He almost said that a prostitute's word would not count for much with the police.

"Besides what?"

"I don't know. I just don't think it would be enough to change the way Renner's looking at this. Plus he knows I paid you money. He'd turn that into something it's not."

He thought of something and changed tack.

"Lucy, if that's all Wentz told you to do with me, and then you did it, why did they come here? Why did they hurt you?"

"To scare me. They knew the cops would want to talk to me. They told me exactly what to say. It was a script I had to follow. Then they just wanted me to drop out of sight for a while. They said in a couple weeks everything will be normal again."

A couple weeks, Pierce thought. By then the play will be over.

"So I guess everything you told me about Lilly was part of the script."

"No. There was no script for that. What stuff?"

"Like about the day you went to her apartment but she didn't show up. That was just made up so I'd want to go there, right?"

"No, that part was the truth. Actually, all of it was true. I didn't lie to you, Henry. I just led you. I used the truth to lead you where he wanted you to go. And you wanted to go.

The client, the car, all that trouble, it was all true."

"What do you mean, the car?"

"I told you before. The parking space was taken and that was supposed to be left open for the client. My client. It was a pain in the ass because we had to go park and then walk back and he was getting sweaty. I hate sweaty guys. Then we get there and there's no answer. It was fucked up."

It came back to Pierce. He had missed it in the first go-round because he didn't know what to ask. He didn't know what was important. Lilly Quinlan didn't answer the door that day because she was dead inside the apartment. But she might not have been alone.

There was a car.

"Was it her car in the space?"

"No, like I said, she always left it for the client."

"Do you remember the car that was there?"

"Yeah, I remember because they left the top down and I wouldn't leave a car like that with the top down in that neighborhood. Too close to all the dregs that hang out at the beach."

"What kind of car was it?"

"It was a black Jag."

"With the top down."

"Yeah. That's what I said."

"A two-seater?"

"Yeah, the sports car."

Pierce stared at her without speaking for a long time. For a moment he felt light-headed and thought he might fall over on the couch, go face first into the pizza box. Everything came rushing into his mind at once. He saw it all, lit up and shining, and everything seemed to fit.

"Aurora borealis."

He whispered it just under his breath.

"What?" Lucy asked.

Pierce pulled himself up from the couch.

"I have to go now."

"Are you all right?"

"I am now."

He walked toward the door but stopped suddenly and turned back to look at Lucy.

"Grady Allison."

"What about him?"

"Could it have been his car?"

"I don't know. I've never seen his car."

"What does he look like?"

Pierce envisioned the mug shot photo of Allison that Zeller had sent him. A pale, brokennose thug with greased-back hair.

"Um, sort of young, kind of leathery from too much sun."

"Like a surfer?"

"Uh-huh."

"He has a ponytail, right?"

"Sometimes."

Pierce nodded and turned back to the door.

"Do you want to take your pizza?"

Pierce shook his head.

"I don't think I could eat it."

It was two hours before Cody Zeller finally showed up at Amedeo Technologies. Because Pierce needed his own time to prepare things, he hadn't even made the call to his friend until midnight. He then told Zeller that he had to come in, that there had been a breach in the computer system. Zeller had protested that he was with someone and couldn't get away until morning. Pierce said that the morning would be too late. He said that he would accept no excuse, that he needed him, that it was an emergency. Pierce made it clear without saying so that attendance was required if Zeller wanted to keep the Amedeo account and their friendship intact. It was hard to keep his voice under control because at that moment the friendship was beyond sundered.

Two hours after that call Pierce was in the lab, waiting and watching the security cameras on the computer station monitor. It was a multiplex system that allowed him to track Zeller as he parked his black Jaguar in the garage and came through the main entrance doors to the security dais, where the lone security man on duty gave him a scramble card and instructions to meet Pierce in the lab. Pierce watched Zeller ride the elevator down and move into the mantrap. At that point he switched off the security cams and started the computer's dictation program. He adjusted the microphone on the top of the monitor and then killed the screen.

"All right," he said. "Here we go. Time to smash that fly."

Zeller could only get into the mantrap with the scramble card. The second door had a keypad lock. Of course, Pierce had no doubt that Zeller knew the entry combination, as it was changed every month and the new number sent to the lab staff by e-mail. But when Zeller came through the trap to the interior stop he simply pounded on the coppersheathed door.

Pierce got up and let him in. Zeller entered the lab throwing off the demeanor of a man who was seriously put out by the circumstances he was in.

"All right, Hank, I'm here. What's the big crisis? You know, I was right in the middle of knocking off a piece when you called."

Pierce went back to his seat at the computer station and sat down. He swiveled the seat around so he was looking at Zeller.

"Well, it took you long enough to get here. So don't tell me you stopped because of me."

"How wrong you are, my friend. I took so long only because being the perfect gentleman that I am, I had to get her back to the Valley and goddamn if there wasn't a frigging slide again in Malibu Canyon. So then I had to go turn around and go all the way down to Topanga. I still got here as fast as I could. What's that smell anyway?"

Zeller was speaking very fast. Pierce thought he might be drunk or high or both. He didn't know how this would affect the experiment. It was adding a new element to the settings.

"Carbon," he said. "I figured I'd bake a batch of wires while I waited on you."

Pierce nodded toward the closed door of the wire lab. Zeller snapped his fingers repeatedly as he attempted to draw something from memory.

"That smell… it reminds me of when I was a kid… and I'd set my little plastic cars on fire. Yeah, my model cars. Like you made from a kit with glue."

"That's a nice memory. Go in the lab there. It's worse. Take a deep breath and maybe you'll have the whole flashback."

"No thanks. I think I'll pass on that for the time being. Okay. So I'm here. What's the rumpus?"

Pierce identified the question as a line from the Coen brothers' film Miller's Crossing, a Zeller favorite and dialogue bank from which he often made a withdrawal. But Pierce didn't acknowledge knowing the line. He wasn't going to play that game with Zeller this night. He was concentrating on the play, the experiment he was conducting under controlled conditions.

"I told you, we've been breached," he said. "Your supposedly impregnable security system is for shit, Code. Somebody's been stealing all our secrets."

The accusation made Zeller immediately become agitated. His hands came together in front of his chest, the fingers seemingly fighting with one another.

"Whoa, whoa, first of all, how do you know somebody's stealing secrets?"

"I just know."

"All right, you just know. I guess I am supposed to accept that. Okay, then how do you know it's through the data system and not just somebody's big mouth leaking it or selling it? What about Charlie Condon? I've had a few drinks with him. He likes to talk, that guy."