It was so unfair.

For the past week, Adrienne had been at the office every night until midnight, preparing for depositions. And just this once, she’d come in late—and Curtis Slough’s secretary was all over her voice mail with progressively sarcastic messages. Culminating in: “Uhhh—are you coming in at all today?”

Bitch!

Adrienne glanced at her watch. It was ten in the morning—not two in the afternoon. Taking a deep breath, she counted to five, and pushed the button for Slough’s extension. The receptionist said that the line was busy, and put her on hold.

While she waited, she looked through the file on Dante Esposito, one of the city’s asphalt “experts.” From what she could see, it looked as if Esposito was going to testify that the asphalt in question was probably different from the mix they usually used. (Not good.)

When Slough finally came on the line, it was obvious from his cheerful tone that he’d forgotten why (or even that) he wanted to talk to her. Which put the ball in Adrienne’s court, because Slough had a reputation for blaming people for his own shortcomings.

“I got your messages,” she told him, “and I have the documents you wanted. Should I send them up?”

“I guess so. Anything useful?”

She hesitated. “Well… I found various inspectors’ reports—and they’re fine for us. As far as the inspectors are concerned, everything about the job was A-OK.”

Slough grunted his approval, then qualified it. “Well, that’s great,” he said, “but we still have Esposito—”

“Yes, but the final inspection was conducted by a man named McEligot. He’s retired now, but he’s the one who hired Esposito in the first place. I talked to him last night, and according to McEligot, the mix was fine. So—”

“Excellent!”

“And since Esposito didn’t even look at the asphalt until two years after it was laid down—”

“I like it!” Slough boomed. “Makes Esposito look like he’s shooting from the hip. Outstanding! We’ll kill the bastards.”

Eddie Bonilla picked her up for lunch at 12:30. He said he had a “bright idea” that he wanted to discuss with her—and, not only that, he’d buy her lunch.

He was waiting for her in his car, in the courtyard outside Harbor Place, where Slough, Hawley was headquartered. The car was a battered Camaro with a pair of Rubik’s Cubes hanging from the rearview mirror, and vanity plates that read SNUPER. Adrienne climbed in. Eddie gunned the engine and shot out into traffic.

She sat back, and closed her eyes. On the whole, she liked being a passenger. It reminded her of the car trips that she took as a kid. She and Nikki. Who used to breathe on the glass so that she could draw on it and they could play tic-tac-toe. It made her think of all those long vacation rides to Lake Sherando, where they went five years in a row, camping out. Deck and Marlena up front, she and Nikki (and all the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the trunk) jammed into the back—along with Cupcake, the cat, in her cat carrier.

As they passed the Washington Monument, Adrienne recalled the time Nikki fed Cupcake the remains of her Fishwich—which had been sitting in the sun for hours. The cat got sick, and God how it smelled! They’d pinched their nostrils together, and made noises like ewwwwww! and rolled down the windows, and stuck their heads out, pretending to gag. There were a lot of trips like that, and they were always the same: long and boring—and lots of fun. Sometimes, they sang songs, or played word games like the one that went: I packed my bag and in it I put…

“A gun.”

“What?” Bonilla was frowning at her.

She looked around. They were passing the Library of Congress, heading east on Pennsylvania. She hadn’t realized she’d been thinking aloud. “My sister had a gun,” she said. “A rifle.”

Bonilla shrugged. “Lotsa people do. Got one myself. Got a couple, in fact.”

Adrienne wasn’t surprised. Bonilla struck her as the kind of person who’d have an arsenal. Which made her think that maybe she should show him her sister’s gun. Ask him about the silencer—and what she should do with it. She was pretty sure it was illegal to have one. But what she asked instead was: “Where are we going?”

“Mangialardo’s. Great subs.”

At 9th and Pennsylvania, they got stuck behind a delivery van and didn’t make the light. Bonilla let out a string of curses, drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel, then gunned the engine a couple of times, just out of habit. She looked out the window. They were driving past a kind of demilitarized zone, a down-at-the-heels buffer between black and yuppie ghettos, when she remembered to ask him about “the assets search.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you.” He tilted his head from side to side, not quite shaking it. “There’s a guy in Florida—‘information broker.’ You give him a name or a Social, he’ll run it through every bank, brokerage, and insurance company in the country.”

“Sounds illegal.”

Bonilla shrugged. “Not for me—‘cause I don’t know how he does it. None of my business. But the point is: he runs your sister—everywhere—and what he comes up with is… the same accounts you gave me.”

“The ones at Riggs—”

Bonilla nodded. “Checking and savings. Maybe twenty grand, tops, just like you said.”

“So he struck out.”

“I don’t think so. I think the guy found whatever there was to find. I think that’s it.”

Adrienne shook her head. “It can’t be. She had a settlement—”

“That’s what you said. So I went through her accounts—all the way back to when she opened them.”

“And?” There were half a dozen police cars up ahead, double-parked outside a small store. Bonilla pulled up behind them into a space marked: NO STANDING.

He shrugged. “She opened the Riggs’ accounts a couple of years ago. Ever since, she gets a check each month—like a salary—five grand—exactly. Except, sometimes there’s more. Like she’s got expenses on top of her base.”

Adrienne nodded, her eyes on the police cars. “And these checks—where are they from?”

“Jersey.”

“New Jersey? Why would she—”

“Not New Jersey. Just… Jersey! It’s an island in the English Channel. Whole lotta banking goin’ on.”

Adrienne nodded. “Well, that makes sense. It’s in Europe. So it’s probably the account her settlement was paid into.”

“Yeah,” Bonilla replied. “That’s what I think, too—though I gotta tell ya, if she was banking in the Channel Islands, there might be some tax issues you don’t know about. Anyway, I’ll fax the address to your office, and you can send the bank a letter. If you show ‘em a death certificate, and tell ‘em you’re the executor… they oughta cooperate.” He opened his door. “You like subs, right? You mind waiting here?” he asked. He didn’t wait for her answer.

He came out a few minutes later with a couple of Oranginas and two sandwiches wrapped in waxy white paper. It was just possible to eat in the car, a pile of napkins between them, without having to change clothes afterwards.

“I meant to ask you,” Bonilla said as they headed back toward Slough. “How’d your sister get hooked up with this quack, anyway? She get referred, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Adrienne replied. “It never came up.” When she saw his eyebrows lift toward his hairline, she added, “Nikki wasn’t exactly forthcoming.”

“The reason I ask,” Bonilla said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say this guy, Duran, was really knocked on his ass by that death certificate. I mean, it looks to me like he’s gonna pass out when he sees it. Now, I grant you, your conman’s a guy who can talk the talk, but this—this was like, I don’t know, John Travolta or somethin’! So, I think: you take this guy to court, you got your work cut out for you.”

“I don’t have any choice,” she said. “We both know the police aren’t going to do anything. They’ve got five hundred unsolved homicides on the books. So they’re not going to get excited about a misdemeanor that carries a thousand-dollar fine and a one-year sentence—max! That’s why I filed the civil suit—which, by the way, took me about an hour to knock out. So it’s not like I’m spending all my time on it.”