Timmy said, "I've never seen this done before. It's nause­ating."

I had seen it before and found it just as sickening this time as the last time and the time before that. I said, "Don't touch any­thing yet," and walked through the dining room and toward the kitchen in the rear of the house.

"Are you going to call the police?" Timmy said. "I don't know about that."

"I don't either. Although if we don't call the cops and it does turn out that some of them are involved in this, they may be inclined to think we know more than we actually know. It might be better for us—and for Maynard and maybe Jim Suter— if we look like a couple of uninvolved outsiders who are shocked and frightened by all of this, but ignorant of—whatever it is that's going on."

"Of course, that's exactly what we are."

"You don't have to remind me."

The kitchen was bedlam. Every pot, pan, and plastic refrig­erator box had been left out on the counter or on the floor. The cupboards had been emptied of food and dishes. Food was piled in the sink—spices, Wheat Chex, fruit, peanut butter, peanut oil, sorbet, half a thawing frozen chicken.

"There's where they came in," I said, and we looked over at the sizable section of the back door around the lock that had essentially been dismantled.

"I'm surprised," I said, "that nobody heard this happen and reported it."

"Maybe somebody did report it. And the police never came."

"Oh, sure. The 911 operator, the dispatchers—they're all in on this . . . thing. This conspiracy so vast it's got tentacles reach­ing into every level of law enforcement in the District of Co­lumbia. Timothy, I'm not ready to go quite that far."

"How far are you ready to go?"

I tugged the broken door open and flipped on the switch for the backyard floodlight. The patio and fish tank seemed undisturbed. The back gate in the tall board fence was shut and locked. The intruder, or intruders, had apparently clambered over the fence both coming and going.

We made our way back to the dining room and up the half-open stairwell to the second floor. The mess upstairs was like the mess downstairs. Nothing seemed to have been purposely smashed; the chaos appeared to be the result of a methodical search that had been unsuccessful over a long time and across a lot of square footage.

I said to Timmy, "This job must have taken a couple of hours. I left for the hospital at about ten-forty. It's two thirty-five now. If the intruder was watching the house and waiting for us to leave, he could have jumped the fence early. But that would have involved a heavy risk of being overheard. If he'd waited for all the neighbors to go to sleep, after midnight, say—and on a Saturday night that would have been unpredictable—then he'd have run the risk of our coming back and catching him in the act."

"Unless, of course," Timmy said, "he or they were in touch with someone who could keep him or them informed about our location and movements. Then there'd be no risk at all of dis­covery."

"Uh-huh."

The middle bedroom, where Timmy and I were staying, had been ransacked just like Maynard's front bedroom. Our bags were open and our clothes strewn about.

"Jeez, I ironed that shirt myself," Timmy said. "Now look at it."

"You've had a rough night, Timothy. I just hope nobody went in the bathroom and sucked on your toothbrush."

"Look, you know what I mean."

I did. We went into Maynard's office in the small back room. File drawers had been yanked open and papers were every­where. The disk boxes next to his computer were open and empty. Maynard's computer files were evidently gone. The tele­phone answering machine on the desk was not blinking. I checked for the tape; it had been taken, too.

Timmy said, "It's a good thing you picked up Maynard's address book before you came to the hospital. I'll bet they'd have taken it."

"Maybe."

Timmy suddenly looked up from the debris around May­nard's Mac and said, "The letter from Jim Suter! Do you think they took that? Where was it when we left the house?"

"It was right where it is now. In my pocket with the address book. I grabbed it just before the cab arrived."

"Good for you. Any particular reason you picked up the let­ter? Surely you didn't suppose for a second that Maynard's get­ting shot and that strange, turbulent letter with all the talk in it of murder and people on the Hill and death threats and the D.C. police—you didn't think all that suggested some kind of terrible conspiracy, did you?"

"No, I just did what I thought Maynard would have wanted me to do: keep that letter safe."

"Well, that's a good reason, too."

While Timmy changed out of his bloodstained clothes and went about straightening up the mess in the guest room, I walked down to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet had been opened and most of its contents dumped in the sink. The mag­azines stacked on the shelf next to the toilet— The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Smithsonian, Blueboy—looked as if they had been rifled; several lay open on the tile floor. I flipped through the Blueboy, then resumed examining the scene. The toilet paper had not been unrolled, a sign, perhaps, that the in­truder whose job it had been to search the bathroom was es­sentially anal retentive, despite the nature of his assigned duties that night.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. I stepped into the hallway. Timmy appeared in the guest room doorway and stood very still. There was an alertness in him that I knew was partly caffeine and partly fear. He said in a low voice, "Should we answer it?"

"I guess we should see who it is."

I started down the stairs as the bell rang again, and Timmy followed me.

In the living room, I pulled the curtains aside and looked out the bay window at the front stoop. A man stood there, but it was his car, double-parked alongside Maynard's Chevy, that drew my attention. It was a D.C. police patrol car, its flashers flashing.

"It's a cop," I told Timmy.

I went around and unlocked the door, opened it, and stood face-to-face with Ray Craig.

Craig said evenly, "Somebody in the neighborhood reported a disturbance in this house earlier. The officers who responded to the call were called to a robbery over on Half Street before they could investigate. I recognized the address on the report and thought I better come over and see what the problem was." He peered over my shoulder at Timmy, standing perfectly still, and at the wrecked interior of Maynard's house. His nicotine stench wafted into the room, and Craig said, "Looks like you had a break-in. Anything missing that you know of? It's been a real pisser of a night for you and your buddy Sudbury."

"It has," I said.

"We were just about to call the police," Timmy said.

Craig stared at him hard, his face still devoid of expression, but with something in the set of his head on his narrow shoul­ders that suggested suspicion mixed with contempt.

Chapter 5

Our wake-up call at the Capitol Hill Hotel, three blocks from Maynard's house, came at eight. I immediately got an outside line and phoned GW to check on Maynard's condi­tion. An ICU nurse said he was "stable."

Death is the stablest condition of all, but I knew she didn't mean that.

"He's alive," I told Timmy.

"Thank God."

Ray Craig had left us at 3:15 a.m. He had noted the damage and remarked on how no valuables appeared to have been taken. He said the break-in did not seem to have been a bur­glary, and again he asked if we knew of any enemies Maynard had, in Washington or in Mexico. He inquired about Maynard's Mexican "associations" half a dozen times. Again, we told Craig we didn't know of any enemies Maynard had in Mexico, which was true.