"Inside," Gabe said again, as Meg hesitated on the threshold of the doorway.

When she didn't react, he hustled her through the door, into a large open space lit by narrow windows and skylights high overhead. In the middle of the room were two long conveyor belts, rusted and useless. Crates tied shut with twine were scattered around the dust-caked concrete-floored room like islands in a gray sea. Doorways at the far end of the room hinted at side passages that perhaps branched into a warren of halls and offices, lavatories and lunchrooms, all the places used by the employees who were now only ghosts.

"What kind of place is this?" she breathed.

"Bottling plant. Some soft drinkDr Pepper, maybe. Shut down in the seventies, around the time this whole part of town was going belly-up. Been stripped of everything valuable."

"How did you know about it?"

"Years ago when I'd just started working patrol, we got a DB call here." He smiled at her incomprehension. "DBshort for dead body."

"Oh."

"Some bum had been squatting in here. OD'd or stroked out or something. Other vagrants found the body. I remembered it because the dead guy had been here a long time. Seemed like a good place to stash a body."

Is that what I am? Meg wondered. A body?

"So you really are a cop," she whispered.

"Real as steel. Were you starting to doubt it?"

"I'd like to think a cop wouldn't amp;"

"Commit the occasional felony? Sweet meat, you got a lot of growing up to do."

"Will I get the chance to do it?"

He didn't answer. She hadn't thought he would.

In silence he led her across the cavernous room to a metal door in the far corner. When he opened it, the feeble daylight from the windows and skylights illuminated a flight of stairs, descending into darkness.

"Go down," Gabe said.

Meg looked at him. "No."

"It's only for a little while." He shifted the gun in his hand, just enough for her to become aware of it. "I need to stash you somewhere."

"You'll kill me down there."

"It's a holding area, that's all." He gestured with the gun. "Now go down."

"Please," Meg said.

"I don't have time to argue. Get the fuck down there. Do it."

There was no pity in his face, no memory of affection.

Heart pounding, she reached out for the metal handrail and made her way down the staircase with Gabe at her back. The treads were steel, and there were no risers, only gaps between the treads that threatened to catch her foot and pitch her forward into blackness.

At the bottom she turned to look at him. He was right behind her, smiling. "Give me your hand," he said.

"My hand?" she said blankly.

He grabbed her left hand, not asking again. Something glinted in the semidarkness. Handcuffs. He fastened one cuff to her wrist, the other to the handrail at hip level.

"Sit tight," he said. "I'll be back for you. That's a promise."

He mounted the stairs. She reached for him with her free hand. "Please, Gabe amp;"

He laughed, shrugging free of her. "That's not even my name, you dumb bitch."

She watched him climb to the top, becoming a silhouette against the daylight. She expected him to look down, say something more, acknowledge her in some way, but he just closed the door. Darkness slammed down like an anvil.

She hugged the handrail, listening as his footfalls receded into silence.

Alone. She was alone in this place, this basement in a deserted bottling plant.

She rattled her cuffed wrist uselessly against the handrail and tried not to cry. She prided herself on not being a crier, and normally she wasn't, but these circumstances weren't normal, and she decided she could cut herself a break.

She cried because she was alone and scared, and because she would probably die soon, and because Gabe had called her an immature kid and worse things, and because she wanted to be out of here, home and safe, and she wanted her mom.

Not Robin, not anymore.

Her mom.

The offices of the OCB, Operations-Central Bureau, were located in the Central Facilities Building on Sixth Street in downtown LA, a spot conveniently close to Parker Center, LAPD headquarters, where Hammond intended to work someday.

He let his adjutant follow him into his office and shut the door. His uniform hung in the closet, clean and unwrinkled, where Lewinsky had placed it after removing it from Hammond's locker. He took down the hanger.

"Give me the overview," he said, unbuttoning his shirt.

"Gray escaped from custody at Cameron's office in Rampart. He stole her car and fled the scene."

"Armed?"

"He took the dead deputy's service piece."

"Deputy shouldn't have been carrying when the prisoner was offloaded from the felony bus anyway."

"Van," Lewinsky said. "It was a van. And no, he shouldn't have been carrying, but according to his partner, he was."

"Why wasn't Gray in leg irons, handcuffs?"

"Apparently Cameron had insisted on minimal restraints."

"Stupid bitch. He should've offed her. Don't quote me on that."

"No, sir." Lewinsky looked away as Hammond pulled off his pants.

"Any witnesses report which direction Gray was headed in?"

"No, but we caught one break. Because of that carjack attempt yesterday, Cameron's Saab is visibly damaged. It'll be easy to spot."

"Gray will ditch the Saab as soon as possible, if he hasn't already. We got ASTRO flying?"

"Choppers are up."

"Area cars?"

"Alerts have gone out to all patrol units, and of course we've dispatched BOLOs to the sheriff's office and all municipal PDs."

"CHP too? Orange County? Riverside?"

Lewinsky turned as Hammond buttoned up his uniform shirt. "The whole Southland."

Hammond paused in his sartorial duties and stood thinking for a moment.

"We need to put in place a general tactical alert."

He resumed dressing.

"A tac alert?" Lewinsky was bewildered. A general tactical alert was ordinarily reserved for situations in which there was imminent danger of civil unrest.

"You heard what I said. All LAPD divisions on alert. Switch to twelve-and-twelves. We'll have to go through the chief, obviously, but he'll be amenable."

"You expect this guy to start a riot?"

"I expect the department not to get caught with its pants down." He glanced at his bare legs. "So to speak. We need to be prepared for every eventuality. More important, we need to look prepared."

"Yes, sir."

"It's called covering your ass, Carl," Hammond said as he pulled on his blue trousers.

"Yes, sir."

"Now where do we expect the son of a bitch to go?"

"I've been on the horn to the RHD dicks who bagged him. They say he might go back to Culver City, his old neighborhood."

"Culver PD get a lookout?"

"Extra squads on the street. Plainclothes guys undercover outside Gray's former residence."

"Former residence." Hammond fastened his tie. Like all police neckties it was the snap-on kind, chosen because in a struggle it could not be used to choke the officer. "What is it, a fucking flophouse?"

"Low-rent apartment building. Courtyard with a pool, circa 1950."

"He won't go back there. He's no genius, but he's not shooting to be the punch line of one of those world's-stupidest-criminal jokes. How about Cameron's office building?"

"Sir?"

"It's within the realm of possibility that the Saab theft was misdirection. Gray may never have left the damn building."

"The car is gone."

"The car could be driven by an accomplice."

"Serial killers usually work alone."

"Except for the twenty-five percent who work in pairs. I want that building thoroughly cleared. Office to office, floor by floor, a clean sweep. Bastard could be hiding in there, figuring it's the last place we'd look."