His wife was dead in the front seat. It looked as if she had not been belted in but had curled up in a fetal position on the passenger seat. To Dar’s eye, it looked as if impact concussion had killed her, not the crushing of the roof, which only came down to the level of the headrest in the front of the car.

The workers redoubled their efforts to get the last Mercedes lifted and pulled off as they continued peeling back the roof and cutting the B-pillars away. Actually, there were no real B-pillars left. As the last Mercedes was lifted off by chain and unceremoniously dumped into the grass, it was obvious that the rear of the Firebird had been crushed down to the level of the seat cushions by the terrible weight of the heaped cars. All of the Pontiac’s tires had been blown and flattened. One paramedic was still on his knees, still calling encouragement to the victims in the back, even as the firefighters tore at the collapsed roof with their gloved hands, attempting to peel back the metal like the lid of a sardine can.

“There was a lot of screaming and crying for the first twenty minutes or so,” Cameron said softly to Dar. “Nothing for the last few minutes.”

“The wife maybe?” said Lawrence.

Cameron shook his head. He took his trooper hat off and wiped the sweatband. “Dead on impact. The driver…the father…he could just moan. The screaming was all coming from the…” He broke off as the power tools managed to tear the last of the roof of the Pontiac free, ripping the trunk lid off as it did so.

The two children were on the floor of the Firebird, beneath the level of the crushed roof. Both were dead. Both the girl and her little brother were cut and bruised, but none of the cuts or bruises looked serious. As the paramedics gently wiped away the blood, Dar saw how bloated their faces both were. The little girl’s eyes were still open, very wide. Dar knew at once that they had survived the crash only to be asphyxiated by the weight of the vehicles pressing down on them. The dead little boy was still desperately clutching his older sister’s right hand. Her left hand and arm were in a fresh cast. Both children’s faces were blue and swollen.

“Fuck,” said Sergeant Cameron softly. It was a prayer, of sorts.

The ambulance roared away with the father in the back. The rescue workers began the slow process of extricating the bodies.

“There’s a baby,” Dar said dully.

Lawrence and the CHP men around them turned their attention his way.

“I saw this family just a couple of days ago in the Los Angeles Medical Center,” said Dar. “They had a baby with them. Somewhere there’s a baby.”

Cameron nodded to one of the CHP men, who began talking on his portable radio.

Lawrence, Dar, and Paul Cameron walked around to the back of the flattened Pontiac.

“Oh, goddammit,” said the sergeant. “Goddamn them. Goddamn him. Goddamn them.”

In the flattened trunk of the Firebird, Dar could see three sandbags and two fully inflated spare tires, still on their rims. A buffer for absorbing the shock of a rear-ending. Standard swoop-and-squat protection. A capper’s guarantee to his recruited squat-car drivers that there would be no real injuries on their shortcut to big insurance payouts and riches in los Estados Unidos.

Dar turned abruptly and walked farther into the grass of the roadside.

“Dar?” called Lawrence.

Dar kept his back to the accident scene. He took a card out of his wallet and his Flip Phone out of his shirt pocket.

She answered on the second ring. “Olson here.”

“Count me in,” said Dar. He cut the connection and closed the phone.

Sydney Olson seemed to have taken over the entire basement of Dickweed’s Justice Center. She had at least five more assistants working at an equal number of new computers and six more phone lines; her operation had spilled over from the single old interrogation room to the observation room behind the one-way glass, into two more unused interrogation rooms, and even out into the hallway where the male secretary now screened visitors. Dar wondered if the prisoners in the holding cells at the far end of the long corridor and their sullen guards were the only ones left in the basement not involved in this expanding empire.

The meeting started precisely at 8:00 A.M. on Friday morning. A long folding table had been set up in Syd’s main office. The map of Southern California still took up most of the blank wall, but Dar noticed that there was an extra red pin—standing for a swoop-and-squat fatal accident—on the I-15 just outside the San Diego city limits, a new green pushpin where Esposito had died at the construction site, and a second yellow pin—a Dar assassination attempt—right on the hill in San Diego. Half a dozen more yellow pins still waited at the side of the map.

This was a serious operational meeting: neither Dickweed nor the local DA had been invited. Dar was surprised to see that Lawrence and Trudy had been.

“What?” said Lawrence when he saw Dar’s quizzical expression. “You expect us not to be in on this?”

“Besides,” Trudy had said, bringing Lawrence a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the big urn near the door, “the NICB is paying us.”

Jeanette Poulsen, the attorney representing the National Insurance Crime Bureau, looked up and nodded at this.

While Syd was connecting her laptop computer to a projector, Dar looked at the other people taking their places at the table. Besides Larry, Trudy, and Poulsen from the NICB, there was also Tom Santana—sitting at Syd’s right—and Santana’s boss at the State Division of Insurance Fraud, Bob Gauss. Next to Gauss was Special Agent Jim Warren, and across the table from the FBI man sat Captain Tom Sutton from the CHP. The only other law enforcement officers present were Frank Hernandez from the San Diego detectives’ bureau and a man whom Dar hadn’t met before—a quiet, middle-aged, accountant-looking type whom Syd introduced as Lieutenant Byron Barr from the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division. Both Captains Hernandez and Sutton gave Barr the kind of suspicious, malignant squint that police reserve for all Internal Affairs officers. Syd kept it sharp and succinct, saying flatly that Lieutenant Barr was there because there was overwhelming evidence that some plainclothes detectives in the LAPD were involved in this conspiracy.

Dar saw Hernandez and Sutton exchange quick glances and nods. He interpreted this as Oh, well, the LAPD, yeah, sure. Fuck ’em.

“All right,” said Syd, turning off all lights save for her computer and projector. She had a remote in her right hand. “Let’s get started.”

Suddenly the white screen at the far end of the table was illuminated with a color photograph of the pile of Mercedeses on the flattened Firebird.

“Most of you are aware that this accident occurred yesterday morning on the I-15 just beyond the city limits,” Syd said softly.

More photos. The cars being lifted off. The driver being extricated. The bodies. Dar realized that these were Lawrence’s photos, taken with his regular Nikon as they viewed the wreck, then scanned and sent to Syd via e-mail. The focus and detail were very clear.

“The only survivor of the crash was the driver, Ruben Angel Gomez, a thirty-one-year-old Mexican national with a temporary U.S. driver’s license. His wife, Rubidia, and their children—Milagro and Marita—all died in the collision with a jackknifed car carrier under lease to the San Diego dealership of Kyle Baker Mercedes.”

The close-up photos of the dead children clicked by. Syd stepped into the light of the projector. “There was a baby—seven-month-old Maria Gomez. We found her late last night in the care of a neighbor in the apartment complex where the Gomezes were living. Social services has taken charge.”