“The tape?”

“Danny Foreman shot that tape of you two.”

She calmly set down the spoon. Either the chili had landed on an empty stomach, or this news was about to make her sick.

“It’s a surveillance tape that he suppressed,” Lou explained. “He didn’t think it relevant at the time, which is cop speak for his not wanting to get you in trouble.” He told her the lab had discovered both Paul Geiser’s and Danny Foreman’s prints on the outside of the cassette. “And another partial that belonged to an INS green card holder-a Russian.” He covered the difficulty of connecting a partial print legally to an individual, but how the discovery of a Russian cigarette ash at the Foreman assault had helped confirm suspicions and led them to a distributor. This, without naming names. “What you need to know, Liz, is that this man, this importer, he plays rough. The Russian mafia is famous for coming after one’s family as a means of pressure.”

“The LaRossas,” she said.

“Yes. The Russian… I saw him late yesterday… told me this tale-the story’s unimportant-that may mean that he, they, I’m not sure, followed us out to Kathy’s. May know where Miles and Sarah are.” He lowered his head.

She felt made of stone. Frozen, both from motion and in terms of cold. She knew exactly what he was telling her, and yet her mother’s sense of protection tried to reinterpret whatever it was so that it wouldn’t come out the way it had sounded. The way he meant it. She finally said, “I want to hear the story.” “It’s not important,” he repeated.

“I… want… to… hear… the… story.”

“I screwed up, Liz. I’m sorry. I did everything I could to avoid being followed.”

She understood then that he took this as a failure on his part. She wanted to forgive him, placing little importance on how it had happened, but then reconsidered and felt angry he’d let them be followed. It felt so wonderfully good to deflect the blame for some of this onto him-even if only briefly. But within seconds she felt awful about gloating over his shame, knowing these problems had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her own past, and this realization and the combined guilt ate into her all the more deeply. She pushed the chili aside distastefully. “The story,” she said again.

He took a moment to explain the tale of the magpie waiting for the empty nest. “We can’t be sure,” he added quickly, “that it has anything to do with the kids. It could very well have been his way of denying responsibility for what happened to Hayes at the cabin. We know Danny Foreman was lured away from the cabin. It’s not inconceivable that this man I’m talking about… his guys were lured away as well, or even followed Foreman when they should have stayed on Hayes. It’s not clear. I want to emphasize that.”

“We’ve got to get them out.”

Lou had the audacity to shake his head no. “That’s not an option.”

She’d never felt this kind of cold, even through her illness, never anything close to this sense of removal and distance. “Why? Kathy can take them somewhere. Boise. Reno. Someplace far away.”

“If they’re being watched, it’ll do no good, only take them farther from us. Look, they may simply know our kids are gone and be using this to trick us into leading them to Miles and Sarah.”

“This can’t be,” she said too loudly. Heiman turned his head slightly, and then thought better and returned to his sandwich. Liz suddenly felt as if eyes from everywhere were upon them. It felt claustrophobic to her. Oppressive.

“We… don’t… know,” Lou said firmly. “We can’t jump to conclusions. It does no one any good. But at the same time, we have to be wise about this. We have to rethink everything.”

Not really listening to him, she said, “We-you-could send police cars. A whole phalanx of them. Middle of the night. Get them out of there. Use dummy cars like they do with the president. They can’t follow them all.”

“Then it’s Kathy they go after,” he said, meeting eyes with her. His were filled with pain. “Or your parents. Or you. Or me, even. Maybe they wait six months, a year-and then go after the kids. The point being, if this was meant as a threat-and we don’t know that for sure-then there’s no way to beat it. You don’t beat these people, Liz. Not at their game.”

“This is not a game.”

“You know what I meant.”

“There must be a way.”

“For the time being, we cooperate.”

He stunned her with this announcement. Her eyes searched the various tables, the people working the sandwich line, wondering if they were watching them right now.

“Are you saying the money’s tied to these people?”

“We don’t know that either.”

“You’re just a wealth of information, aren’t you?”

“It’s fluid,” he said.

She disliked that term. He used it all the time.

He said, “We work on a couple of different assumptions. One is that they may know that Miles and Sarah are with Kathy. The other is that it may have been their money-this Russian’s money. It makes some sense because his business is in trouble with the government right now, and he’s probably cash shy. It makes that seventeen million all the more tempting. He hires Hayes’s new lawyers, gets him out on parole, and puts him to work.”

“What have I done?” she asked, a desperate sadness permeating her.

“You can’t beat them at their game,” he said in that Lou way that suggested he’d already thought this through to where he was now ahead of it. She knew this about him, loved him for it-always looking around the next corner, but could hardly see clear to understand what he meant.

“We beat them, we make it safe, by either playing along or putting the whole lot of them in jail. We’ve already taken certain steps, and there’s more I have planned, but in the meantime, no matter what, you play along. That was the message I took away from there. That’s something I won’t even share with my own team. If you get a call, when you get a call, you call me first and we decide how to play it. Whether or not, and how I include our guys, I don’t know yet.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“It’s not right,” he said. “But it’s necessary.”

“I just go back to work now? Just another day at the job?”

“You have a reception to plan.”

She couldn’t believe he’d said that. Her expression told him so.

“There’s a second interpretation to the story about the magpie, an interpretation that is further confused, or maybe supported, by physical evidence.”

“I don’t see how you can be so calm about this,” she blurted out.

“Either Danny Foreman or a DPA-a deputy prosecuting attorney-named Paul Geiser could have been partnered with Hayes, could be behind the crime scene we found. They’re the magpie, stealing Hayes out of the nest and away from the Russians.”

“And David? Is there a body yet?”

Lou didn’t answer that. “It’s incredibly important that should you hear from either Foreman or Geiser, regardless what either may tell you, you must come to me first-even if he makes a convincing argument to the contrary. Don’t believe anyone but me, Liz.”

She nodded, confused, unsure whether David Hayes being alive or dead benefited her family more. Amazed to be in a position to even think such a thought.

Lou reached across the table and took her hands in his. To her surprise, his were colder than her own.