“I don’t remember.”

“I guess you’re such a whore you can’t remember all your boys, right?”

She shrugged again, smiled, nothing would faze her.

“The last time I saw you, you were running away, running down the sidewalk in a Category 4 hurricane, barely able to stand up, like a crazy woman. I yelled and yelled and finally said to hell with you. Woman must be crazy. I didn’t know you were headed to Nelson’s. You know he called me, said you were at his place, said you were acting crazy, and I said no surprise there. Bitch is crazy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s because you’re a professional with ice in your veins. And you know, even in bed there was something distant about you. No complaints, mind you, but something was never right. You know they found your fingerprints in Nelson’s condo?”

“Nelson who?”

The wall behind Bob was plain white drywall, or so it seemed. A section of it was a hidden screen, and behind the screen were three cameras aimed at Karen Sharbonnet’s face. Every twitch and blink was being analyzed by their experts. Every movement of her eyes and the muscles across her forehead and around her mouth. She was ice. Her hands were frozen. Her breathing calm. Her expression never changed. At the thoroughly unexpected sight of Bob, she had registered nothing.

Until.

“You whacked him with a seven iron?” Bob asked, incredulously.

A slight parting of the lips, as if she needed a bit of air. A slight hardening of the eyes, as if shocked. Then she narrowed her eyes and two wrinkles appeared at the top of her nose. Then she shook it all off with a smile and said, “You must be the crazy one.”

“I’ve never argued that, but I’m not crazy enough to kill and not stupid enough to get caught. Look, babe, I’ll see you soon. They’ll extradite you back to Florida, the scene of the crime, and put your cute little redheaded ass on trial. And I’ll be there, in the courtroom, watching, eager to testify against you. I can’t wait. My buddy Nelson deserves a little justice and I’m more than happy to help.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bob stood, walked to the door, and left the room.

10.

Matthew Dunn lived in a rented one-bedroom condo in a glass tower near the Vegas Strip. Forty-eight hours of surveillance revealed a rather laid-back approach that included a long walk each afternoon to the Belaggio where he played blackjack at ten dollars a hand while sipping cheap scotch. His background was far more interesting. He’d been booted from the Marines for insubordination, then hired by a private U.S. mercenary gang to do dirty work in Iraq. He’d survived two years in a Syrian jail for smuggling guns. He’d been indicted in New Orleans for importing cocaine, but somehow walked. He’d spent three years in a federal prison for an insurance scam, and a week after being paroled landed a five-million-dollar defense contract to supply orange juice to U.S. troops. Somewhere along the way he took up killing for profit and became a go-to guy for high-end contracts. A raid with warrants on his bank accounts revealed little—less than $20,000. The FBI assumed he preferred cash and foreign banks. Monitoring his laptop and listening to his cell phone, the FBI became concerned when he booked a flight to Mexico City. He was arrested without incident at McCarran International and put in isolation at the Clark County Detention Center.

11.

Eighteen days after breaking his neck, Rick Patterson finally died in the ICU at a Cincinnati hospital. He was forty-four, single, had never married, and had little family to speak of. A brother had him cremated and his remains sent by FedEx to a mausoleum in Seattle for “future purposes.” There were gaps in his background, but the best guess was that he and Karen Sharbonnet met twenty-one years earlier while on duty in East Africa. Their paths crossed several times and both spent years in Afghanistan and Iraq. They certainly never married and there was no evidence of any serious relationship, other than the business one that led to his death. Attempts to find money were futile. Like others in his shadowy world, he apparently preferred cash and offshore accounts.

Karen was not informed of his death, and the FBI assumed she still believed he died in the woods where she left him. She was in protective custody with no access to newspapers or the Internet. When she was informed that she was being held for the capital murders of Linda Higginbotham, Jason Jordan, Nelson Kerr, and a plastic surgeon in Wisconsin, she calmly asked for a lawyer.

12.

After signing the preliminary plea agreement hammered out by F. Max Darden, Sid Shennault went to work prowling through the financial records of Grattin Health. Since he had implemented the systems and upgraded them over the years, it was easy work. Within forty-eight hours he was sending F. Max encrypted emails with financial info so rich and detailed, Agent Ross Mayfield and his task force were soon drooling. Flaxacill was indeed a cheap drug. Grattin spent, on average, eighty million a year for it, paid through a web of offshore companies and accounts to the same trade broker in Singapore, who, of course, eventually forwarded the loot to the lab in Fujian Province.

The treasure trove of documents soon became an avalanche as Sid sold his company’s soul to impress his new handlers and, hopefully, squeeze them for an even better deal. After the first leak he became a traitor, and once a traitor there was no turning back. After seventy-two hours, he had buried the FBI with more raw data than they could process, all of it wonderfully admissible in a court of law.