woodstock-era coffee table is lost under remote controls, faded photographs, an electric screwdriver, random loose change, plastic squeezable figures of Happy and Bashful from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a stack of Sun Microsystems coasters, and at least two dozen rabbits’ feet that’re dyed in impossibly bright colors.

“I’m impressed,” Charlie blurts. “This room’s an even bigger wreck than mine.”

“Wait’ll you see the rest,” Gillian says. “He was purely function over form.”

“So all this stuff is his?”

“Pretty much,” Gillian replies. “I’ve been meaning to go through it, but… it’s not that easy to throw away someone’s life.”

She hits it right on the head with that one. It took my mom almost a year to toss dad’s toothbrush. And that’s when she hated him.

“Why don’t we start back here,” she suggests, leading us into the spare bedroom her dad used as an office. Inside, we find an L-shaped black Formica countertop jutting out from the back wall and continuing down the righthand side of the room. Half of it’s covered in paperwork; the other half with tools and electronics – wires, transistors, a miniature soldering iron, needle-nose pliers, a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers, and even some dental tools to work with small wiring. Above the desk is a framed picture of Geppetto, from Disney’s Pinocchio.