“That’s what I mean. It was a racial thing.”

“I thought you got booted out of Florida International for missing class your last semester.”

“It was a racial thing.”

Tasker just looked at him.

“Yeah, little white French-Canadian girl from Hallandale. She never let me go.”

“That’s how you were oppressed?”

“Let me have a little racial anger, my brother. I’ll help you on the damn case as long as the Feds leave us alone and no FBI guys shoot me again.”

Tasker had to crack a smile at that one. “I can almost guarantee no one in the FBI will shoot you during this case.”

At the Miami field division’s main office of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, known simply as ATF, Bill Tasker sat at a desk, shaking a Magic 8-Ball.

“Will I see a naked woman in the next twelve months?” he asked the ball quietly.

NOT LIKELY, showed on the octagonal globe inside the ball.

“Figures,” muttered Tasker, placing the ball back on the desk.

“What figures?” asked Camy Parks, the ATF agent working on the Stinger case with him.

“Just testing my luck.” He said it staring at the ball so his eyes didn’t try to involuntarily dart toward the gigantic opening on Camy’s low-cut white blouse.

“Guys worry about luck. Women worry about skill.”

Tasker quickly moved his gaze up to Camy’s delicate face.

She smiled and said, “Guys worry about those more than women, too.”

Tasker blushed at being busted.

“Things still not on track with your ex-wife?” she asked.

“Not yet. What am I saying? Not at all.”

“What’s her beef?”

“She isn’t ready. That’s her best answer. Her worst is that she still has feelings for some lawyer she was dating.”

“A lawyer-yuck. Why?”

“Don’t know. I don’t think she even knows.”

Camy sighed. “Women, what a pain in the ass.” Her delicate Tennessee accent made every word sound like a compliment.

Tasker nodded, keeping his eye on her for any hint of a joke. Maybe the rumors he’d heard about her were true. He watched her compact, incredible frame move as she cleared some of the folders off her desk.

“It’ll be a relief to take a break from this stuff.”

“That all the cruise-ship case file?” asked Tasker.

“These are just the reports. I have a file cabinet full of photos and a whole aisle in the evidence room.”

Tasker looked at the photographs taped on separate sheets of paper. The first was of the Krans-Festival flagship, the Sea Maiden. One porthole was burned black around the edges. The second photograph was of a red suitcase.

“This couldn’t have held the bomb?”

“No, that’s the same model and color. All we had left was a handle and some of the top of the bag.”

Tasker read the label: Samsonite.

“You worked this all by yourself the past two years? What about the Bureau?”

“They had a guy on it for the first month, then something happened and they pulled him off. I got a Department of Transportation agent on it with me, and we’re in good shape with the leads.”

“You close to an arrest?”

“Not at all. Just caught up on leads and lab work. Nothing new in eighteen months.”

“Any other hard evidence?” asked Tasker, trying to remember the details of the two-year-old case.

“Just the handle to the suitcase that contained the explosive, a photo of a car we believe was involved and the explosive fingerprint. And about three hundred bogus leads.” She pulled out a black-and-white security-camera photograph of a light-colored Toyota Corolla with a big dent in the roof where the windshield met it.

“What kind of explosive did they use?”

“It’s called TATP. God help me, I can never say the full name. It’s homemade and really unstable and nasty.”

“You think the bomber killed himself since this attack?”

“I doubt it. We checked all the unattended death records for the tri-counties. There are just too many missing persons. For all I know, he’s rotting out in the Everglades after standing too close to one of his own bombs.”

“One can only hope.”

She smiled at him. “People were real interested in the case, but then interest just dried up.”

“I remember the news coverage-for a week. The people at Krans-Festival fell all over themselves saying it was an isolated incident.”

“Yeah, they thought it would hurt the cruise industry, but it really didn’t. The one baggage handler was killed. The city is holding it as an open murder case, and the survivors didn’t see anything unusual.”

“Why wouldn’t the FBI be all over that?”

“Maybe because the casualty was an Italian laborer on the ship. Maybe ’cause there wasn’t much damage and it didn’t look too sophisticated?”

“That wasn’t big enough, but they want a piece of my Stinger deal?”

“It’s crazy, I know. At least I know the agent they assigned to us.”

“Lail?”

“Jimmy Lail.”

“What’s he like?”

“Different.”

The test was perfect. He felt more and more comfortable with the TATP. The liquid explosive was a little unstable, but that only added to the fun. For a homemade explosive that couldn’t be traced, he’d take the risk. Even though it had been made in a wash basin in an old dilapidated garage, he had to admit that in the couple of years he’d had the explosive it had held up well. He didn’t take any chances with it, either. That was the saving grace of the tiny detached garage. He kept his Corolla, his tools, three hidden guns and the explosives in it, away from everything and everybody else.

He walked in through the rear kitchen door, wiping his feet carefully to avoid his wife’s wrath. She was peeling carrots for a salad at the cheap, uneven kitchen table, and as he came inside, he leaned down to kiss her.

“How was work?” asked his wife.

“Good, no problems.”

“Carlos called for you about an hour ago.”

He nodded silently as he tramped through the cluttered house out to the garage. He always parked the Corolla behind it so no one could see it from the street. Sometimes he even pulled an old parachute over it because the crease in the car’s roof caused it to leak a little and the old silk parachute deflected light rain. It also hid the car completely. Just in case.

Bill Tasker sweated as he cranked the pedals of his Trek mountain bike. He rode on the grass swale while his eight-year-old, Emily, steered her smaller Mongoose on the road next to him. Her long blond hair, in a ponytail, bounced behind her with each stroke of the pedal. Her muscular little body propelled the bike smoothly over the paved road. Another year or two and he wouldn’t have to ride in the grass so that she could keep up.

Tasker’s ten-year-old, Kelly, was in her weekend art class at the Kendall Community Center. He used the two-hour class time to take Emily on little adventures she liked, generally something athletic, in keeping with her attributes. Only having them every other weekend made each visit special. He took any minute he could to spend with the girls. Even if he couldn’t live with them, he wanted them to remember all the fun they had when they did see him. Things like this would keep their mother from saying he was too focused on his job, that work was always his first priority. Real type-A personalities didn’t find time to ride bikes with their daughters. Did they?

They tracked west on Coconut Palm Drive in the Redlands, having to deal with only the occasional car. Emily told him about school and gymnastics and her friends near his old house in West Palm Beach, about an hour and a half north of southern Dade County. Her permanent good mood was infectious, but Tasker was still troubled. He had tried to ask his youngest daughter about her mom’s dating status. His ex-wife had come on strong while he was in the soup with the FBI but had cooled things off when he was cleared. She’d been vague about the reasons, but he knew one of them was a defense attorney named Nicky Goldman. Tasker knew him a little from his days working in West Palm, and he did seem like a nice enough guy, but that didn’t lessen the pain of knowing his ex-wife was dating a lawyer. A defense lawyer at that. At least personal-injury attorneys didn’t risk public safety to win a case. Tasker’s uncle had been a lawyer until he’d become a judge in the mid-eighties. He was a man of integrity and had real disdain for most of the modern attorneys. Tasker respected his uncle’s views and attitudes. Now, with televised trials and million-dollar jury awards, it seemed lawyers had mortgaged their souls for some success. All that was fine until he thought of one of them interacting with his daughters or, worse, interacting closely with Donna.