"I know what you did," Dan said to Lenny.

Lenny chewed his gum and smiled. "Don't know what you'd be referring to, Danny boy, but whatever it is, wouldn't you have to include yourself? In for a penny, in for a pound, my friend. And how is sweet Michelle? How is she going to like visiting her daddy in a federal penitentiary?"

Dan almost came over the desk. It took all my strength to stay in front of him as he screamed over my shoulder and jabbed his finger at Lenny. "You ever say my daughter's name again, cocksucker, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to rip your balls off and shove them down your lying throat, you filthy bastard."

Not surprisingly, Lenny was moving back and not forward. He stayed clear as I maneuvered Dan out the door and into the corridor. When he couldn't get past me to get to Lenny, he pounded the wall. "I hate that motherfucker."

"Stay out here, Dan."

"He's going to find it."

"Be quiet."

He lowered his already hoarse voice. "He's going to get the video and we won't have anything."

"There's nothing we can do. It's a surveillance video taped on company-owned surveillance equipment. It belongs to the company. Everything in there is company property. We'll think of something else. Don't come back in."

I went back to get our jackets. I also wanted my backpack, which still had my cell phone in it. Lenny, looking smug, was lounging in my doorway. "You all better skedaddle," he said, winking at me, "while you still have an operation left to save."

I was dripping wet again, but in the whole melee Lenny had never even broken a sweat. I guess reptiles don't sweat.

"And by the way," he said, easing into my desk chair, "when you get downstairs to the ramp, say hello to Angelo for me."

With the environmental-control system in the terminal gone haywire and all the moist, overheating bodies crammed together, the atmosphere was suffocating. The odor of sweating scalps and ripe underarms hung in the air like a damp mist. The angry determination on Dan's face made me nervous.

"We're looking for Angelo, right? Nobody else."

His distracted nod gave me no confidence. "I'll take the north end to the firehouse," he said, zipping his jacket, "and you take the south. And let me know what you find out in Operations."

He pulled on his gloves. Made for skiing, they were heavy-duty, but to me they looked like boxing gloves. He was so pumped up by the encounter with Lenny, I knew that no matter what I said, he was a heat-seeking missile headed straight for Little Pete. And there was no way he was going to win that fight.

"Stay in radio contact with me," I said into his ear, then pulled back so that I could see his eyes. "Please, Dan."

He could do no better than a grim-faced nod, and I watched him disappear into the crush of angry passengers. He'd been walking away from me like that since the day we'd met.

If the departing crowd that first night of my arrival had been hostile, these people were homicidal. My destination was Operations, but I couldn't take one step without someone stopping me to ask something I didn't know. Or to yell at me.

The quickest way to move was around the crowd. I worked my way over to the windows and what I saw there, rather what I couldn't see, stopped me cold. A DC-10, a very large aircraft, was parked just outside the window at the gate, but it was snowing and blowing so hard, it was barely visible. With my hands cupped around my eyes to block out the overhead light and my nose pushed up against the window, I could see more. Ground equipment was scattered everywhere, the bellies of the aircraft were open, and the cabin was lit, making for a ghostly line of blurry portholes that disappeared into the blowing snow. But as far as I could tell, the ramp was deserted. I couldn't find a single soul moving down there.

I felt a shove from behind and a sharp elbow to the kidney that flattened me up against the glass. I whipped around, but it was just a passenger who had himself been pushed. Someone else grabbed my arm and I jerked it back.

"Miss Shanahan." It was an agent, but it took a moment for me to register that it was JoAnn. She'd been working the night I'd arrived, and here she was again in the middle of another disaster, this one even worse. "I heard you were over here," she said, quickly. "I've got about a hundred people wanting to talk to the manager. Will you help us?"

The scene, I swore, was getting more chaotic as I stood there. The noise level was rising with the tension, and her dark eyes pleaded for me to take charge again. And I wanted to. I wished more than anything that straightening out the operation was the biggest thing I had to worry about tonight. When I didn't respond immediately, the look on her face turned from desperate hope to cold cynicism. When I took off my Majestic badge and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans, she started to walk away.

"Wait a second." I put my hand on her shoulder. "Lenny Caseaux is in my office right now. Call him and ask him to come down. If he won't, start queuing up passengers to go see him in the administration offices. All right?"

As the idea sank in, she nodded with a sly smile. She could have fun with that one. More power to her.

The chaos upstairs had been almost unbearable, but the silence downstairs was worse. Somewhere at the far end of the long, deserted corridor, a door not properly latched slammed open and shut, and as I passed by open doorways and empty offices, I could hear the storm outside, the wind bellowing and the grit and debris raining against the windows.

Kevin was as beleaguered and overwhelmed as I'd ever seen him.

"Why did you send everyone home?" he asked without even looking up.

"What?"

His curly hair was limp from repeated comb-throughs with nervous fingers, and when he did make eye contact, he could barely focus on me. "Tell me what's going on, Kevin."

I waited as he answered a radio call from the irate captain on Gate forty-three who demanded to know the same thing. Kevin calmed him down the best he could, telling him to sit tight.

"The assignment crew chief came in half an hour ago," he said, turning back to me, "to drop off his radio. He said he had authority from you to send everyone home immediately. He said you declared a weather emergency."

"I didn't do that, Kevin. It had to be Lenny." He answered the radio again, this time responding to JoAnn. I wanted to grab the mike from his hand and make him pay attention to me. Instead, I went to the closed-circuit TV monitors and checked every screen, but there was nothing to see in the near-whiteout conditions. By the time he'd finished his call, I'd projected all kinds of horrible scenes onto the white screens, and my temples were pounding with more possibilities.

"When's the last time you saw Little Pete?" I blurted.

"Little Pete was in here earlier," he said. "He was looking for Angelo, and that's another thing-"

"Angelo's still on the field?" He looked at me as if my eyes had popped out of my head, which they might have.

"He called about an hour ago from the mail dock. Why the devil did no one think to mention to me that Angelo was coming back?"

"Angelo has a radio, then."

"No. They were all out when he got here. He called on the phone, and I told him to go home. He said he'd just gotten here and he was staying. It's probably a good night for him to raid the freight house."

"Did you tell Little Pete where he was?"

"Of course I did. He's a crew chief. He was looking for a crew."

My hand went automatically to my radio. "Dan Fallacaro from Alex Shanahan, do you read me? Dan, do you read?"

"He was looking for you, too."