He took it. "Hello?"

"Wyatt."

Elana's voice was so familiar to him that he could almost feel it beneath his compulsively keying fingers. The timbre of her voice alone had always revealed to him the entire range of her soul, and he needed to hear only a single word to know whether she was playful, angry, frightened, sentimental, passionate. Today he could tell from her greeting that she'd called very reluctantly and that her defenses were up like the shields on the spacecrafts of the sci-fi movies they'd watched together.

On the other hand, she had called.

She said, "I heard that he's dead. Jon Holloway. I heard it on the news."

"That's right."

"Are you all right?"

"Fine."

A long pause. As if looking for something to fill the silence, she added, "I'm still going to New York."

"With Ed."

"That's right."

He closed his eyes and sighed. Then, with an edge in his voice, he asked, "So why'd you call?"

"I guess just to say that if you wanted to come, you could."

Gillette wondered: Why bother? What was the point?

He said, "I'll be there in ten minutes."

They hung up. He turned to find Bishop looking at him cautiously. Gillette said, "Give me an hour. Please."

"I can't take you," the detective said.

"Let me borrow a car."

The detective debated, looked around the dinosaur pen, considering. He said to Linda Sanchez, "You have a CCU car he can use?"

Reluctantly she handed him the keys. "This isn't procedure, boss."

"I'll take responsibility."

Bishop tossed the keys to Gillette then pulled out his phone and called the troopers who'd be transporting him back to San Ho. He gave them Elana's address and said he'd okayed Gillette's being there. The prisoner would be returning to CCU in one hour. He hung up.

"I'll come back."

"I know you will."

The men faced each other for a moment. They shook hands. Gillette nodded and started for the door.

"Wait," Bishop asked, frowning. "You have a driver's license?"

Gillette laughed. "No, I don't have a driver's license."

Bishop shrugged and said, "Well, just don't get stopped."

The hacker nodded and said gravely, "Right. They might send me to jail."

The house smelled of lemons, as it always had.

This was thanks to the deft culinary touch of Irene Papandolos, Ellie's mother. She wasn't the traditional wary, silent Greek matron but a sharp businesswoman who owned a successful catering company and still managed to find the time to cook every meal for her family from scratch. It was now dinnertime and she wore a stained apron over a rose-colored business suit.

She greeted Gillette with a cool, unsmiling nod and gestured him into the den.

He sat on a couch, beneath a picture of the waterfront at Piraeus. Family being ever important in Greek households, two tables were filled with photographs in a variety of frames, some cheap, some heavy silver and gold. Gillette saw a picture of Elana in her wedding dress. He didn't recognize the shot and he wondered if it had originally shown the two of them and had been cropped to remove him.

Elana entered the room.

"You're here by yourself?" she asked, not smiling. No other greeting.

"How do you mean?"

"No police baby-sitters?"

"Honor system."

"I saw a couple of police cars go past. I wondered if they were with you." She nodded outside.

"No," Gillette said. Though he supposed that troopers might in fact be keeping tabs on him.

She sat and picked uneasily at the cuff of the Stanford sweatshirt she wore.

"I'm not going to say goodbye," he said. She frowned and he continued, "Because I want to talk you out of leaving. I want to keep seeing you."

"Seeing me? You're in prison, Wyatt."

"I'll be out in a year."

She laughed in surprise at his effrontery.

He said, "I want to try again."

"You want to try again. What about what I want?"

"I can give you what you want. I will. I've done a lot of thinking. I can make you love me again. I don't want you out of my life."

"You chose machines over me. You got what you wanted."

"That's in the past."

"My life's different now. I'm happy."

"Are you?"

"Yes," Elana said emphatically.

"Because of Ed."

"He's part of it… Come on, Wyatt, what can you offer me? You're a felon. You're addicted to those goddamn computers of yours. You don't have a job and the judge said that even when you get out of jail you can't go online for a year."

"And Ed's got himself a good job? Is that it? I didn't know that a good income was important to you."

"It's not a question of support, Gillette. It's about responsibility. And you're not responsible."

"I wasn't responsible. I admit that. But I will be." He tried to take her hand but she eased away. He said, "Come on, Ellie… I saw your e-mails. When you talk about Ed it doesn't exactly sound like he's perfect husband material."

She stiffened and he saw he'd touched a nerve here. "Leave Ed out of this. I'm talking about you and me."

"Me too. That's exactly who I'm talking about. I love you. I know I made your life hell. It won't be that way again. You wanted children, a normal life. I'll find a job. We'll have a family."

Another hesitation.

He pressed forward. "Why are you leaving tomorrow? What's the hurry?"

"I'm starting a new job next Monday."

"Why New York?"

"Because it's as far away from you as I can get."

"Wait a month. Just one month. I get two visits a week. Come see me." He smiled. "We can hang out. Eat pizza."

Her eyes swept the floor and he sensed that she was debating.

"Did your mother cut me out of that picture?" He grinned and nodded at the snapshot of her in her wedding gown.

She gave a faint smile. "No. That was the one Alexis took – on the lawn. It was just of me. Remember, the one where you can't see my feet."

He laughed. "How many brides lose their shoes at the wedding?"

She nodded. "We always wondered what happened to them."

"Oh, please, Ellie. Just postpone it for a month. That's all I'm asking."

Her eyes studied some of the pictures. She began to say something but her mother stepped into the doorway suddenly. Her dark face was even darker than before. "There's a call for you."

"Me?" Gillette asked.

"It's somebody named Bishop. He says it's important."

"Frank, what's-"

The detective's voice was raw with urgency. "Listen to me carefully, Wyatt. We could lose the line any minute. Shawn isn't dead."

"What? But Miller-"

"No, we were wrong. Stephen Miller isn't Shawn. It's somebody else. I'm at CCU. Linda Sanchez found a message for me on the main CCU voice mail. Before he died Miller called and left it. Remember when Phate broke into CCU and went after you?"

"Right."

"Miller was just coming back from the medical center then. He was in the parking lot and saw Phate run out of the building and jump in a car. He followed him."

"Why?"

"To collar him."

"By himself?" Gillette asked.

"The message said he wanted to bring the killer in on his own. He said he'd screwed up so many times that he wanted to prove that he could do something right."

"Then he didn't kill himself?"

"Nope. They haven't done the autopsy yet but I had a medical examiner check for traces of powder burns on his hands. There weren't any – if he'd killed himself there would've been plenty of trace. Phate must've seen Miller following and then killed him. Then he pretended to be Miller and intentionally got caught cracking into the State Department. He hacked into Miller's workstation at CCU and planted those fake e-mails and took his machines and disks out of his house. We're sure the suicide note was false too. It was all to stop us from looking for the real Shawn."