‘I think I’d like to go down to the marina at Gonzales Road,’ she said. ‘See if I can find anybody down there who saw anything that might help. You know, suspicious-looking coves planting bombs and such like. I suppose there’d be surveillance cameras everywhere, but the Old Bill have probably laid hands on those already.’

‘Without a fucking doubt,’ agreed Granger.

He pointed the car west for the drive to the waterfront. The driver seemed to appreciate that his passenger was not in much of a mood for any conversation.

Julianne closed her eyes and concentrated on not seeing visions of the Rhino lying comatose, crippled and burnt in a hospital bed. She found she had no choice, though. She couldn’t stop thinking about the Rhino. So she forced herself to remember him in some of his better moments. Lecturing her about boutique beer in New York, for instance. Smoking Greg Norman’s cigars with Miguel on board the yacht. Flirting outrageously with Fifi while grilling out on deck . . .

Good times. Amazingly good, considering how they’d come about.

Jules was almost smiling when the other car hit them.

45

TEMPLE, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION

The timer beeped on the ballistic gel mould. She gave it another thirty seconds, just to be safe, before opening the little unit and removing the small, yellow, thumb-sized gel disc. The rubbery blob was about the size of a slightly elongated dime. Caitlin held it up to the light to check the impression.

Perfect.

She now had Ty McCutcheon’s thumb-print, lifted from his bourbon glass in the bar the previous evening. Securing the print had been a matter of little concern. Musso had arranged the staff roster and spoken to their waitress before she’d come on duty. The woman, an army comms specialist in her day job, kept Caitlin’s glass topped up with iced tea instead of Highland Park, and had whipped away McCutcheon’s smooth-sided tumbler, securing it in a Ziploc bag as soon as he’d finished his first Maker’s Mark.

Caitlin stowed the thumb-print away in a small plastic container that she snap-closed and zipped into the pocket of her leather jacket. Low clouds scudded across the sky outside the window of the empty room on the top floor of the Kyle Hotel. She had a good view across downtown from here, a vantage point that let her to appreciate how much the tiny federal settlement resembled a village carved from a deep forest. Just a block or two back from the cleared streets, Temple was reverting to nature. Head-high razor grass grew thick and wild, and small stands of trees obscured the roof lines of low-set buildings that had not burnt or collapsed. A thick, dark cloud, a flock of birds, lifted off from the forest canopy a few streets away, startled by something on the ground perhaps. A feral cat? A dog pack? She’d heard plenty of both the previous night.