“I thought you were into fingerprints,” I say, puzzled.

“Fingerprints, too,” he says. “Anything to do with distinguishing characteristics, as it pertains to the skin. Long story short, this particular tat tells us a lot we didn’t know about Bruce.”

The enhanced, blown-up image on the screen looks, to my uneducated eyes, like a winged angel standing on some sort of pedestal.

“You’re partly right,” Shane corrects me. “Those are, indeed, wings. But the dark area in the center of the wings isn’t an angel, it’s a dagger. An unsheathed dagger. The banner under the dagger reads: Sine Pari.

“I’m a little rusty on my Latin,” Savalo complains.

“‘Without Equal,’” Shane translates. “Bruce is or was a member of the Army Special Operation Forces. Very elite. Can’t be more than a few hundred men in the greater New York area who have that insignia burned into their skin. Probably fewer who fit his particular age group.”

“So this means you can narrow it down?” I ask. “We can find him?”

“Yes,” says Shane. “I believe we can.”

28 bing-bing

Captain Cutter exits the enclosure with a smile on his face. He’s snapping the padlock on the outer door when Wald, feigning casualness, asks, “So? Everything okay?”

“Everything is just dandy, Wald.”

“You’re not pissed?”

“Me? No. But in the future the boy is not to be harmed in any way,” Cutter says, adopting a stern tone. “No puppy slaps. No matter how much you think he might deserve it. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, sir. Clear.”

“Hinks? Can you breathe?”

Hinks, cloth to his face, grimaces but nods his head. “I’m breeving froo my mouf.”

“Good,” says Cutter. “We’re about to start the next phase and I need you fully functional. You and Wald can stop at the E.R. on the way to your assignment.”

Wald jerks into his alert-posture mode. He’s an action junkie, in need of a regular influx of adrenaline, and guard duty at the boat shed just doesn’t cut it. “This about the hump you call Stanley?” he wants to know.

“It’s about the mission,” Cutter says somewhat evasively. He’s patting his pockets, looking for the key to the old, gray metal office desk where he keeps some of his personal effects. “Change out of the overalls, I want you in civilian dress.”

Hinks and Wald are stepping out of their blood-spattered overalls when Cutter removes a custom-silenced Sig-Sauer from the desk drawer and shoots both men in the chest. Bing-bing, bing-bing. He doesn’t much like silenced weapons because the muzzle velocity is always compromised, no matter how good the muffling device, but in this case it doesn’t make much difference, because the targets are less than ten feet from the desk. Can’t-miss range. All four shots penetrate, and from the pinking! rattle, one or more bullets have exited and are bouncing around the boat shed.

Both men are down with mortal wounds, but neither is dead. Small-caliber bullets rarely kill instantly because the human heart continues to beat for a few minutes, no matter how devastating the damage, as Cutter knows from experience. So he’s obliged to dispatch his unreliable employees with head shots, the classic coup de grâce to the cranium as he stands over their quivering bodies. Distasteful, but necessary. He’s seen targets with truly awesome chest-cavity wounds get up and run around like bleeding zombies, effectively dead but still functioning on some level. Sever the brain stem, however, and the human body becomes a bag of cooling meat.

Bing-bing, it’s over.

After returning the Sig to the drawer and locking it, Cutter goes to the sink, where he carefully soaps and washes his hands. Removing the smell of gunpowder. He deeply regrets having to kill Hinks and Wald. It wasn’t part of his master plan, and he takes no pleasure from the executions. He’d known both men for several years, liked them on some level. But in there with the boy, it had suddenly become crystal clear that neither man was capable of carrying out even the simplest of assignments. Shocking, really. Both had been adequate soldiers in the field, performing dangerous and complex missions. To be fair, he’d known all along that Wald in particular had trouble controlling his impulsive behavior. Didn’t matter when the unplanned victim was an Iraqi suspected of terrorist activities, or an Iraqi who looked threatening or mouthed off or whatever. But the boy had to be kept in pristine physical condition or he was no use to the mission.

The mission. The project. Cutter knew he had to remain focused. The next few days were crucial. Not having a guard team in the boat shed meant he would have to leave the boy untended for hours at a time. Which in turn meant he would have to reinspect the enclosure, make sure it was escape-proof for a very clever and determined eleven-year-old. The only other alternative was to keep him heavily sedated, and that wasn’t a good idea, considering what the boy would have to do when the time came. When Cutter had everything lined up and ready for the final play. The big move that was going to return his own precious son to a normal family environment. Or as normal as it could be, assuming Lyla bounced back into something like sanity, as she had done several times in the past. At some point, after Jesse was back home, it would be safe to get her the medical attention she required.

Someday soon, but not now.

Before returning to the enclosure with a first-aid kit and a bowl of hot water, Cutter spreads a blue plastic tarp over the men he’d executed. Just in case an unexpected visitor somehow managed to get through the locked fence and the locked door. Unlikely, but you can’t be too careful. Later he will decide the best way to dispose of the bodies. There are a few empty resin barrels in the shed that might suffice, assuming the barrels can be sealed. A problem to be solved. Or maybe there’s something in the old Chris Craft that will work—can two muscular men be fitted into a two-hundred-gallon fuel tank? Can it be sealed and then the boat itself sunk in deep water? Or is that too complicated, a scenario where too many things can go wrong?

Have to give it some thought, once he’s attended to the boy.

He’d never had to dispose of cadavers before. That was the nice thing about fatalities in a war zone—somebody else came along and cleaned up the mess.

29 six degrees of pizza

As it happens, I was right the first time about the pizza. Randall Shane may not litter the floor with empty boxes, but the delivery guy treats him like an old friend, and seems interested that he’s ordered more than the usual solo pizza.

“Ain’t by any chance your birthday, is it, Mr. Shane?” he wants to know, leaning in the door to clock us. “Bet it’s somebody’s birthday, huh?”

“Nope,” says Shane, moving to block his view. “Just having a few friends over. Thank you, Marty, keep the change.”

I had offered to cook, thinking that the act of food preparation might be soothing, but Shane really doesn’t keep much in the house other than Ritz crackers, Campbell’s soup and a frost-bitten chicken potpie scabbed to the inside of the freezer.

So that’s how we end up around the dining-room table, eating slices and discussing how to go about identifying the man who abducted my son.