“And then?” prompted Emma. “What happened then?”

Ben ran a hand through his dark hair. “And then a new case came in, a live one, and I had to put the Tiger investigation on hold. After all, it was only a speculative thing, a routine follow-up on a letter from the crackpot file.”

“But you kept with it anyway, right?” asked Jane, a firm believer in perseverance as a virtue.

“I’d hoped to keep with it in my spare time, but the new case didn’t leave me with any. When it eventually wrapped, I wanted to go back to investigating the Tiger deal, but I was told that another agent had taken up where I left off and concluded there wasn’t anything to it.”

“Seriously?” I said. “Wow, those guys were good. I mean, if trained professionals couldn’t find evidence of anything wrong-”

“Not so fast,” said Ben. “That’s not the whole story. I didn’t think much about it at the time, and before long I was neck-deep in another new case, and then another, and after a while I’d pretty much forgotten about the Tiger deal. Until last week, that is. Which is when I read an article about the Thunderbolt buyout-”

“-which got you wondering,” interrupted Hilary.

“Exactly. So I went to pull the Tiger file. Only-”

“-there was no Tiger file!”

“Hilary,” Luisa said. “Let the man finish his own sentences.”

“She’s right, though, isn’t she? The Tiger file was gone?” I asked.

“It was more than gone. There was no trace that it or even the letters from Bill Marcus had ever existed. Everything had been completely wiped from the system.”

“That sounds like the sort of thing that happens in South American dictatorships, where the government ‘disappears’ people,” said Hilary.

“Thank you for perpetuating tired stereotypes of my homeland,” said Luisa.

“Look,” said Ben,“I don’t know who erased the records, or where the order to do so came from, but remember a United States senator was involved. My initial investigation probably tripped an alarm or two somewhere important.”

“Whatever happened to checks and balances?” asked Jane.

Ben shrugged. “The very fact that the records were gone confirmed for me that I’d been on to something. And the good news is, based on what we saw at today’s shareholders’ meeting, a lot of people suspected what Perry had going with Gallagher and Brisbane. With all of the shareholders present and the media coverage, there’s no way there won’t be a thorough investigation now. Perry and Brisbane may have dodged some very real bullets, but I think their respective careers may be over.”

“But what about Jake Channing’s career? You must have suspected him, too,” Peter asked. “Or why else were you following him?”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said.

“Oh.” I said knowingly. Then I realized I had no idea what he meant. “What do you mean ‘that’s why you’re here’?”

“When I read about the Thunderbolt deal, and after finding the Tiger file gone, I decided it was worth looking into things on my own. I called Winslow, Brown on Monday morning pretending to be from Perry’s office to get the names of the bankers working on the deal with Gallagher. I thought his team would either be in on the entire thing or would make good witnesses. Once I had your names, I did some digging. It didn’t take long to find out that not only had Jake worked at Gallagher’s old firm, he used to date Gallagher’s wife, so I was suspicious of him from the beginning, and even more so once Gallagher was murdered.”

“If you were investigating us, didn’t you find out about Mark Anders actually being Andrew Marcus?” I asked. “Didn’t that raise any flags or trip any alarms or anything?”

He shook his head. “No. It was sloppy of me, especially in retrospect, but I figured that looking into the junior associate would be a waste of time; he was unlikely to know much of anything. Instead I focused on Jake and on you, Rachel. I had my concerns about Jake, but you checked out clean. I wanted to approach you, but I wasn’t sure how. I needed to get a better sense of whether I could trust you.”

“And that’s why you were eavesdropping when we were at the St. Regis on Tuesday night?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. Sorry about that, but I didn’t want to just march right up and introduce myself. Then Dahlia was attacked on Wednesday morning, and you disappeared, so I was left with Jake. I was trying to figure out my next move when I saw him meet up with Annabel Gallagher late on Wednesday.”

“And you were following him on Thursday, when I saw you at Starbucks,” I said.

“That’s right. It didn’t take long to put two and two together. I figured that they were behind both Gallagher’s murder and the attack on Dahlia Crenshaw. In fact, I almost stopped you that afternoon, to try to warn you, but I was worried that you’d alert Jake, since you and he seemed to be friends, and I didn’t want to lose track of him. That was an excellent disguise, by the way. I would never have recognized you if I hadn’t been able to hear you and Jake talking.”

“So you were following Jake. And you followed him to the boat basin on Thursday night.”

“Not that I did much good there. I wasn’t far behind him when I saw somebody else following him. Now I know it was Andrew Marcus, but at the time I thought it might have been another accomplice, so I had to give Jake more of a lead than I would have liked. And I didn’t realize he was counting on meeting you there. Then I heard shots, and I came running-”

“-and collided into me,” I concluded for him. “Sorry about that.”

He gave me a sheepish smile. “Occupational hazard.”

“Okay. So you were on to Jake and Annabel. But what do you want from us?” asked Peter.

“I’m on to Jake and Annabel-it sounds like we’re all on to Jake and Annabel-but we don’t have any proof.”

“Jake seems to think he can bluff his way though,” I told Ben, explaining about the e-mail Jake had sent me and his message from earlier that night. “And he thinks I’m clueless enough to buy his bluff.”

“The nerve of that guy,” Peter muttered.

“Good,” said Ben. “Then I think we have a chance.”

S unday morning felt like spring, as if March had skipped over April and gone straight to May. A gentle breeze wafted a strand of hair across my face as I got out of the cab. After several rigorous shampooings, my hair was back to its original dark red, and while I’d declared the results of my adventures in alternative hair color inconclusive-the Madonna wig left me with sincere doubts as to just how much more fun blondes had, and my experience as a brunette had been too action-packed to offer a valid basis for comparison-it was nice to once again recognize my image in mirrors and other reflective surfaces.

The streets of Chinatown were thronged with honking cars, and the sidewalks were thronged with pedestrians. I wondered who had decreed that dim sum was a good idea for brunch. I was as fond of dumplings as the next person, but to me brunch just wasn’t brunch without Hollandaise and hash browns. Still, when Jake had suggested dim sum it seemed appropriate to feign enthusiasm, so here I was at the corner of Bowery and Canal Street, trying my best to ignore the animal carcasses hanging in the shop windows. As a general rule, the less my food resembled actual living beings the more appealing I found it.

“Stop rubbing your ear like that,” said a voice in my ear.

I jumped but managed not to shriek. Being wired was new to me, and I’d temporarily forgotten that Ben was watching from the control center disguised as a delivery van parked nearby.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” he added.

I stopped rubbing at my ear, even though the tiny transmitter planted within itched. Instead, I shoved my hands in my pockets and scanned the scene around me. The knowledge that so many eyes were watching made me feel fidgety, and because they were watching it seemed extra important not to fidget but to maintain an air of cool composure. Peter, especially, had been less than sanguine about Ben’s plan to entrap Jake using me as bait, but I’d assured him I’d be fine with Ben and the colleagues he’d rounded up maintaining constant surveillance. Technically, this was still an offthe-books operation, as the powers that be seemed happy to blame Andrew Marcus for everything, but Ben had convinced a couple of his co-workers to help him out.