“The cops caught up to that idiot, Howard.” O’Hara spat the words. “The rat bastard squealed on me, so eventually, yeah, they caught up to me, too.”

“But Howard was convicted, and you were cut loose. After that, he wouldn’t tell you where he stashed the money, would he?”

O’Hara slammed a fist against the nearest cardboard box. “Said he was doing the time, so he should take all the profits. I never could get him to tell me. Then Howard died, and I couldn’t find out anything about anything. Until a friend on the inside told me about some dope named Norman Applebaum. Said he’d been Howard’s cellmate for a while, that he’d been Howard’s friend.”

“And you put two and two together.” This made sense and I know it sounds crazy, but at a time like that, logic was exactly what I needed. My emotions were too brittle. They couldn’t be trusted. Logic was the only thing that was going to save us. “Why did it take you so long to find Norman?”

“Why do you care?” O’Hara reached into his pocket, and for a second I was afraid he’d pull out the chloroform-soaked hankie again. Lucky for us, he was looking for a piece of paper. He unfolded it, and, peering through the gathering gloom, I recognized the phone number of Très Bonne Cuisine.

“Been in prison,” he said. I guess that was the answer to my question. “Took me a while to find your friend Norman. He likes to change his name. But now that I have found him…” O’Hara waved the piece of paper in front of my eyes. “As soon as we get out of here and I can get a cell signal, you’re going to make a phone call for me.”

“You won’t get that far.”

I signaled Eve to keep quiet, but it was too late. She was upset and when Eve is upset…

There was nothing I could do but sit back and pray that she’d come to her senses.

“There are cops all over this place,” Eve said. “They’ll stop us before you can drive this thing out of here. They’ll find us.”

“They must be looking.” I said this to myself more than to anyone else. Again, I was sticking with rational thought, and this was as rational as thoughts came. Jim and Norman knew I’d been on my way to find Eve and go to Claude Brooking’s booth for a mandoline. When we didn’t return in time for the cooking demonstration, they must have been worried. They must have come looking for us.

“Of course they did.” O’Hara saw the wheels were turning inside my head. “Why do you think I had to make sure you two wouldn’t make a sound? They came looking, all right. But that Scottish guy, and that other one, the guy in the suit-he must be a cop, I can tell them a mile away-neither one of them knew that Brooking guy. I told them I was him and they bought right into it. Didn’t recognize me from any of my mug shots. Good thing I shaved my head since my last prison picture was taken, lost some weight, too. That cop, he never suspected a thing. I told them I sent you away with whatever it was you’d come for. And they headed off again, looking for you.” He glanced at his watch. “That was hours ago. Think they’re nice and worried by now?”

I pictured Jim and Tyler searching the building. I imagined how frantic Jim would be when he couldn’t find me.

I told myself not to go there or my panic would swallow me whole.

“So what’s your plan?”

I don’t think O’Hara expected me to be so objective about the whole thing. Which didn’t oblige him to answer. He kicked his way through the gadgets that littered the floor, climbed into the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the ignition.

“We’re going to head outside,” he said, carefully pulling the RV toward the garage-sized doors I saw across the now-empty exhibition floor. “And when we stop to check out, if one of you makes even so much as one little bit of a noise…” He took his knife out of his pocket and left it on the front seat next to him. “One of you makes a noise and I cut the other one. That’s a promise.”

We were quiet when he pulled out of the hall, and we were quiet while he drove along the D.C. streets looking for a place to pull over and make his phone call. He finally found it across Woodrow Wilson Plaza in the Federal Triangle Metro parking lot.

O’Hara turned off the RV, punched the numbers on his cell phone, and held it up to my ear. I wasn’t surprised when Jim answered the Très Bonne Cuisine phone.

“Jim?” My voice was tinged with tears and I knew that would get me nowhere. And it would worry Jim. I swallowed my emotions. “Jim, it’s Annie.”

“Annie, darlin’. Are you-”

“I’m fine, Jim. Eve is fine. We’re with Matt O’Hara.”

I heard Jim repeat this news to whoever was in the room with him, and I wasn’t surprised to hear Tyler asking for details.

I didn’t have a chance to provide any before O’Hara took the phone away.

“Now you see I’m not playing games,” he said, and I don’t know if Jim was on the phone, or if he was talking to Tyler. “You tell your friend Norman I want my money, and I want it now.”

Whoever he was talking to repeated the message, and replied, and O’Hara scowled. “Tomorrow morning’s too late.” He listened for a moment. “Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s not easy to get your hands on that much cash. OK. Tomorrow. Six a.m. and not a moment later. Put the money in a brown paper sack and put the sack in the trash can nearest to the entrance of the Washington Monument. Oh, and if you’re not there…” I didn’t like the smile that pulled at the corners of O’Hara’s mouth. “If the money’s not there and if the cops are, your two lady friends here are going to be dead.”

MATT O’HARA WAS SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT if he parked at the Metro station all night, either the Metro Transit Police or an officer from the D.C. Metropolitan force would come a-knockin’ to see what the RV was doing there.

Too bad.

I would have welcomed a hero, no matter what the uniform. The way it was, by the time the sun was down and the city was quiet, my wrists ached from being taped and I was pretty sure my feet and ankles weren’t getting nearly enough blood flow. I was thirsty. I was hungry. I was exhausted. Oh, yeah, I was scared to death, too.

We left the Metro station and drove through the city, and though the boxes piled in front of the windows on the sides of the RV made it impossible to see in that direction, if I twisted just enough, I could see out the front windshield. My neck muscles ached and my insides were flopping around as if they were filled with nervous butterflies. Still, I couldn’t pull my gaze away. I watched familiar scenery shoot past: the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument. At night with its monuments bathed in light, Washington, D.C., is especially beautiful, and seeing the sights I’d seen so many times before and always taken for granted, realizing I might not ever seen them again, tears stung my eyes. After a couple hours of driving around in what seemed an aimless pattern, O’Hara pulled into a no-tell motel somewhere near Sterling, jumped out, and left us on our own.

“Now’s our chance,” I hissed at Eve, checking out the window to see what O’Hara was up to. I watched him go inside a door marked Registration and for the first time since our ordeal began, some of the tension drained from my body. Even a couple moments out of O’Hara’s sight-and away from that menacing knife he was always flashing-was a welcome relief. “We’ve got to make a move, Eve. We’ve got to try and escape.”

“And we’re going to do this how?” Eve is not usually this sarcastic, but I suppose I couldn’t blame her. We were under some major stress here. Good thing she didn’t realize that she’d bitten off all her lipstick. If she had any idea how pale she looked without it (or how her hair stuck up at a funny angle over her left ear) she would have been even more upset. She squirmed. “I can’t move my hands. I can’t even feel my feet. Annie, what are we going to do? You don’t suppose he’s-”