“Well, that means she’s not going to marry you until she’s old and gray, and you’re nearly dead.”

“That crossed my mind,” Stone said. He hung up and watched the lights flashing on his phone, as people called in.

58

ERIK MACHER GOT OUT OF his car and tried to see as far forward as possible. He was stuck on I-95 in New Jersey and had been for half an hour. His cell phone rang.

“Yes?”

“It’s Alf. We’re stumped here. Another half-dozen armed people have arrived and are now deployed. Even if we just wanted to shoot this family, we wouldn’t have a chance, without fifty percent fatalities of our own. Only a mortar or a rocket-propelled grenade would give us a chance at them. How long do you want to go on paying us to watch the grass grow?”

Macher made his own decision: “All right, pull your people out and go home. If I hear that anything has changed, I’ll call you, and we can start all over again.”

“Right. We are aborting this mission.”

Macher hung up and ran for his car. Traffic had started to inch forward.

—

JOAN BUZZED STONE. “Yes?”

“Lance Cabot on two.”

He pressed the button. “Yes, Lance?”

“We’ve processed Nelson Knott’s DNA sample from his coffee mug. It’s a match for Martha’s son—no doubt.”

“What do you think we should do with it?”

“Get it to your mailing list as soon as possible,” Lance said.

“I don’t have the mailing list, it was on the envelopes.”

“Come to think of it, Stone, neither do I. But we have a list of contact and fax numbers for several hundred media organizations worldwide.”

“I think fax is a good idea. Send it to all the U.S. numbers, and who cares if it’s overkill.”

“Okay, I’ll get our lab to type up a suitable letter, and we’ll attach the report to it.”

“Somebody is going to reach me eventually about this, and they’re going to ask how we got the DNA sample. What do you want me to say?”

“Well, for God’s sake don’t say my people got it. Say that someone in Knott’s organization managed to obtain it and sent it.”

“Sent it to whom? Not to me!”

“A law enforcement agency.”

“That would slow them down for about half a second, Lance. Which law enforcement agency?”

“Let me talk to somebody at the FBI, maybe I can get them to release the results.”

“They’re a criminal investigative body—they would process it only if the commission of a crime were involved.”

“Rape is a crime,” Lance pointed out.

“Yes, but not a federal crime.”

“Where did the alleged rape take place?”

“In Knott’s office in Washington, according to her DVD testimony,” Stone said.