"So they were shooting from behind their own car?"

"How the hell should I know?" said Kurtz. "But wouldn't you?"

Rigby leaned closer, her right elbow on the counter. "I sure as hell wouldn't use a twenty-two to try to kill two people from more than forty feet away."

"No, but I don't think they planned to shoot so soon," said Kurtz. "They were waiting for O'Toole to go to her car just past where they were waiting. Then the shooter would have stepped out and popped her from a couple of yards away."

Rigby's dark eyebrows went up. "So now you know they were after the parole officer, not you. You're conveniently remembering a lot today, Joe."

Kurtz sighed. "My car was down the ramp to the right. The shooters were on the ramp where O'Toole's car was parked."

"How do you know that?"

"She was walking in that direction," said Kurtz. "We both saw it on the tape." He braved another nibble of donut.

"Why two men but only one shooter?" hissed Rigby. They'd been whispering, but they were speaking loudly enough now that one of the waitresses in red polka-dot flannel pajamas looked over at them.

"How the fuck should I know?" Kurtz said in a conversational tone.

Rigby plunked down a five dollar bill for the two coffees and donut. "Do you remember anything else?"

"No. I mean, I remember pretty much what we saw on the security video—trying to drag and carry O'Toole back to the door, or at least behind that pillar, and then getting hit."

Rigby King studied his eyes. "That bit about rescuing O'Toole, risking your life to carry her to safety, didn't strike me as the Joe Kurtz I used to know. You were always the living embodiment of the theory of sociobiology to me, Joe."

Kurtz knew what she was talking about—his wino mentor, Pruno, had given him a long reading list for his years in Attica and Edward O. Wilson had been on the list for year six—but he wasn't going to show her he understood the comment. He gave Rigby the flattest gaze he was capable of and said, "I draped O'Toole over my back like a shield. She's a hefty woman. She would have stopped a twenty-two slug at that range."

"Well, she did," said Rigby. She stood. "If you regain any more memory, Joe, phone it in."

She walked out through the southwest door of Broadway Market.

His phone rang as he was driving the Pinto back to Chippewa Street.

"Errand is all done," came Angelina Farino Ferrara's voice.

"Thanks."

"Fuck thanks," said the female acting-don. "You owe me, Kurtz."

"No. Consider us even when I give you the down payment back, and spend the fifteen wisely. Go buy a new bra for your Boxster."

"I sold the Boxster this spring," said Angelina. "Too slow." She disconnected.

The office smelled of coffee and cigarettes. Kurtz had never picked up the habit for the second and felt too queasy to enjoy more of the first.

O'Toole's computer memory had divulged everything under questioning—password-protected files on her thirty-nine clients, her notes, everything except the password-protected e-mail. Most of what they got was garbage. O'Toole obviously didn't use the company computer for personal stuff—the files were all business.

The files on all the ex-cons, including on Kurtz himself, piled up the usual heap of sad facts and parolee bullshit. Only twenty-one of the thirty-nine were "active clients"—i.e., cons who had to drop in weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly to visit their parole officer. None of O'Toole's notes for the last few weeks' visits started with—"Client so-and-so threatened to kill me today…" In fact the level of banality was stunning. All of these guys were losers, many of them were addicts of one or many things, none of them—despite the veil of O'Toole's cool, professional summaries—seemed to show any real signs of wanting to go straight.

And none of them seemed to have a motive for killing his parole officer. (All of O'Toole's clients were male. Perhaps, Kurtz thought, she didn't like ex-cons of the female persuasion.)

Kurtz sighed and rubbed his chin, hearing the stubble there rasp. He'd showered this morning—moving slowly through the haze of pain and queasiness—but he'd decided that the stubble went with the purple and orange raccoon mask and dissolute visage. Besides, it hurt his head to shave.

Arlene had left the office after their meeting this morning—on Fridays she usually went to have coffee with her sister-in-law, Gail, often to discuss Sam's daughter, Rachel, for whom Gail now acted as guardian. So Kurtz had the office to himself. He paced back and forth, feeling the heat from the back room filled with humming servers at one end of his pace and the chill from the long bank of windows at the other end. Yesterday had been brisk and beautiful; today was cold and rainy. Tires hissed on Chippewa Street, but there wasn't much traffic before noon.

He kept shuffling the five pages with their thirty-nine names and capsule summaries and considered ruling himself out as a suspect. The honed instincts of a trained professional investigator. No other strategies or conclusions came to mind. Even if he just cut the list to the twenty «active» clients she was seeing weekly or bi-weekly—and there was no logical reason to do that, nor any logical reason to think it was just one of her current clients who did the shooting since it could have been any of the hundreds or thousands who had come before—it would take Kurtz a week or two to get a door-to-door investigation under way.

But something was gnawing like a rodent at Joe Kurtz's bruised brain. One of the names…

He shuffled the pages. There it was. Page three. Yasein Goba, 26, naturalized American citizen of Yemeni descent, lives in a part of Lackawanna called "back the Bridge," meaning south of the first all-steel bridge in America, in what was now one of the toughest neighborhoods in America. Goba was on parole after serving eighteen months on an armed robbery conviction.

Kurtz tried to remember what his bag lady informer, Mrs. Tuella Dean, had said—rumors about "some crazy Arab down in Lackawanna talking about wanting to shoot someone."

Pretty thin. Actually, Kurtz realized, thin was too grandiloquent a word for this connection. Invisible, maybe.

Kurtz knew that his search for this Yemeni, if he did it, went straight to the heart of the most pressing question in his world right now—If the odds are that someone was after Peg O'Toole rather than me, why the hell am I looking into that shooting rather than the heroin killer thing? After all, Toma Gonzaga was going to kill a guy named Joe Kurtz in—Kurtz glanced at his watch—seventy-eight hours, unless Kurtz solved the mobster's little serial killer problem. Kurtz had only met Toma this one time, but he had the strong feeling that the man meant what he said. Also, Kurtz could use one hundred thousand dollars.

So why am I fucking around investigating my shooting if O'Toole was the probable target? Get to work on the heroin shooter, Joe.

Kurtz walked over to the four-foot by five-foot framed map of the Buffalo area set on the north wall of the office. Sam had used the map in their old office, and Arlene had put it up here despite Kurtz's protests that they didn't need the damned thing. This morning, though, he and Arlene had gone through the list of murder sites from both Angelina Farino Ferrara's and Toma Gonzaga's lists and stuck red thumbtacks at each site—fourteen sites for twenty-two missing and presumed murdered people.

The hits had been literally all over the map: three in Lackawanna, four in the black ghetto east of Main, but others in Tonawanda, Cheektowaga, four more in Buffalo proper, and more in relatively upscale—or at least middle-class—suburbs such as Amherst and Kenmore.

Kurtz knew that no investigator in the world, even with police forensic resources behind him or her, could solve these murders in three days if the perpetrator didn't want to be caught. Too many hundreds of square miles to cover, too many hundreds of possible witnesses and potential suspects to interview, too many scores of fingerprints to check out—although Kurtz didn't even own a Boy Detective fingerprint kit—and too many possible local, state, and national killers who'd benefit from putting a crimp in the Gonzaga drug empire in Western New York.