"Or if you want, I can send it straight to your mom."

    "Thanks but she, um, doesn't have a computer either."

    Suzy rolled her eyes. "Where's she live?"

    "Um, Toronto."

    Jack could tell he'd pulled that one out of the air.

    She laughed. "Toronto! I've been there! I love Toronto! It's like another country."

    A few heartbeats of silence, then Bobble said, "Oooooookay. We'll be going now, Suze. Don't forget to send that picture to my man, here."

    "Right. See you here for the Belmont party? Or are you going out to the track?"

    "I'm here, Suze."

    She gave him a thumbs-up.

    "Wow," Bobble said as they hit the street. "Another country? She knows all that techie stuff but doesn't know Toronto's in Michigan? I mean, people are so stupid these days."

    Jack let it go.

    "So why do we want a photo of you and this gal Laurie?"

    Bobble grinned. "Because guess who's in the background, staring straight at the camera?"

    "Our man Hughie?"

    "None other."

    Things were looking up.

    "Neat," Jack said. "Old Hughie got Zaprudered."

    Bobble said, "Zapwha?"

    "Never mind."

    Hideo knocked on the door a third time. It needed painting. In fact, the whole apartment building needed a makeover. He shook off the thought. His need for orderliness sometimes distracted him from the matter at hand.

    And what mattered here was getting past this door.

    He heard movement on the other side. The three yakuza flanked the doorframe, out of range of the peephole. Though dressed in suits and ties, they looked anything but respectable. Yakuza… the word meant "good for nothing," and that quality shone through. Each might as well have had another tattoo on the forehead announcing "hoodlum."

    But Hideo had no idea what he'd run into on the far side of the door, and so was glad to have them along.

    The facial recognition software had done its job half well. In the NYPD database it had found mug shots of a brown-haired man named Hugh Gerrish, arrested for breaking and entering two years ago. They matched perfectly the face on the security cam. Gerrish had pleaded out to an illegal-trespass charge and been given probation with no jail time. The file listed this apartment in Brooklyn's Greenpoint area as his address.

    The software had not, however, found the ronin. Rather, it had found too many of them. One hundred twenty-seven hits, each of them resembling the ronin. Either his features were very common, or the only existing photo was not detailed enough for an accurate search. Perhaps both. Hideo would have to work on a way to narrow the selection.

    "I'm coming, I'm coming," said an old woman's voice from within. Her accent was Spanish. A few seconds later the peephole darkened and he heard: "Who are you?"

    Gerrish's mother, perhaps? Hideo was prepared for this.

    "Police, ma'am," he said, holding a gold NYPD detective's badge up to the peephole. "We need to speak to you about your son."

    "Madre de Dios!"

    A chain rattled, the knob turned, and the door opened. A wizened, gray-haired old woman in a stained housedress looked up at him with frightened eyes.

    "Mi Julio! What has happened?"

    Hideo had a sudden bad feeling about this. Hugh Gerrish hadn't looked the least bit Hispanic. He pushed open the door and motioned the yakuza inside. The old woman backed up a step and opened her mouth to scream but Hideo pressed a finger firmly against her lips.

    "Silence, please. We mean you no harm." When she took a breath as if to scream anyway, he held up his other hand in a stop sign. "Please."

    She stayed silent.

    Beyond, in the tiny apartment, Hideo heard a cacophony of doors and drawers opening and closing. It lasted less than a minute, and then Kenji was beside him.

    "Empty, Takita-san," he said in Japanese. "And no katana."

    "How many bedrooms?"

    "One."

    Hideo nodded as a sinking feeling dragged on his gut.

    "The closets—any men's clothes?"

    He shook his head. "Only woman's. And not much of that."

    Goro and Ryo appeared, the latter holding up a framed photograph. Hideo took it and saw the old woman with her cheek pressed against that of a dark-haired, dark-skinned young man who looked nothing like Hugh Gerrish. He showed it to her.

    "Who is this?"

    She snatched it from him. "Mi Julio." Tears rimmed her eyes. "What has happened to him?"

    "Nothing. He is fine. We have made a mistake."

    "Mistake?" she said, her tone and expression growing indignant. "You break into my home and frighten—"

    "How long have you lived here?"

    "Since September."

    Eight months. Gerrish must have moved out last summer. Hideo suppressed a curse and masked his frustration as he pulled a wad of bills from his pocket.

    "We have disturbed you and wasted five minutes of your time." He peeled off five hundred-dollar bills and pressed them into her hands. "I trust this will help you forgive us."

    She gazed at the bills as if he'd given her a fortune. Perhaps to her it was. To him it was merely an expense he would charge to Kaze.

    What had seemed so straightforward and easy yesterday was proving digressive and difficult. He had run into obstacles, but none he could not surmount.

    As Americans liked to say: Back to the drawing board.

    Shouldn't be too hard to spot, Jack thought, studying the face in the photo as he walked west along East 96th Street.

    He'd just left Russ Tuit, his go-to guy for all things computer. Russ had downloaded the photo, cropped out Bobblehead and the inebriated-looking Laurie, sharpened and enlarged the guy behind them, and printed it out. Still kind of blurry, but serviceable.

    Hugh Gerrish had a round, florid face topped by wavy brown hair that scooped down into a sharp widow's peak. The outstanding feature was a big diamond stud stuck in his left earlobe. Jack wished he had more of a view of his body to help spot him from a distance, but this would work.

    He'd checked the post time at Belmont: first race one o'clock except Fridays when it moved to three P.M. The track was closed today so he'd have to wait till tomorrow.

    "Jack?"

    A woman's voice. He looked around and saw a slim blonde in her mid-twenties, looking much younger because of her pigtails and her getup. She wore a white oxford shirt with a loose, askew tie, a plaid pleated miniskirt, white knee socks, and high-heel Mary Janes. Only a few of the shirt buttons were fastened, exposing her diamond-studded navel.

    Jack stared, dumbfounded. "Do I—?"

    She smiled and batted her heavily mascaraed, blue-shadowed eyes. "It's me. Junie. Junie Moon. We met—"

    "Right-right. Gia's friend. How are you?"

    They'd met last summer when Junie had been a guest at a Brooklyn party celebrating a big sale of one of her paintings. But she hadn't looked like jailbait then.

    "Fine. Things have cooled down a little, but still better than I'd ever dreamed."

    Nathan Lane had bought one of her paintings and publicly raved about it and suddenly her canvases were going for twenty K apiece. Jack had never seen any of her work but Gia said she was good.

    "You're looking… different."

    "Like it?" She struck a pose. "Marketing. All marketing." She stepped closer. "I saw Gia last week."

    "You did?"

    "She didn't tell you?"

    "No."