listening devices provided by Felix, hear what was going on in the FBI’s control room. We arrived just as they received a call from the front door, about a woman refusing to let them search or scan her evening bag. It could have been the same woman we’d seen, but I suspected they’d been dealing with similar complaints all night.
“I don’t care if she’s the wife of the goddamned president,” a man boomed. “No one gets in without a search and if you can’t handle that, then find someone who can.” He signed off. “Fucking unbelievable. Old bats thinking we’re going to swipe twenty bucks from their handbags, delivery men too lazy to carry boxes to the front door, but if something goes wrong, they’ll be the first to raise a stink, calling the papers to complain that we weren’t doing our jobs.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong, Marty. A woman couldn’t get groped in here without us knowing about it.”
“Yeah, but if she does, I’ll have ten deadweight rookies in here asking me what they should do about it, while that fucker has free run of the building.”
The door creaked open.
“What the hell are you two doing back—?” the first man boomed.
“There’s been a seat mix-up,” a woman said. “An elderly couple is in ours—”
“Then tell them to move!”
The women continued in the same calm voice. “The usher feels it would be less intrusive if we took the seats beside them—”
“I told you where to sit! We picked out the sight lines to cover every—”
“We’ve checked the sight lines and they’d be the same.”
“I don’t care. You sit where I assigned you, and if there’s someone there, then you move them. Why the hell you couldn’t figure that out without bothering me—”
“Because you asked to be apprised—personally apprised—of all complications.”
“This isn’t a complication, Chin. It’s ass-wiping, and you can damned well do your own.”
The door clicked shut. I looked over to see a young couple in formal wear heading back to the foyer.
“Idiot,” the woman muttered.
“He’s under a lot of pressure,” her partner said. “He saw what happened to McMillan, and he knows if this goes bad, he’s next.”
“Stress, my ass. Dubois is in his element. He wants to be in control so he can take full credit if he pulls this off. But if he doesn’t, you can bet your ass it’ll be everyone else’s fault.”
Jack touched my arm and motioned that we should move on. I had to agree. All we’d accomplished here was overhearing Martin Dubois, the agent now leading the investigation after the last one had been “reassigned.” The guy might be a jerk, but he seemed to be doing the job.
As we walked through the lobby, I hoped that the undercover agents wouldn’t be as obvious to the killer as they were to me. The janitor emptying a quarter-filled trash can. The extra barman, who did nothing but wipe the counter and polish glasses. The couple lingering in a T-intersection, talking but never looking at each other. Still, if the killer did “make” them, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. He might realize he didn’t have a chance.
Next, Jack and I scoped out all the potential blind spots—places we’d pick for a hit. We started with the bathrooms. The moment I walked in, I knew it was covered, by an agent playing washroom attendant, pumping lotion onto a matron’s hands and apologizing when the squirt dribbled onto her shoe instead. Oh, the joys of undercover work.
Despite the on-duty agent, I gave the bathroom a once-over, seeing it with a hitman’s eye. No closets, no windows, the dividers too low to crawl under, the stalls too small to hide in. By the time I finished using the toilet, I was satisfied enough to strike this “blind spot” off my list.
I scrubbed my hands, my mind fully aware of my surroundings yet skipping forward, planning my next move.
He was here. My target. In this very building.
I was on the trail, his scent in the wind. The real thing. Out there. Waiting for me.
And while maybe that should have had me as puppy-dog excited as Jack seemed to think I was, I felt calm. Perfect control, the kind I’d never felt off the shooting range. Everything in focus. Sharp focus—smelling the soap on my hands, hearing the squeak of shoes on the linoleum, seeing the flash of red as the woman beside me painted on fresh lipstick.
I looked at myself in the mirror. No signs of stress—no