“Right!” I say excitedly. “Like I told you, he talks like a soldier, too. The way he puts words together.”

“As identifications go, it’s not exactly a courtroom certainty,” Savalo points out.

“We’re not in a courtroom,” I insist. “This is the guy.”

“I’m going with Mrs. Bickford,” Shane says. “Not only for the physical ID, but because he accosted her.”

“Pointing a finger isn’t accosting,” says Savalo, playing devil’s advocate.

Shane gives me an abashed look. “If I thought he’d be in that garage, I’d never have sent you out alone,” he says. “I assumed he’d fled the scene.”

“He didn’t follow us there,” I point out. “He was waiting.”

“That’s what the time log shows.”

“But how did he know we were going to talk to Vargas?”

Shane shrugs. “We can’t be sure. But I think he’s covering his tracks. Anticipating that any investigator would likely want to talk to the attorney who filed the paternity suit. Which meant Vargas had to be silenced.”

“’Scuse me,” I manage, before clamping hand to mouth and hurrying from the room in a panic, gorge suddenly rising.

Shane rushes ahead of me, opens a door and flips up a toilet lid. Just in time. After the nauseating act is over, he makes me sit on the closed lid and hands me a cold, wet towel. “Hold it to your forehead.”

“Sorry,” I gasp. Thinking, Great. First you dissolve into a crying mess, now you’re throwing up. Wonderful day you’re having, Kate. What’s next? A full-scale nervous breakdown?

“Perfectly all right,” Shane is saying, looking at me with deep concern. “It’s my fault. Loads of tension, combined with the fact that you haven’t eaten all day. I have a bad habit of not remembering that people have to eat.”

Savalo makes an appearance, peering sideways around Shane because she’s not tall enough to see above his shoulder. “You okay?” she wants to know.

“Fine,” I say, despite the vile taste that lingers in my mouth. Nothing solid came up, just a few specks of bile.

“She hasn’t eaten,” Shane explains.

“Not that,” I tell them, fighting to calm myself. “Bruce. He scares me sick.”

“Of course he does,” Maria Savalo says sympathetically. She crouches at the commode, pats my clenched hands. “He scares me and I never, uh, met him,” she adds carefully.

A moment later Shane is guiding me out to the kitchen. He rummages through the cabinets until he locates an unopened box of Ritz crackers. He puts a few crackers on a plate, pours milk into a tumbler. “Here you go,” he says. “Force it down if you have to. You need to put something in your stomach.”

“Do you have any peanut butter?”

“I think so. Let me check.”

When I was a little girl, that’s how my mother treated an upset tummy. Crackers with a dab of peanut butter. Comfort food. I’m not the least bit hungry, but the food tastes good and the cold milk seems to make my heart stop hammering. And then, of course, I’m reminded of Tommy with his chocolate milk and Fig Newtons and I have to fight back the tears.

Not going there again. Have to keep going forward or I’ll lose my balance and fall into the abyss.

“Better?”

“Better,” I agree, and take a deep breath that helps to clear my head, if not my heart. “Now, what about the second tape? There’s something on it, isn’t there? Something useful?”

“I can take you back to the motel,” Savalo suggests. “You need to rest.”

I shake off the suggestion. “I’ll rest when we’ve got Tommy back. What about the second tape?”

The look in Shane’s eyes convinces me he’s been saving the best for last. That he’s found something we can act on, beyond the certainty that the man in the mask has been covering his tracks. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s do it,” and we follow him back into the workshop.

My attorney insists that I take the chair this time, and I sink into it gratefully, my knees much weaker than I’ve been letting on. Weak not only from the residual fear of the man in the mask, but from anticipatory excitement.

Let this be something important. Let this be a way to find my son.

Shane produces a smaller cassette—not the VHS format—and fits it into a different machine.

“Okay, a little background,” he begins. “Over the last few years the city has installed several thousand wide-angle cameras at busy intersections. Part of the Homeland Security precautions, with federal funds attached. So far they haven’t caught a terrorist on camera, but the cameras been very useful in a number of criminal investigations. Needless to say, the department discourages publicity about the ‘spy cams,’ if only to discourage vandalism.”

We’re looking at an image of the intersection on the same block as the parking garage. I can make out a line of vehicles waiting for the light to turn, and the ghostlike images of pedestrians.

“Takes a little getting used to,” Shane explains. “The spy cams run at sixty frames per minute. One frame per second. That’s so they can store seven days’ worth of images on each cassette. I synced to the time log of the primary tape. That’s Bruce, exiting the garage.”

It’s hard to make out on the small screen, but sure enough, a silver Ford Explorer is nosing out the parking garage, waiting to merge into traffic on Queens Boulevard.

“The windows are tinted,” I point out. “Just like I said.”

“Excellent point,” Shane says, as if proud of my powers of observation. “Which means we won’t get a look at his face through the windshield. But we do have something that might be even better than a grainy head shot.”

He clicks through several more frames, until the SUV is almost at the intersection, and therefore at the bottom of the image captured by the spy cam. “Two things of interest,” he says. “First is the license plate. New York tags, which may or may not mean anything, since the vehicle was almost certainly stolen. Second, and this could be our big break, he has the driver’s-side window down. And we have you to thank for that, Mrs. Bickford. If you hadn’t seen him, alerted him to your presence, I very much doubt he’d have the window down.”

“The window down? So what, if we can’t see his face?”

“That pale spot against the window opening?” Shane says. “That’s his elbow.”

His elbow? That’s what all the excitement is about? I feel like the air has been let out of my balloon, but before an involuntary groan of disappointment escapes my lips, Shane clicks to the next frame, and I begin to get a glimmer of what has so excited him.

“There, you see that? Looks like a discoloration on his left forearm, a couple of inches above the wrist? That, ladies and gentlemen—excuse me, ladies and ladies—that is a tattoo. Known in the lingo as a ‘distinguishing characteristic.’”

Standing just behind me, Savalo snorts her approval. “Randall, you are amazing. Had me going there. Thought you were going to ID the guy by the shape of his elbow and really blow me away.”

I’m holding my breath, not quite certain how important it can be—lots of guys have tattoos, lots of women, too, for that matter—but Savalo and Shane both seem so upbeat it fuels me with hope.

“That’s why he’s always wearing long sleeves, even in short-sleeve weather,” Shane explains. “Kate described her attacker as wearing long sleeves, remember? He knows the tattoo is a giveaway. But after his encounter with Kate, he rolls up his sleeves and cocks his arm out the window. Probably wants to feel the wind on his face, remind him he’s all powerful, able to terrify women and children.”

“Is that enough to identify him? A blurry tattoo?”

Shane next produces a CD from his shirt pocket, slips it into a slot in one of the computer towers. “I made a deal with the homicide boys. They loan me the raw data—the spy-cam download—and I’d do the enhancement work free of charge. It helped that I developed the original tat-recognition software for the FBI.”